Jada Pinkett Smith gets very candid on her show Red Table Talk, and will discuss even the most private of personal matters.

Jada Pinkett Smith is a person very much in the public eye. She’s married to A-list actor Will Smith, for a start. She’s a successful actor in her own right, with franchises such as The Matrix and Madagascar under her belt. And she has a Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, in which she discusses important issues. Recently, she told the Red Table Talk audience a major secret about her private life.

Many revelations have come out on Red Table Talk. For example, in one episode Jada’s daughter Willow Smith discussed how she self-harmed as a child, something Jada was shocked to hear. Jada herself has gone into a lot of intimate details about her life, and talked about them for the whole world to hear.

In two of the most recent episodes of Red Table Talk, Jada talked about addictions with her mother Adrienne and Willow. She herself had suffered from several of them in the past, she said. One of them was a little surprising and many people might not have heard of it – or had the courage to talk about it, the topic carrying something of a social taboo.

Still, Jada Pinkett-Smith has always had a habit of defying social conventions. On Red Table Talk she’s shared all sorts of secrets about her life, her marriage, and the rules she chooses to ignore. For example, in one 2019 episode she discussed her relationship with Will and said there had been “betrayals.”

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Jada’s exact words were, “I’m asked a lot about, ‘Is there infidelity with your relationship with Will?’ And I’m like, no, but there have been other betrayals of the heart, that have been far bigger than I could even think in regards to an infidelity situation.” That’s a big piece of information to share.

The whole Smith family have discussed relationships and parenting on the show, and Jada doesn’t shy away from airing material which presents her in a difficult light. In one 2018 episode, both Smith children shared issues they had with their parents growing up. They felt like the pressures of fame had hurt their upbringing.

Willow said, “I only have one terrible experience, which is ‘Whip My Hair’ [her debut single]… You and daddy should have been like, ‘OK, we value her musical growth and knowledge more than her popularity.’” Jaden said he had been through the same thing. Jada was almost brought to tears.

In response to her children’s criticisms, Jada said, “When you become a parent, you have these huge ideals, even for yourself, because we all are coming into parenting with our own childhood traumas. And you’re hoping you can fix all that through your own rearing of your children, and you can’t.” It was a very unsparing moment.

The whole of Red Table Talk has been praised for how honest it is. In July 2018, newspaper USA Today declared, “Unlike the web of other celebrity TV shows featuring manufactured family drama and few moments of actual clarity… the revealing conversations on Red Table Talk have authentic, difficult lessons at their center.”

And in May 2019 Red Table Talk tackled another controversial subject: pornography. The episode began with Jada and Willow discussing it jokingly in their dressing room. “Low-key, I’m down for the expensive-looking stuff, you know,” Willow said. Jada turned to the camera and announced, “Oh, Jesus.”

Jada said she had been shocked to find out that when Willow was 11 she was able to access porn via the social media site Tumblr. “I can’t believe kids are exposed to this on a daily basis,” Jada said. “I was profoundly disturbed.” Tumblr implemented a ban on all pornography in December 2018.

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But Willow didn’t think it was so much of a big deal. “The thing that I will say, though, is that because I had you and daddy to actually have, like, real conversations with, that stuff didn’t really affect me,” she told her mother. “Because I knew I had a connection with people that I could talk to about it and knew what the reality of it was.”

Jada talked about how times had changed when it came to pornography. “Back in the day, porn for my generation started in magazines, and then you had to go to a seedy store to get a VHS tape. We didn’t have access to it like that, you had to really go on an adventure to see some pornography. Whereas for your generation, it’s on your phone.”

Jada talked about all this in front of her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. She, too, had some thoughts. “I grew up in a household that created a lot of shame, which is so interesting because it wasn’t like that for [Jada], but it was like that for me,” she explained. But as the show went on, she said, “I cannot believe that I’m having this conversation with my daughter and granddaughter!”

Later on in the show, Jada interviewed a former porn addict. “There are a lot of porn addicts who lose sexual interest in their partners because the expectation is so different,” she explained. “A lot of couples say that porn has a devastating effect on their relationship.” She sat down with Garrett Jonsson, who now helps other addicts kick their pornography habits via the charity Fight the New Drug.

Garrett’s wife Arial Larsen, a former dancer, was also there. They discussed the problem and what had happened between them. “I think when I started to realize that I had a challenge with pornography was when we started dating, and then I didn’t feel comfortable telling her,” Garrett said.

Garrett went on, “Through four years of marriage, I was able to hide it from her. It was easy to sneak around because it’s this rectangle in my pocket, not a box of magazines. I tried to stop and couldn’t.” Indeed, earlier on in the episode, Jada had described the availability of sexually explicit material as being like “porn in the pocket.”

Arial said that when she discovered her husband had a porn addiction, she went into denial about it. The couple constantly argued about sex, as Garrett couldn’t understand why his wife would ever refuse it. Eventually, the dancer felt she had reached her limit and walked out. Garrett knew he had made a massive mistake.

The couple ended up fighting Garrett’s problem and coming back together. “Garrett’s a really good man and I love him,” Arial said. “I didn’t want to leave him. But I was sick of the issues, so I needed him to come to an understanding of, if I say, ‘No,’ it doesn’t mean anything against you.” Garrett has now been “clean” of his addiction for three years.

The episode had a lot to say about the problems with porn, its availability and the impact it can have on relationships. Garrett explained, “The major difference is instant gratification and differed gratification.” But the episode’s most intriguing thread involved Jada herself. She, too, had once been a porn addict.

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At one point in the episode, Jada announced, “If I was still on my porn game, I’d be able to show you some good porn. Back in the day I had a little porn addiction, but I wasn’t in a relationship when I had a porn addiction, believe it or not, thank goodness.” Throughout the show, she expanded on this revelation.

Jada said later, “We’re here to talk about the effects of pornography on relationships. This is an interesting one, and I actually feel like I was using ‘addiction’ a little lightly. And maybe I’ll say now that I had an unhealthy relationship to porn at one point in my life, where I was trying to practice abstinence.”

Jada explained that her addiction to porn “was like filling an emptiness – at least you think it is, but it’s actually not.” The issue had a major impact on her life, she admitted, commenting, “Reading some of the effects of pornography, it really gives you false expectations as far as sexual interaction.” All the same, she her stance isn’t completely anti-porn.

While Jada said that many women would like to see porn banned, she wasn’t one of them. “I’ve heard lots of women say that it has helped them break their inhibitions in regards to sex… I feel like a lot of women have that to deal with,” she said. “I don’t think we know culturally what women like, because women have not been allowed to explore in the same way as men.”

Jada has spoken before about other addictions she has had to battle. In a July 2018 episode of Red Table Talk, she went into detail about them. Addiction ran in her family, she claimed, and Adrienne had fought a heroin addiction once. “I am a binger, and I always have to watch myself and how I can get obsessed with things,” Jada said.

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One of the things with which she became obsessed was intercourse. “I definitely went through a sex addiction. [I thought] everything could be fixed by sex,” Jada explained. But there were other issues. She also, she said, “became a gym addict” and on top of that came to realise that she had a problem with alcohol.

Jada described how she came to realise she was an alcoholic. “I remember reaching a rock bottom that time I was in the house by myself and I had those two bottles of wine and was going for the third bottle,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Now hold up. You’re in this house by yourself going onto your third bottle of wine? You might have a problem.’”

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The actor said she got through her addictions by abstaining from them altogether. These days, she revealed, she asks herself important questions. She said, “It’s not what you’re doing but how you’re with it. Why you’re doing it. It’s the behavior that’s attached to it because if you want to have a lot of sex, that’s great, but why are you having all that sex? That’s what you’ve got to look at.”

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Jada isn’t the only celebrity who has opened up about a porn and sex addiction. Brooklyn 99 actor Terry Crews also did so in 2014, and two years later he released some videos about his struggle to Facebook. The problem got so bad, the TV sitcom star admitted, that it sent him to rehab and nearly ruined his marriage.

Terry described on his videos the battles he had fought, including the struggle of having a little-known addiction. He said, “Some people say, ‘Hey, man … you can’t really be addicted to pornography.’ But I’m gonna tell you something: If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably have got a problem. And that was me.”

He went on, “It changes the way you think about people. People become objects. People become body parts; they become things to be used rather than people to be loved.” Terry had suffered from his pornography addiction for most of his adult life. He had actually started looking at erotica at the tender age of 12.

In 2019, Terry told Men’s Health magazine about what he had done to overcome his addiction. He and his wife had undergone a 90-day “sex fast” to try and break the cycle. “Everything that is within your grasp doesn’t need to be in your hand. You have to tell your body, ‘No’,” Terry explained. “Because if you listen to your body, you’re gonna be off.”

Jada had a similar problem, but hers involved masturbation rather than sex with other people. In a July 2018 episode of Red Table Talk, she explained, “My grandmother taught me about self-pleasuring because she wanted me to know that that pleasure was from me… And she taught me at 9!”

That seems like a very young age to learn about sex and masturbation, but actually many child psychologists think it’s a good idea to teach kids early. WebMD, for example, states: “Never avoid a ‘teachable moment.’ Dive in and offer accurate information whenever your child sashays anywhere near the topic of sex.”

But addiction raised its head again for Jada. “I gave myself multiples first. Multiple orgasms. I was really into it at one point. Just because I was in an exploration state and I was abstaining from men,” she said on the show. “And I actually think I went through kind of an addiction, too, with it. And then one day, I was like, ‘Enough. You’re having five orgasms a day.’”

The website for which Garrett now works, Fight the New Drug, has some advice about porn addiction. In 2019, after reporting on Jada’s story, the organization explained what it regarde as the dangers of pornography. One of the key factors, it said, was the length of a romantic relationship.

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The Fight the New Drug website claims, “Many studies reporting the perceived positive effects of porn for couples have studied participants who are in early dating relationships. As the length and seriousness of the relationship go[es] up, so do[es] the negative effects of porn consumption for many couples.”

And the statement continues, “We don’t always see the clearest possible results of what’s actually happening until we follow something over time. For example, look at eating and exercising patterns. People can be pretty happy about eating junk food in the moment, even for a short period of time. But, in time, the overall effects of an unhealthy eating habit start to emerge and the long-term effects become more clear.”

At the end of the article, Fight the New Drug stated, “Porn promises immediate satisfaction, endless excitement, and easy intimacy, but in the end, it robs a consumer of all three. This is why we’re so excited Red Table Talk decided to tackle this issue with Garrett and Arial – everyone deserves to know the truth about porn and relationships.”

However, Jada doesn’t necessarily want porn gone altogether, and she doesn’t want an addiction to it to become even more taboo. She wants the issue to be discussed. “People are already having problems with it, so if we stigmatize it, it makes it more shameful,” she explained on the show. “It makes it so that people don’t want to talk about it, and then don’t heal.”