Chris Rock went to counseling after his now infamous Oscars moment.
According to his close friend and fellow comedian Leslie Jones, the comedian/actor and his family suffered deeply after the incident.
During an interview with PEOPLE, Jones told the outlet that the “humiliating” incident, in which actor Will Smith stormed on stage and slapped Rock after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s bald head, “really affected him. People need to understand his daughters; his parents saw that. He had to go to counseling with his daughters.”
“For a long a** time, I was just mad. Chris Rock did a f***** joke. I know Will, too… I was like, you couldn’t handle that shit afterwards. This is the Oscars. The whole world is watching,” Jones said. “I was like, ‘Chris, when he got up, why didn’t you run?’ I would’ve been running around that stage like, ‘Will, calm down. Jada, call your man!’”
“It made me so infuriated,” Jones told the publication. “You don’t know that I was going to jump in my car and roll up there. I was so f–cking mad on so many levels.”
Rock has since been able to move on from the incident and even makes jokes about it.
“Everybody got pissed off about him doing a special. That’s what comedians do. Instead of us going crazy, we fucking go talk about it on the fucking stage. Thank God we’ve got the stage,” she said
As for Smith, Jones said she wished he had handled the entire situation differently, especially in the aftermath. “He could have still fixed it,” Jones said, adding that the actor could have addressed the incident later on during his Best Actor acceptance speech, saying, “‘I shouldn’t have did that. Bring Chris Out. I can not accept the Oscar right now because that was f–king wrong.”
