Few relationships in Tupac’s life have been misread as often as his bond with Jada Pinkett. Fans, filmmakers and gossip columns turned it into a love story. Jada Pinkett Smith herself describes something else: a soul connection without romance.
Baltimore, 1986
The two met in 1986 at the Baltimore School for the Arts, as sophomores. They clicked instantly, Jada has said, as friends: they were “pretty much inseparable.” In 2014 she told The Arsenio Hall Show that Tupac was one of the first men in her life who saw her beauty, her talent and her intelligence without it being about sex.
At the school Tupac rapped under the name MC New York and started the group Born Busy with friends.
Friendship, not romance
Jada has denied again and again that there was anything more. She told radio host Howard Stern in 2015 there was “no physical chemistry between us at all”; an attempt at a kiss was simply “disgusting.” In the 2003 documentary Tupac: Resurrection she called him “one of my best friends. He was like a brother.” Tupac said of her:
“Jada is my heart. She will be my friend for my whole life.”
In her 2023 memoir Worthy and in interviews around it, she said that Tupac proposed to her in 1995 while he was locked up on Rikers Island. She said no because the chemistry wasn’t there. In her view he “needed a rock”and would have married her and divorced her as soon as he got out. She calls him her soulmate.
Opening doors for each other
The two friends helped each other. On Tupac’s recommendation Jada landed her first film role, in Menace II Society (1993); in turn, she got him a guest spot on the sitcom A Different World that same year. She appeared in his videos for Keep Ya Head Up (1993) and Temptations (1995).
In early 1995, while Tupac was waiting on the appeal of his conviction, Jada put $100,000 toward his bail, Jet magazine reported. In his VIBE interview from prison, Tupac named her among the few people who stood by him. After his release in October 1995 the two fell out: she did not agree with the direction he was taking. According to Biography.com, she had planned to visit him on the day he died. “That was a huge loss in my life,” she said later.
Poems
Tupac wrote her many letters and poems. One of them, Jada, appeared in 1999 in the poetry collection The Rose That Grew from Concrete; it closes with the lines “u R my Heart in Human Form / a Friend I could never replace”. For what would have been his 50th birthday in 2021, Jada released a previously unknown poem, Lost Soulz, which she believes he wrote in jail.
A theatre for Tupac
In 2006 Jada Pinkett Smith gave her old school $1 million through her family foundation and asked that its new theatre be named after her classmate Tupac Shakur. It was reported in 2007. She has been married to actor Will Smith since 1997; in 2023 she revealed that the two have lived separately since 2016.
One frequently repeated item is not carried over: that Jada told a May issue of Essence she would most like to have dinner with Tupac. The quote could not be traced to any specific issue.