Will Smith’s Former Friend Is Trying To Add Him As A Defendant After Losing Most Of His Case Against Jada

Bilaal Salaam, the man who has spent years describing himself as a longtime member of Will Smith’s inner circle, filed court documents laying out his plan to add Will as a co-defendant in the lawsuit he already has running against Jada Pinkett-Smith. He is not opening a separate case. He is trying to expand the one he has, at a point when that case has gone badly for him at nearly every turn.
The suit started in December 2025, when Salaam filed a $3 million complaint against Jada for intentional infliction of emotional distress. His account centers on September 2021 and a confrontation he says happened in the lobby of the Regency Calabasas Commons, around the time of Will’s 53rd birthday. Salaam alleges Jada told him that if he continued telling her personal business, he would end up missing or catch a bullet, and that she then demanded he sign a nondisclosure agreement or else. A nondisclosure agreement is a contract that legally bars someone from discussing specified information publicly.

 

He also alleges Jada and people around her ran a campaign of harassment against him for two reasons. The first is that he refused to help clean up the fallout from the 2022 Oscars, when Will slapped Chris Rock on live television. The second is that she found out he was writing a memoir covering the Smith family. Jada has denied all of it. Her legal team responded with an anti-SLAPP motion, which is a California procedure designed to get lawsuits thrown out quickly when they appear intended to punish someone for speaking publicly rather than to address a real legal injury. Her position has been that Salaam’s claims are part of an ongoing public campaign against her and her family. The court has largely gone her way. Salaam sought a restraining order against Jada and did not get it, with the court finding he had not presented enough evidence. A judge struck a significant portion of his complaint. In May, Jada won an order requiring Salaam to pay just under $33,000 in attorney fees and legal costs, and she is currently pursuing that money. Salaam is representing himself throughout, without a lawyer.

 

This is also not his first attempt to pull Will into it. On July 7, he emailed Jada’s attorney asking to depose Will, meaning question him under oath as part of the case. Her team shut it down flatly, replying that there was nothing to meet and confer about, and pointing out that Will is not a defendant in the lawsuit and had never been served with a subpoena. Adding Will as a co-defendant would solve that problem for Salaam. If Will is a party to the case, the deposition question changes entirely.
Meanwhile, Salaam is defending himself on a second front from a different member of the family. In May, Sheree Zampino, Will’s first wife and the mother of his son Trey, sued Salaam for $1 million alleging slander and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Her complaint centers on statements he made during an appearance on Tasha K’s YouTube show, where he made degrading claims about her personal life. Zampino disputes the claims entirely.

 

So the current picture is one man, without counsel, litigating against Jada Pinkett Smith, being sued separately by Sheree Zampino, owing roughly $33,000 in fees from a case he has mostly lost, and now moving to bring Will Smith into it as a defendant. Whether the court allows the amendment is a separate question from whether he filed the paperwork. Adding a defendant to an existing lawsuit typically requires a judge’s approval, and judges are less inclined to grant it when the underlying claims have already been narrowed. Nothing has been decided yet. Neither Will nor Jada has commented publicly on the filing.