Will Smith opens up about strained ties with ‘violent’ dad

Hollywood superstar Will Smith is opening up about how he saw his mother getting abused at the hands of his violent dad. 

Smith wrote in his new memoir, Me, about how he wanted to kill his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr. to avenge his mother, Caroline Bright, for all the ways he abused her.

“My father was violent, but he was also at every game, play, and recital. He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies. He listened to every record. He visited every studio,” he wrote.

“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood.” The two eventually split when Smith was a teen and divorced in 2000.”

“One night, as I delicately wheeled him from his bedroom toward the bathroom, a darkness arose within me. The path between the two rooms goes past the top of the stairs. As a child I’d always told myself that I would one day avenge my mother,” he shared.

“I paused at the top of the stairs. I could shove him down, and easily get away with it. As the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom,” he added.

“There is nothing that you can receive from the material world that will create inner peace or fulfillment. In the end, it will not matter one single bit how well [people] loved you — you will only gain ‘the Smile’ based on how well you loved them,” he wrote about his relationship with his father who died in 2016.