One TikTok user says Pinkett Smith’s claims about Shakur are untrue.
Jada Pinkett Smith has been accused of lying in her memoirs. The actress has shared excerpts from her book Worthy in the lead-up to its release on October 17. Among the revelations is a claim that Tupac Shakur proposed to the 52-year-old in 1995. Pinkett Smith described Shakur as her “soulmate” and said the rap icon proposed while imprisoned on Rikers Island.
Jess begins by asserting that the “math isn’t mathing,” referring to Shakur’s 1995 conviction for sexual assault. The rapper was sentenced to 1.5 to 4.5 years in prison after being found guilty of raping Ayanna Jackson. Death Row Records mogul Suge Knight bailed him out in October 1995 after serving only nine months.
After spending a month at Rikers Island, Shakur was transferred to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Because Shakur spent only a short time at Rikers, Jess thinks Pinkett Smith would not have had time to visit him there. “She specifically said she went to see him, this was not on the phone,” said Jess before cutting to video of Smith discussing the proposal during an episode of the podcast All The Smoke.
Jess then mentions Shakur’s short-lived marriage with Keisha Morris. Morris and Shakur dated before the rapper’s conviction and married in April 1995, during his time in prison. Though the marriage was annulled 10 months later, Morris and Shakur stayed close until his passing in 1996. “Tupac already had a girlfriend named Keisha,” Jess added. “He proposed to Keisha—her words in a September 2011 interview—he proposed to Keisha before he even went into prison, they were already engaged. They got married in April.”
Morris moved closer to Shakur after he was relocated to the Clinton Correctional Facility and visited him almost every day. “So you’re telling me that in the two to four-week window that he was at Rikers, engaged to another woman, who had moved closer to the prison and was there almost every day, Tupac proposed to Jada?” Jess asked.
“You might be saying to yourself ‘Tupac wasn’t known to be a one-woman man, he was no angel.’ Fair enough,” she continued. “Let’s see where Jada was in January of 1995, which we have established is the only time she’d be able to see Tupac at Rikers, Jada had already met Will Smith in 1994.”
In 1994, while auditioning for a role on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Pinkett Smith met her future husband, Will Smith. The actor was married at the time, so they didn’t begin dating until a year later. During the video, Jess shares a clip of an old interview with Smith, in which the actor recounts calling the actress in February 1995 for a date, just five days after Sheree Zambino divorced him.
As soon as she took the call, Pinkett Smith got on a plane from Maryland to Los Angeles. The couple began a whirlwind romance, getting married in 1997. “Jada, when in all that time, did you visit Tupac in Rikers and get this f— proposal?” Jess asked. Pinkett Smith met Shakur at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the 1980s when they were teenagers. She told Howard Stern in 2015 that she and Shakur were not attracted to one another, though they remained close friends, and he wrote a poem for her.
She and Will Smith have two children, Jaden Smith, 25, and Willow Smith, 22. She is also the stepmother of Trey Smith, 30, Will Smith’s son from his first marriage to Zampino. NBC News recently interviewed Pinkett Smith in which she admitted that she and the 55-year-old actor have been “living separate lives” since 2016. She said the couple is working together to reestablish their marriage.
