In a new interview with Vulture, August Alsina says he doesn’t regret his entanglement with Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith. He sees the experience of being given a love like that as “a gift,” he says, even if it was “complex or hard” and landed both him and the Smiths in a public debacle none of us should have been privy to in the first place. But surprisingly, he also tells Vulture that no, he hasn’t seen the Red Table Talk episode about him yet.
The topics in Vulture’s interview range from Alsina’s very public health battles—“Black people are always overlooked […] dealing with the health-care system, having to spend so much money to go to the doctor and still be overlooked,” he says—to his entanglement with the Smiths. Obviously, everyone is most interested in what he had to say in response. The answer? Like his counterparts in this saga, he elaborated on very little. Following Will and Jada’s recent Red Table Talk episode, questions about her relationship with Alsina multiplied exponentially. As is common with any Red Table Talk, the episode was more focused on moving through their “healing” than it was providing concrete specifics.
But that’s beside the point. In his interview with Vulture, Alsina sticks to the same strategy. In response to a question about whether he still speaks to the Smiths, Alsina responds:
I don’t have an issue with anybody. I love everybody. I love all of them. They’ve been my family, and there’s a lot of history there. They’re beautiful people. They’re beautiful spirits. They really are. After my sister died [of cancer in 2018], I decided to do something different and kind of untangle myself from what I had been tangled up in for so long, because it kept me out of alignment with my true self, so to speak. I’m an artist. But because the full truth was never there and the clarity was never there, it kept me from living in my expression. And that made me feel weighted down. That, itself, is another form of oppression and repression and suppression. It started to kind of eat at my life force. That’s really what it’s about more than anything. But there’s no bad blood with anybody. They [the Smiths] got [the Angela Yee interview] way before the world ever saw it. It came from a loving place. There’s no bad love with anybody. I got love for everybody on this planet.
Following this, he claims he doesn’t regret his involvement in their marriage because it helped him “access my higher self.” He continues: “There’s nothing to regret because it’s not something I went searching for. It’s not something I went after. I don’t go after people’s girls. Nobody preyed on me or was a predator towards me. This is none of that. It just is. It just was.”
Alsina also hits back at vocal critics of his initial interview, telling Vulture that he doesn’t see his involvement with the Smith’s as “scandalous,” and knows that people on Twitter were ultimately going to make him “out to be a crazy person, saying this was so unbelievable.” He says the response to his interview with Angela Yee, which ignited this firestorm, “was very telling for me in so many ways.” He continues:
That’s where the disconnect is. How you see yourself is not how I see myself. I see my experience and everything I’ve gone through. I see myself as worthy. I see myself as deserving of love. People have all these ideas about who people are, and what’s possible, and what’s impossible. I believe the possibilities are endless. People may not like that about me, and I get it, cause everybody lives within these confines and constructs. You could say that I am an unconventional person.
He also addressed a rather confounding Twitter interaction with Keke Palmer, in which she informed a fan last week that she and Alsina had never dated. In response to the now-deleted tweet, Alsina claimed Palmer was mentally unstable, and that he had receipts about some alleged texts sent between her and her friends about Alsina. (If you’re confused, so are the rest of us!) Palmer eventually responded, writing on Instagram:
I wanna be mean, but I can’t. I want to post screenshots, but I won’t. I feel attacked, but It’s not about me. It’s about so much more than that and as much as I want to defend myself against the disrespect I have received(cause I mean I’m not nice all the time ) this is about something so much bigger. I wouldn’t feel good kicking someone when they are down because it’s so easy to attack when you’re in a corner, I get it. People be hurting y’all and most of the time it has nothing to do with you. I can’t fuck up my karma worried about my ego, though I’m human and I have one. Just know I am that bitch despite what my humility may make one believe. I don’t have to beg or be thirsty for a damn thing because my talent speaks louder than my looks. Let the cheek be turned pooh’s, my character is too strong.
Here’s what Alsina, meanwhile, had to say about calling Palmer mentally unstable. Warning: It’s a whole lot more of absolutely nothing!
I literally can’t give her any of my energy at this point in my life. I actually gave it too much of my energy. But what I will say is that covert narcissism exists. There’s so much that I witnessed that people don’t know that I see, that comes across my table. People will throw stones and hide their hands and then get back and play victim. I’m aware of that. That’s just people. But with that in particular, I don’t even have the energy to devote to that conversation at all. When I said “next,” I meant that in real life.
So let’s recount: Jada Pinkett Smith and August Alsina were absolutely involved. It happened either during or after he worked with the Smith family on working through his own issues, like substance abuse and mental health. Alsina claims Will gave his consent to their relationship, but neither the Smiths nor Alsina have circled back to this claim. Things ended amicably—or they didn’t—and he wouldn’t have said anything about it at all if he hadn’t seen people online calling him a homewrecker and a cheater. The Smiths for their part, are happy with their “bad marriage for life,” as they joked about on Red Table Talk, even if Will claims he had every right to never speak to Jada again because of her entanglement with Alsina. Elsewhere, Alsina isn’t going to extrapolate on why he called Keke Palmer mentally unstable.
Cool! Just as many questions, just as few answers. This has been yet another entry in the Red Table Talk saga. Until next time!
