Will Smith’s daughter Willow says it took her a ‘couple of years’ to ‘forgive’ her father after early rise to fame


Will Smith's daughter Willow says it took her a 'couple of years' to 'forgive' her father after early rise to fame

Willow Smith is opening up about the complicated relationship she had with her famous father, Will Smith, after she skyrocketed to fame following her hit single "Whip My Hair" when she was just 10 years old.

Speaking to her mother and grandmother on Monday's episode of "Red Table Talk," Smith, who is 18 today, described her father as "harsh" back then.

“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing. It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times,” Smith told mom Jada Pinkett Smith grandma Adrienne Banfield-Jones.

“It was a couple of years, honestly. Trying to regain trust for not feeling like I was being listened to or like no one cared how I felt,” the singer continued.

And while the young star didn't fully disclose the details of the tension between her famous parents at the time, she explained that she was able to forgive them after a few years and also learned to forgive herself.

“I had to forgive myself because I felt guilty because everyone is trying to make me better, trying to make my dream. But I didn’t really understand what my dream entailed,” she said.

Back in October, the youngest of the Smith clan also revealed that the pressure to finish her first album after releasing “Whip My Hair" is what drove her to self-harm.

“After all of that kinda settled down and it was like a kind of lull, I was just listening to a lot of dark music,” Willow recalled. “It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself.”

Jada then revealed the shocking conversation in which she found her daughter was cutting herself.

“We went through what happened and, in the moment, I realized as a mother you also have to give your children space to deal with their own shadow,” Jada explained during the "Table Talk" episode. “There’s lots of things that my mother didn’t know about me that she’s just finding out about me.”

Willow's mother continued and said she decided to focus on how the young singer “got herself out [of cutting herself] versus what got her there.”

“I was most proud about that she could share it in the way she did, which let me know she had come through in a major way, that she could put it on the table like that,” the actress said. “I wanted to focus on what [it was] that got her through.”

She added, “I really talked to her about her powering side of her journey and give her all the praise in the world for that part instead of focusing on, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?'”

Smith explained that the self-harm was a dark period in her life that she had to overcome in her own way.

“I never talk about it because it was such a short weird point in my life," she said. "But you have to pull yourself out of it."

Fox News' Katherine Lam contributed to this report. 


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Will Smith’s daughter Willow says it took her a ‘couple of years’ to ‘forgive’ her father after early rise to fame

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