Jada Pinkett Smith’s mom, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, says she had non-consensual sex with the actress’ late father, Robsol Pinkett Jr, during a candid discussion for an episode of their Facebook Watch series ‘Red Table Talk’.
Banfield-Norris told her daughter and her granddaughter Willow Smith, 19, who was present around the table, that during her brief marriage to Pinkett Jr she was made to have sex without giving her consent.
“So, Gam, you feel like nowhere in your history in regard to sexual intimacy have you felt like you had a sexual experience that was not necessarily consensual,” posed Pinkett Smith, in a question to her mother.
To which 67-year-old Banfield-Norris replied: “I have, I have, but it was also with my husband. Your dad, actually. So that’s really grey.”
Asking for clarification, Pinkett Smith asked her mother: “You’re basically saying you had non-consensual sex with my father?”And her parent nodded in agreement.
Banfield-Norris was still at high school when she gave birth to Jada, 49, in 1971.
Her marriage to Pinkett Jr lasted just two months, and her daughter previously revealed the domestic violence her mom was subjected to by her late father – who died in 2010.
“I knew that my mother and my father had a very violent relationship early on,” Pinkett Smith said. “She has a couple [of] scars on her body that, as a child, I was just curious. I was like, ‘Oh, Mommy, what’s that? What’s that?’… This will be the first time that Willow’s actually heard these stories about her grandfather who she knew.” One of the scars on her back was from the time she was “thrown over the bannister”.
Banfield-Norris explained how her husband used to turn violent after he had been drinking. She said: “Not to make this like an excuse … but he was typically in an altered state when he was abusive like that. He was typically drunk.”
She explained that she stayed in the marriage for as long as she did because she thought she was in “love”.
“I think women stay because they think that they’re in love. That’s what it was for me. I thought that it was love.”