Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith deny allegations he slept with actor Duane Martin
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith are fielding off rumors about Smith’s alleged infidelity with actor Duane Martin.
Pinkett Smith said she and her husband would be taking legal action against Smith’s former associate in a preview clip of the Nov. 16 episode of “The Breakfast Club.”
“Let me just say this,” Pinkett Smith said. “It’s ridiculous, right? And it’s nonsense.”
The rumor emerged when a man, who refers to himself as Brother Bilaal, said he had previously worked with Smith and alleged that he had walked in on the Oscar winner and Martin having sex in a dressing room, according to a trailer for the Nov. 15 episode of the “Unwine With Tasha K” podcast.
“This story is completely fabricated and the claim is unequivocally false,” a representative for Smith said in a statement to TODAY.com.
Pinkett Smith echoed a similar sentiment on “The Breakfast Club.”
“It’s one thing to have your opinion about somebody, versus just making up salacious, malicious stuff,” Pinkett Smith said in the interview. “So that’s actionable, and we gonna roll with that.”
Pinkett Smith described Bilaal’s allegations as a response for the payment that she said he believed he deserved for the work done in connection to the publication of her husband’s memoir titled “Will” in 2021.
“It’s based around this person’s idea that they, in some way, were doing business around Will’s book and that they spent money or what have you, and that they needed to be compensated,” she said. "Will was willing to give him a certain amount or what have you, and he didn’t take it. So this whole situation is based on that.”
In a statement to TODAY.com, Bilaal said he stands by his comments and that "there was no 'shakedown' period."
"Jada is being untruthful. I have the evidence. Everything was addressed in my full interview with Tasha K prior to Jada’s comments," he said.
TODAY.com has reached out to Smith’s rep for comment about his involvement with Bilal and has not heard back.
Pinkett Smith added she didn’t know all of the details surrounding the business between the two, but said they would come out in the upcoming, unspecified legal action she and her husband would be taking.
When asked how Smith was dealing with the rumors in the meantime, Pinkett Smith said her husband “is always going to find the funny.”
“He was like, ‘Do you believe that s---?’” she said he asked her. “But he just laughed about it.”
Representatives for Martin did not respond to a request for comment from TODAY.com.
The allegations come more than a month after the release of Pinkett Smith’s memoir, “Worthy,” where she revealed she and her husband had been separated and have lived “completely separate lives” since 2016, among other revelations.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com