Jada Pinkett Smith is at the center of a legal battle. The actress is being sued for three million dollars by Bilal Salam, who was Will Smith’s friend and professional partner, claiming that she threatened him and led a smear campaign against him after a confrontation that occurred in September 2021 at Will’s birthday party.
According to the lawsuit filed on November 7, “the defendant Jayda Pinkett Smith approached the plaintiff along with about seven people from her entourage, became aggressive and threatened him that if he continued to ‘tell her personal matters’, he would ‘disappear or get shot’.” It is also claimed that she demanded that he sign a confidentiality agreement, “otherwise it will not be good.”
The lawsuit claims that after the incident, one of Jaida’s associates followed Salam to his car “while continuing to verbally threaten.” Less than a year later, he said, he was approached after the Oscar ceremony in 2022, where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock live, and asked him to “help manage the crisis surrounding the incident.” Salam refused and claimed that “his conscience did not allow him to be part of a cover-up or a misleading PR campaign.”
According to Salam, after he refused, a “retaliatory action” began against him that included threats from people close to Will and Jaida. Things escalated, according to him, when the two discovered that he was writing a revealing book about his time in their midst. Following this, according to him, he began to be interviewed in public “to protect himself and document the events”. According to him, at this point Jaida “deliberately and maliciously began to lead a defamation campaign in interviews”.
In the lawsuit, Salam accuses Pinkett Smith of “intentionally causing emotional distress” in three different cases, and of “extreme and scandalous behavior”, which includes actions designed to “threaten, bribe and silence” him. He demands damages in the amount of three million dollars, in addition to general and punitive damages, and also seeks to compel Jaida “to publish a public apology and retract the false claims she made against him, including false accusations of attempted extortion.”