Who Is August Alsina? Jada Pinkett Smith Confirms Will Smith-Approved Affair With Musician
Alsina says he loved her for years.
Youtube August Alsina shocked the world in an interview this week when he said he had a multi-year relationship with Jada Pinkett Smith. Rumors have swirled about a possible relationship between the 27-year-old musician and the married 48-year-old mother of two but neither of them have spoken openly about it before.
The conversation came up when Alsina was talking about his 2019 album The Product III: stateofEMERGEncy and the documentary The Rise Of August Alsina, which is about his life. Lip Service host Angela Yee asked him directly about the rumors. He gave a candid, and shocking, answer. Now Pinkett Smith is confirming parts of the story.
Who is August Alsina — and did he actually have a Will Smith-approved affair with Jada Pinkett Smith?
Who is August Alsina?
Alsina is a 27-year-old New Orleans native who broke out in the music scene in 2014. In recent years, there have been rumors he had some kind of relationship with Jada Pinkett Smith but he has never addressed it, preferring to keep his personal life private. He recently released a documentary about his life story where he talks about his experiences in love, though he doesn't mention anyone by name.
In 2019, he released The Product III: stateofEMERGEncy, which includes a track called “Nunya,” and the video got fans talking about his possible relationship with Pinkett Smith. The video included a text conversation between two people, the woman being named Koren. That’s Pinkett Smith’s middle name.
Alsina also posted a lengthy tribute to Pinkett Smith on Instagram on her 47th birthday. The post has since been deleted but at the time he wrote “I️ don’t believe in luck. I️ believe in God’s divine order. & you are an example of Gods divinity in It’s covering over my life. A beautifully complex individual you are. I️ could spend a lifetime decoding you. Thank you for your laughter. Thank you for seeing my heart and character & not measuring me based upon what I️ come from. You see me for who I am & what I’m gonna be, even when I️ can’t see ME. Thank you for challenging me on a daily basis. You’re A little piece of heaven here on earth."
In the weeks that followed this interview, Pinkett Smith kept her own counsel before talking about it on her Red Table Talk show. She confirmed that there had been a romance between them. She said she and Alsina started as friends and something deeper developed during a period where she and Will Smith were separated.
Will Smith interviewed his wife as they talked about the story.
The couple started out by saying that they had always intended to keep the entire storr private because it was a part of their lives that they didn't feel obligated to share. However, they wanted to clarify what happened.
Pinkett Smith explained that when she first got to know Alsina, he was struggling with health issues and she was struggling in her marriage. "You and I were going through a very difficult time," she said to her husband on the show.
Smith replied, "I was done with you."
"We broke up," she continued. "We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time."
She went on to explain that the romance that developed between herself and Alsina taught her a lot about herself. “I just wanted to feel good.” She added, “It had been so long since I felt good. It was really a joy to just help heal somebody, too.'
"Through that particular journey," she continued. "I learned so much about myself and was able to really confront a lot of emotional immaturity, emotional insecurity and I was really able to do some really deep healing."
Alsina talking to Yee this week.
Alsina says Will Smith was okay with the relationship.
Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband Will Smith have been married since 1997. The couple have two children together. However, they have hinted that they have an unconventional approach to marriage, something Alsina referenced in his conversation with Yee on Lip Service. He claimed that he fell in love with Pinkett Smith after vacationing with the family and went to Smith to talk about his feelings. “I actually sat down with Will [Smith] and had a conversation due to the transformation from their marriage to life partnership. He gave me his blessing,” Alsina recalled.
The Smiths addressed this claim and said that it wasn't actually the kind of formal conversation that Alsina described, it was more that he was trying to explain the understanding of the status of the Smith's marriage at that time. "One thing I want to clean up… about you giving 'permission' which is... the only person that can give permission in that circumstance is myself," she said as Smith nodded along.
"[W]hat August was probably trying to communicate because I could see how he could see it as permission because we were separated amicably, and I think he wanted to make it clear he’s not a homewrecker because he’s not," Pinkett Smith said.
Alsina says he gave himself totally to being with her.
Alsina claimed that the relationship was a powerful force in his life and he devoted himself to Pinkett Smith for years. He talks about loving the whole family and giving himself over to that love.
“I totally gave myself to that relationship for years of my life, and I truly and really, really deeply love and have a ton of love for her," Alsina told Yee. “I devoted myself to it, I gave my full self to it—so much so to the point that I can die right now and be okay with knowing that I truly gave myself to somebody.”
What do the Smiths mean by “life partnership?”
Pinkett Smith has explained that her marriage has been complex and sometimes difficult. She and Smith have worked to develop their own framework for being together, including abandoning the word marriage in favor of the term “life partnership.”
In 2018, the couple shared that the whole family came to a point of crisis when Smith realized that his dreams of fame and an outsized life were taking a toll on his wife and kids. They didn’t want the same things he did and he had to reckon with making changes if he wanted to keep his family together. “I was devastated even worse than a divorce. We broke up within our marriage and got back together again,” he said at the time. “We had to rebuild with new rules and something way, completely different.”
In 2019, Pinkett Smith explained that it was a matter of giving each other room to be who they are. "Specifically, for me in regards to creating now, redefining my marriage as a life partnership was the necessity of autonomy for myself and for Will,” she said on her show Red Table Talk. “And finding the core of us that wanted to be together outside of the constraints of the traditional ideas of marriage because they weren't working for us.”
The Smiths have talked about their marriage.
She has never admitted to infidelity.
In the same Red Table Talk episode, Pinkett Smith skirted around the idea of infidelity, saying that there are some things that are worse than cheating in a marriage. “I'm asked a lot about, 'Is there infidelity in your relationship with Will?' And it's like, no, but there have been other betrayals of the heart that have been far bigger than I can even think in regards to an infidelity situation," Pinkett Smith said.
As we now know, the couple was separated at the time of her relationship with Alsina and they don't appear to consider it infidelity.
They stopped speaking when Pinkett Smith reconciled with Smith.
As time went on, the Smiths decided to work on their own relationship, at which point Alsina exited the situation, according to Pinkett Smith. "And as I came through and started to realize certain things about you and I, he decided to break all communication with me which was totally understandable," she said. "And I let that be and hadn't talked to him since so it is a little weird that all this stuff is coming out now since this was several [years ago]."
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.