Leslie Jones Says Chris Rock Needed Counseling After ‘The Slap’

Will Smith’s open-handed slap wasn’t the worst of it for Oscar host Chris Rock, fellow SNL star Leslie Jones told People. “That s--t was humiliating. It really affected him,” she explained. “People need to understand his daughters, his parents, saw that. He had to go to counseling with his daughters.”

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Whether or not Jones was the right person to reveal Rock’s need for therapy — maybe he should have been the one to tell us? — she clearly has her old friend’s best interests at heart. “It made me so infuriated,” she said. “You don’t know that I was going to jump in my car and roll up there. I was so f---ing mad on so many levels.”

Jones wishes both Rock and Smith had handled things differently. Should Rock have told a different joke? No, according to Jones — what he should have done was sprint the hell out of there. “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!’”

“Chris Rock did a f---ing joke,” Jones argued. If Smith was angry, there were other places and times to address it. “I know Will, too,” she continued. “I was like, ‘You couldn’t handle that s--t afterwards. This is the Oscars. The whole world is watching.’”

Once the heat-of-the-moment slap was over, Jones said, Smith still could have fixed things — or at least made them better. When Smith came out to accept his Oscar, she said, he could have said something like, “I shouldn’t have did that. Bring Chris out. I cannot accept the Oscar right now because that was f---ing wrong.”

Rock didn’t have much public comment after the debacle, keeping his powder dry until he unloaded on Smith in this year’s Selective Outrage special. To Jones, that was the perfect way for Rock to bring the pain — and deal with his own. “Everybody got pissed off about him doing a special. That’s what comedians do,” she explained. “Instead of us going crazy we f---ing go talk about it on the f---ing stage. Thank God we’ve got the stage.”