*“Forgiveness” was the main course being served up on the latest episode of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Facebook Watch series “Red Table Talk.”
On Monday, the actress and her half-brother Caleeb dish about their late father Robsol Pinkett, Jr. and how they learned to forgive him for being an addict who “wasn’t there for us as children,” Jada explained.
Jada’s daughter Willow even revealed how she struggled to forgive her famous father after she became a pop star.
“We grew up with different mothers on opposite coasts, but our father is a shared source of pain,” Pinkett Smith said to her brother. “It’s about finding forgiveness for the man who gave us both life and also hurt us the most.”
Caleeb didn’t get to know his father until he was 12, and says Robsol was sober for 20-25 years before he fell off the wagon. Jada brought him out to California where he was clean for three years and then “he fell off again and died from an overdose” in 2010.
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“We both had a lot of resentment,” Jada said. “We had the feeling like we had to be responsible for him, but he never had to be responsible for us and that was a hard pill for me to swallow.”
They both shared how he told them he couldn’t be a dad to them because he’d “rather get high than be your father.” He supposedly told Jada, at age 7, “I can’t be your father. I’m a criminal, I’m an addict and that’s just what it is.”
“When he died from that overdose, I got the call from Caleeb and the most difficult part of him dying like that was he and I had had a horrendous fight when I found out he relapsed,” Jada explained.
Willow was asked if there was anyone in her past she needed to forgive and the answer came easy: her own parents.
“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing,” she explained.
In a previous episode, Willow said her success at such a young age wasn’t handled properly. “You and daddy should have been, ‘OK, we value her musical growth and knowledge more than her popularity,” she said at the time, explaining how she later rebelled by shaving her head.
“It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times,” she added on Monday’s new episode. “It was like a couple years, trying to regain trust for trying for not feeling like I wasn’t listened to or no one cared what I felt during that time.”
She added that she also had to forgive herself: “Because I felt guilty because I was like, everyone is trying to make me better, trying to make my dream, but I didn’t really understand what my dream entailed.”
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