Jada Pinkett Smith talks about Oscars slap and alopecia battle

Jada Pinkett Smith opened up Wednesday about her husband’s Oscars slapping incident and the disorder she suffers from that led to it.

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Smith, on her podcast “Red Table Talk,” talked about her battle with alopecia, the condition that causes hair loss, and how it led to a joke told by comedian Chris Rock that triggered her husband, Will Smith, to go up on stage and slap Rock.

“This is a really important ‘Red Table Talk’ about alopecia,” Pinkett Smith said at the start of Wednesday’s podcast. “Considering what I’ve been through with my health and what happened to me at the Oscars thousands of people have reached out to me about their stories.”

Several guests on the show talked about how alopecia had affected their lives. One guest told how her daughter developed the disorder then killed herself after she was bullied at school.

Alopecia areata is an autoimmune disorder that causes a person’s hair to come out.

Pinkett Smith talked about the Oscars slapping incident that happened after Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith being bald. She went on to say she hoped her husband and Rock would be able to put it behind them and be friends.

“Now, about Oscar night … my deepest hope is that these two intelligent, capable men have an opportunity to heal, talk this out and reconcile. The state of the world today, we need them both and we all actually need one another more than ever,” she said.

" ‘Til then, Will and I are continuing to do what we have done for the last 28 years and that’s to keep figuring out this thing called life together,” Pinkett Smith added.

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