Gabrielle Union Breaks Silence Over Feud With Jada Pinkett Smith

Gabrielle Union has finally broken her silence over her longtime feud with fellow actress Jada Pinkett Smith. She admitted that she and Smith actually had no clue as to how their 17-year beef started.

While promoting her new movie “Breaking In” on the “Today” show on Monday, Union had the chance to address her publicized disagreement with Will Smith’s wife. “Jada nor I ever used the word feud … Back in the day, neither one of us knew originally what took place back then, but the people that we had around us were like, ‘Well, you know how she feels about you,’” the 45-year-old Hollywood actress told host Hoda Kotb.

“And then I was like, ‘OK, girl, bye’ for 17 years,” Union added. “And even though we’re both very outspoken women, we’re both activists, our husbands are friends, we both felt we had too much pride and too much insecurities to actually say, ‘Hey, did that ever happen or was that a creation of someone else who did not want to see two women rise together?’”

Union has already filmed an episode for Smith’s new Facebook Watch series, called “Red Table Talk,” which the latter hosts alongside her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris and daughter Willow Smith, as per People. According to Union, she and Smith discussed the issue in the episode. “That’s what we talk about on her show — how we got over ourselves, how we both evolved — no feud, just a lot of silence — to come together and create something really beautiful with a lot of healing,” she said.

Smith was the first one to address the feud. The former star of “Gotham” opened up about the issue when she did an interview with Extra last Thursday while promoting her new talk show. “I have a really touching episode with Gabrielle Union. We haven’t been on the best of terms for 17 years and we have a reconciliation,” Smith said.

Smith also disclosed that Union was the one who popped in her mind when the producers of her show told her that she should do a girlfriends special. “When the producers said we want to do a girlfriends show, her name just kept coming up. It just couldn’t be anything else.”