Author and mom of Chris Rock, Rose Rock, is opening up about the infamous Oscars slap.
In a sit-down with South Carolina’s WIS-TV show Soda City Live, Rock said Chris was “doing well,” but is “still processing, because that’s not something you expect.”
“When he slapped Chris, he slapped all of us,” Mrs. Rock said of Will Smith. “He really slapped me, because when you hurt my child, you hurt me!”
Rose Rock, who is also a motivational speaker, also said if she had a chance to talk to Will, she would have asked, “What in the world were you thinking?”
She added of Will and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith, “You reacted to your wife giving you the side-eye, and you went up, and you made her day because she was bowled over laughing when it happened.”
Mrs. Rock also said, “I wouldn’t take his award away, and I don’t see any good way they could have taken him out without disrupting.”
However, she admitted she also didn’t think much of the Academy’s banning Will for 10 years. “What does that mean? You don’t even go every year,” she quipped.
She said Chris’ biggest regret was he was “so happy” to present the Best Documentary Oscar to his friend Questlove. “No one even heard his speech. No one was able to just be in the moment, because everyone was sitting there like, ‘What just happened?'”
Indeed, even Rock’s mother thought the slap might have been a gag — until Will cursed out the comedian from his seat at the awards show.
Rock closed with saying of Smith, “I feel really bad that he never apologized. I mean his people wrote up a piece saying ‘I apologize to Chris Rock,’ but you see something like that is personal, you reach out.”
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