The Slapgate Chronicles

In the last 24 hours, I wondered why no one is including the two biggest victims of Will Smith’s Oscars Slapgate in its narrative. We are talking about Will and Chris and their history, Will and Jada and their marriage, Chris and his previous jokes about Jada, the pain of Jada, and the tale of the husband the protector; why aren’t we talking about Venus and Serena Williams?

These two women spent their childhood in Compton, dealt with racism and misogyny at every single level of their lives, yet went on to achieve impressive careers in an elitist white sport, culminating in sitting at the Academy Awards to watch a man pick up the Oscar for a movie about their life.

What they got in return was a man playing their father slap another man on stage, for the whole world to see, forever tarnishing their huge moment. I’d be mind-blowingly pissed if I was them, in that auditorium.

When I see people commenting but it was all for Jada and he saw her in pain and… please just, stop. We can’t go around slapping people who say things we don’t like.

If Will’s obvious manic episode really needed to bounce off of something, he could have just said what he said, from his chair: “Leave my wife’s name out of your mouth”. Far from classy, still, but leave the “fucking” part out and leave the — going to the stage to slap a man part out, it could be swallowed.

Instead, he decided to walk up to the stage and assault another man on international television, before he called himself ”a vessel of love” in his acceptance speech.

I see lots of people commenting he didn’t punch him, it was just a slap, like that somehow makes it less violent. The slap is worse than a punch here. Slap is the highest form of disrespect. You slap an annoying teenager for talking back or coming home after curfew, not a grown man who is your equal.

It was all for Jada rhetoric doesn’t work for me. Respecting your wife by disrespecting someone else shouldn’t work for any sane human being.

The 658 analyses people wrote in the aftermath went deep into “slavery and white supremacy’s history that has a deep root in what happened tonight”, the black woman’s hair, and the protection of the black woman. Everyone in this scenario was given a space where they were allowed to be hurt, emotional, and lose it.

But does Chris Rock also have some space where he could be something? Feel something? Hurt about something? Losing it? He actually does. More than these two. I’ll get back to that later.

It was reported last night that Chris did not write the GI Jane joke. The Academy writing staff did. It was also reported that Chris didn’t know about Jada’s alopecia. I also didn’t know about it. And I surely scroll Instagram timelines more than Chris Rock.

He said it himself, “It’s a GI Jane joke”. GI Jane is a beautiful badass woman, I’m failing to see how the comparison can be received as an insult.

It’s clear Will Smith is going through something.

I am, as it seems the rest of the world is too, puzzled by Will and Jada’s relationship. The number of details they share about their marriage, then protest people are too noisy, or too judgmental about it, makes me think this game of oversharing than complaining gives them some sort of satisfaction. Maybe it makes them hard for each other.

Happy for them. But can we be excluded from it?

Open marriage, not an open marriage, divorcing, not divorcing, Will telling GQ he dreams about the harem of 20 women, Jada going to the Wireless Festival in London to meet her son, where she meets his friend the rapper August Alsina. Then sits on Red Table Talk to tell us all how she met him when he was 23, in her words:

“I started a friendship with August four and a half years ago, and we became really, very good friends, and it all started with him simply needing some help, and me trying to help his health and mental state. The outpouring for him from our family was first about his health.

We used all of those different services to help him get through it, and then you and I had a very tough time.”

Will then responds — “I was done with your ass, but marriages have that,” to which Jada responded, “We broke up.” And Will says, “And then what did you do, Jada?”

He literally pushes his wife to talk about her side piece, her son’s friend, a 23-year-old, on one of the most-watched digital talk shows.

She also really, really wants to give us those details:

“As time passed, I became entangled in a different kind of entanglement with August,” she explained. “It was a connection, obviously,” she said when Will asked what she meant by entanglement.

This man is accepting things but clearly, he’s not happy about things. I won’t go into assumptions here, only their own words; there are decades of reports about her disdain for the institution of marriage and a family house, while he stated many times he wanted just that — a house, family, wife.

There’s some kind of emotional disconnect here, however hard they try to explain to us they are so much more evolved in love than the rest of us. What really made him so emotionally manic to resort to physical violence, we probably won’t ever find out.

Maybe you saw a fierce protector of a woman on that Oscar stage, but I saw a terribly emasculated man who needed to resort to yelling and slapping to feel — manly? Strong? Respected? Valued?

I like how the New Yorker put it:

“So, you understand, he only slapped Rock — he slapped Chris Rock! — because he’s such a big man, such a rushing, white-water river of protection for the women in his life. He kept on like that, self-pitying and spiritualizing.”

Physically assaulting a man on the Academy Awards stage, to later justify it by “love making you do crazy things”, getting applause and a standing ovation from the crowd, instead of getting escorted out or reprimanded; it’s not just puzzling, but dangerous.

What message does this send out into the world? Next time we go to a comedy show, can we jump on stage if the comedian we came to see says something we don’t like during his stand-up?

Today, a morning after the slapgate, no one is voicing concern about Will's physical aggression. There's no Trevor Noah to give an intro about how violence is bad and express his worry about Will, asking us all to counsel him, as he did with Kanye. Except, Kanye never committed any physical violence but did get banned from the Grammys for ranting on Instagram. Never violent, never physically abusive to anyone. Where is the same shock for Will, that Kanye has been receiving for months now?

Back to Chris Rock.

We analyzed Will’s possible inner turmoil that caused this. Did anyone stop and think about the possible inner turmoil of Chris Rock? Or is he not allowed to be emotional, or messy? Why is it acceptable for Will to express his emotions through violence, while Chris is expected to manage and defuse the situation?

This is where it gets emotional for me.

Chris Rock is on the Autism Spectrum, diagnosed in 2020, with Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NLD). NLD affects the ability to read nonverbal social cues. It’s a tendency to process everything verbally — conceptualizing emotions by putting them into words instead of just feeling them.

Chris says it’s great for writing jokes, but bad for relationships and friendships. Bad in social settings. Unable to see the bigger picture.

I can not express to you how hard is to get diagnosed later in life. You spend every single day revisiting your childhood traumas, realizing you had no one to support your then-unknown diagnosis, constantly being the one that needs to tolerate the neurotypical world, instead of the typical world tolerating and accommodating the neurodivergent. It’s exhausting.

Chris has been vocal about trying to figure out and live with his diagnosis, donning 7 hours a week in therapy. Let’s clarify — the man on the autism spectrum, not adept at social cues, demonstrated an incredibly graceful response when faced with a slap to the face, at the world's most prominent award show. He skillfully diffused the situation, brought calmness to rage, and felt someone else, at that moment, was dealing with more than he was.

And the two people with obvious relationship problems decided their issues, sorrows, triggers, and emotional turmoils were bigger and more important than anyone else’s that night. More important than the colleague dealing with a difficult diagnosis, or two extraordinary athletes who couldn’t even shine on their big night.

By the time of posting this article, Will Smith issued an apology to the Academy and Chris Rock. He did that the next day, not right after his transgression. Right after the slap, then the win, he decided to get jiggy with it and dance all night without a worry on his face, Oscar in hand.