WASHINGTON: Hollywood star Will Smith recently revealed that he has suffered from guilt because he believes as a child he failed to protect his mother when his father beat her to the ground in the family's Philadelphia home.
According to Page Six, the 'Men in Black' actor recounted the domestic abuse in his new book 'Will' and called the traumatizing attack a defining moment, as per an excerpt of the book published in a news outlet.
The excerpt read, "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."
Smith's father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., and mother Caroline Bright eventually split when Smith was a teen and divorced in 2000, but the effects of that one night at their home have lingered on.
"Within everything that I have done since then, the awards and accolades, the spotlights and the attention, the characters and the laughs, there has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day. For failing her in that moment. For failing to stand up to my father. For being a coward," Smith said.
The actor reflected on his indecision to intervene in his deeply emotional analysis of the incident, "What you have come to understand as 'Will Smith', the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction, a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect myself. To hide myself from the world. To hide the coward."
"How we decide to respond to our fears, that is the person we become," he wrote.
Smith's father died in 2016. The actor has recently been transparent with his personal life and some of the struggles he's endured.