Jada Pinkett Smith went into detail on Red Table Talk about her experiences with drug and alcohol addiction, including a harrowing moment she had while on the set of The Nutty Professor.
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During the episode, she described her younger self as being “a weekend party girl,” saying she would indulge in drugs and alcohol “Thursday to Monday morning.”
She said that she realized she was harming herself when she had “an eye-opening incident” while in her makeup trailer on the set of The Nutty Professor.
“I passed out,” she said. “I went to work high, and it was a bad batch of ecstasy. And I passed out. And I told everybody that I had taken–I must’ve had old medication in a vitamin bottle. That’s what I said. But I tell you what I did though. Got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time.”
The episode included more revelations from Pinkett-Smith and her family’s struggles with substance abuse and sobriety, including Pinkett Smith describing another moment from her past in which she threw up at Debbie Allen‘s house.
“Don’t think that people didn’t try to tap me on my shoulder. Don’t think that when I was at Debbie Allen’s throwing up all over her house…that she wasn’t like, ‘Hey,'” she said. “But I had to reach my rock bottoms.”
The episode also featured testimonies from other successful women across the country about how they dealt with substance abuse while being at the top of their field. One of the women, Khadi Olagoke, used her experiences and lack of representation in mainstream 12-step programs to create Sober Black Girls, a place where Black women can talk about the racial and societal issues that might affect their sobriety. Dr. Jessica Mellinger also joined the Red Table to discuss the troubling rise in young women being admitted to the hospital for alcohol-related liver disease.
Red Table Talk is now streaming on Facebook Watch.
