Jada Pinkett Smith says she and Will Smith will "never" get divorced. (Reuters)
Jada Pinkett Smith isn’t proud of dating Will Smith when he was still married to his first wife, Sheree Zampino.
Pinkett Smith, 46, and Smith, 49, began dating when he and Zampino, with whom he shares son Trey, were separated, but not yet divorced. Pinkett Smith made Fletcher her first guest on her “Red Table Talk” series in a special motherhood-themed episode, where they reflected on the good, the bad and the ugly of co-parenting not just with each other, but with an Oscar winner.
“Because I did not understand marriage, I did not understand divorce, I probably should have fell back,” Pinkett Smith admitted during their chat, to which Zampino, 50, cracked, “You think?”
Pinkett Smith confessed to being inconsiderate and insensitive to Zampino and Smith during the end of their marriage and to being focused on immediately developing a co-parenting arrangement, even though it was uncomfortable for the estranged couple at the time.
The women reminisced on a particularly heated argument in which Zampino cursed the “Gotham” star out.
“I called back and happened to say, ‘B—h, you livin’ in the house I picked out,” Zampino said. “And you said, ‘It’s my house now.'”
Will Smith and his first wife Sheree Zampino in 1991. (Getty)
Smith ended up siding with his ex in that brief beef, Pinkett Smith revealed.
“Well, I want you to know, that Will Smith let me have it,” Pinkett Smith said. “His take was, ‘That is Trey’s mother, and that’s just not your place.'”
Zampino also confessed that she was reluctant to have Smith introduce Trey to his new love, but that her nerves subsided after Pinkett Smith’s first meeting with the then 3-year-old boy.
“Trey comes home and I said, ‘How did you like Miss Jada?’” Zampino recalled to a tearful Pinkett Smith. “He said, ‘I really liked her, Mommy.’ … Thank you for loving my baby.”
Pinkett Smith previously told “Access Hollywood” of having Zampino on her show, “I thought it was important to have that conversation because she was my entry point to motherhood. I was co-mothering with her. At that particular time, before [having a blended family] was popular, before it was even an idea, we were trying to create something that we had never experienced.”
Getting over their difficult beginnings seem to have paid off handsomely: Pinkett Smith and Smith have been married for 20 years and now share two children of their own, son Jaden and daughter Willow, who is also a panelist on “Red Table Talk.”
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