Additionally, in a preview of an interview on All the Smoke, she said that Pac proposed to her while he was in jail. “I talk about this in the book, when I go to see him in Rikers,” she said. “When I had to talk about it, speak my words for the Audible version of the book, that was probably one of the more painful parts. Seeing him there, the condition he was in, and having to leave him there. He was in bad shape.”
She continued, “So when he asked me to get married, he was at Rikers. And I knew at that time that A. He needed someone to do time with him, which I was going to do anyway. You ain’t have to marry me to do time. … And then, he needed a rock. Because of friendship, because of everything we had been through together. He just wanted to feel that solidified foundation. Because I promise you, he woulda married me and divorced me as soon as his ass left jail.”
She attributed his proposal to the “mind state” he was in at the time, adding that he wrote her a “long letter.” Pinkett Smith said that she believed he wanted to “tether [himself]” to “keep [him] on a trajectory.”
Pinkett Smith has long been open about her love for Pac, whom she met while attending the Baltimore City School for the Arts. She dated Will Smith after meeting him on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and they later married in December 1997, just over three months after Pac was fatally shot in Las Vegas. Just last month, she shared a cute video of her and Pac lip-syncing to Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” She has described her relationship with Pac as “like a brother” in the past and in 2019 she said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Pac.”
