(This article contains links and transcripts to the podcast you’ll hear above.)
Watch Will Smith’s apology here.
Read Chris Rock’s indirect response to that apology here.
This is not the normal kind of podcast that I do. For those new to the show, I normally focus on small town crime, but I was so heated after I saw Will Smith’s indignant ass roll up on stage and assault Chris Rock that I decided to break ranks. I had a conversation with a friend of mine the day after Smith slapped Rock at the Oscars. I never published it in full - just snippets. And I used it to spark some responsible debates about whether men should be expected to defend their women in today’s society and so on. So, I’m gonna go ahead and publish that conversation along with this news that Smith apologized yesterday, because I think it’s relevant now even more than when I first recorded it.
So, obviously today’s talk is going to be about Will Smith’s public apology. If you haven’t seen this, I’ll publish a snippet of the audio, and let you go find the full thing for yourself on his Instagram account.
Now, this is pretty personal to me, because I've been publicly verbally accosted by a friend of mine in the past. I know that’s not the same as being slapped by a guy who thought I was attacking his wife. But I think principally the example is still on par with what’s expected of men these days.
So the situation was this…
He slandered me in public, and I gave no response. In fact, after he'd gotten the attention of the entire bar, I announced I was going to take a piss and left him standing there in a hushed room with all the eyes on him.
What I should have done, and what I would have done if I'd had the opportunity to relive that moment, would have been to point out that he was a grown man screaming at another man in a bar and making a fool of himself. I would have said that the minute we can no longer just talk about things and resort to shouting matches, we are limiting how other people can approach us. And there should be no subject out of bounds for discussion. Because when discussion stops, battles begin. And if discussion never picks back up, those battles turn into wars.
Later, when I saw Charles the next morning, he apologized. I thanked him for his apology in the same breath that I acknowledged that it takes a certain kind of man to afront someone in public and apologize in private. He was not pleased. But deep down, he knew that was because I was right.
But this is probably what I like about the Will Smith apology to Chris Rock. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I believe Will Smith to have been sincere in his apology. He was not acting. And I think the world got a real visage into the private thoughts and mannerisms he uses in his private world, with his family and friends.
I think he went a little overboard a couple times, when he apologized to Jada and his family members. Because, surely they've been given an apology already. If he's sitting there on a national broadcast prepared to answer for his actions, he's likely also had that conversation by that time. But that's just speculation on my part, so that, too, could have possibly also been genuine.
I'll say that I was not on Will Smith's side at the beginning. And technically, I'm not on his side now. Because even in the wake of an apology, it doesn't change what he did. In the end, however, he did something that even my friend Charles, couldn't and didn't do. He publicly apologized. And it seemed to me that he was being honest.
Now, whether or not that honesty was generated as a result of losing millions of dollars on lost movie deals and generally living like a hermit for fear of the public backlash he would have received for going out, remains to be seen.
I don't know. I don't know what his motivating factors are. I can say that it took him a helluva long time to own his shit. And frankly, he did not look too apologetic that very same night when he was dancing and singing, waving his award around at the Academy Awards. And, I guess in that case, I have to give him credit for owning his shit at all, since, if that backlash had never come, we might never have seen him appear to do this.
But I'll play that clip now, and then move on to the conversation my friend and I had about the original incident.
Now, here’s the chat I had with my friend about the original incident.
[Audio segment]
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On Will Smith's Apology