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Chris Rock, 58, wasn’t able to simply shake off the infamous Oscars night slap delivered by Will Smith. That’s according to his close friend Leslie Jones, who opened up during a revealing interview with People. “That s*** was humiliating,” she told the outlet for the recent conversation. “It really affected him. People need to understand his daughters, his parents, saw that. He had to go to counseling with his daughters.” Chris has two daughters, Lola, 21, and Zahra, 19, whom she shares with ex Malaak Compton-Rock.
Elsewhere in the interview, Leslie admitted she was “infuriated” by the live March 27 incident, which had Will marching up to the stage to smack the comedian over a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith‘s appearance. “It made me so infuriated,” Leslie said of watching the incident. “You don’t know that I was going to jump in my car and roll up there. I was so f****** mad on so many levels.”
Will Smith slaps Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Oscars in Los Angeles. (Rob Latour/Shutterstock)
And the anger didn’t end when the ceremony signed off, with Will taking home a Best Actor Academy Award for King Richard after a standing ovation from the crowd. “For a long a** time I was just mad,” she explained. “Chris Rock did a f****** joke.” She continued, “I know Will, too… I was like, you couldn’t handle that s*** afterwards. This is the Oscars. The whole world is watching.”
Leslie also divulged that she discussed the infamous, meme-making moment with Chris. “I was like, ‘Chris, when he got up why didn’t you run?’,” she said. “‘I would’ve been running around that stage like ‘Will, calm down. Jada, call your man!‘”
And bringing things full circle, the comedian felt that the Men in Black star had an opportunity to make it right before the night was over. “He could have still fixed it,” she lamented, adding that he should have said, “‘I shouldn’t have did that. Bring Chris out. I can not accept the Oscar right now because that was f****** wrong.’”
