“This is a very important ‘Red Table Talk’ on alopecia. Considering what I’ve been through with my health and what happened at the Oscars, thousands of people have reached out to me with their stories,” she said in an introduction to the episode.
“Now about Oscar night,” Pinkett Smith said. As of that night, Smith resigned from the academy and was banned from attending Academy Awards for 10 years; Rock has made no public statement about the incident. “My deepest hope is that these two smart and capable men have the opportunity to heal, to talk about it and to reconcile. The state of the world today, we need both,” he said. she continued. “In the meantime, Will and I are continuing to do what we’ve been doing for the past 28 years, and that’s continuing to figure out this thing called living together.”
And with that, the ‘Girls Trip’ star pivoted into a touching conversation with Nicole Ball, whose 12-year-old daughter Rio died by suicide after being bullied at school for her alopecia areata, this which caused him to lose his hair.
Two weeks after Rio’s death, the 94th Academy Awards were broadcast live from Los Angeles. Pinkett Smith and her husband, who would go on to win the Oscar for his role in “King Richard” later that night, sat front row as Rock joked that the actress looked like she was auditioning for ” GI Jane 2″.
“It’s no joke,” Ball said of the medical condition.
Since 2018, Pinkett Smith has gone public with her battle with the disease. “There was so much shame,” she said on Wednesday’s show, which also featured a doctor who explained the condition.
Pinkett Smith will likely address the Oscar controversy and its other high-profile effects later this season on her show. Less than a month after the slap, she opened the season premiere of her chat series with this statement, “Given everything that’s happened over the past few weeks, the Smith family has been focused on deep healing. Some of the discoveries around our healing will be shared around the table when the time is right.”