Jada Pinkett Smith asked a Los Angeles court to order a mental health exam for the man suing her for $3 million, tying the request to his own emotional-distress claims.
Pinkett Smith moved for an extensive psychiatric evaluation of plaintiff Bilaal Salaam after he accused her of threats, pressure, and a campaign of retaliation that he says wrecked his health and forced him overseas. She denies the claims. The Daily Mail reviewed the previously filed complaint and reported the defense motion seeking the exam.
Salaam, a musician who says he was friendly with Will Smith for four decades, filed the intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress suit in November 2025. He wants $3 million. Pinkett Smith’s filing argues he put his own mental and emotional condition at the center of the case and must prove it.
The defense request describes a structured evaluation lasting about five to six hours, not counting breaks. It would include a psychiatric interview, a mental status examination, and standardized psychological testing.
Pinkett Smith’s motion states the exam “will not include any physical examination or any painful, protracted, or intrusive procedure.” The stated rationale is blunt: Salaam “has made his mental and emotional condition the centerpiece of this case.”
"has made his mental and emotional condition the centerpiece of this case"
That line tracks the damages story Salaam told the court. He claims stress left him with a 100-pound weight gain, high blood pressure, and Type 2 diabetes. He also says he spent a year and a half living outside the United States because he feared for his safety, lost day-to-day time with his children, and saw a long-term romantic relationship end.
Salaam’s complaint reaches back to Will Smith’s March 27, 2022, attack on Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Rock had joked about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, a look tied to her alopecia, riffing on the 1997 film G.I. Jane:
"Jada, I love you, G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait to see it!"
Smith walked onstage, slapped Rock, and shouted at him to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth. He later apologized in an online clip and on other occasions, resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and faced a 10-year Oscars ban. In the July 2022 video he said his spouse “had nothing to do with” the attack and that he acted “from my own experiences, from my history with Chris.”
Salaam claims the friendship soured when he refused to provide “crisis management” services for Will Smith after that night. He says he turned the work down because he believed he would be asked to “perform tasks he believed were illegal, unethical, or morally compromising.”
After that refusal, he alleges, the Smith family launched a “retaliatory campaign.” He says the pressure rose again when word spread that he was writing a memoir.
The complaint describes a September 2021 gathering at the Regency Calabasas Common theater in Calabasas, California, for Will Smith’s 53rd birthday. Salaam alleges Pinkett Smith approached him, became “verbally aggressive,” and warned that he could wind up “missing, or catch a bullet” if he kept talking about the family’s “personal business.”
He further claims she was flanked by an entourage of seven people and “demanded” he sign a non-disclosure agreement covering that exchange. In a separate claim, he says an associate of Pinkett Smith later urged him to “end this feud before you get physically hurt” after learning about a possible book.
Pinkett Smith, 55, married Will Smith on New Year’s Eve 1997. She has denied the allegations against her. The Daily Mail reported it sought comment from representatives for both sides.
The motion does not decide who is telling the truth about the theater confrontation, the alleged NDA demand, or the claimed overseas exile. It asks the Los Angeles court to test the mental-health narrative Salaam himself advanced while seeking multimillion-dollar damages.
Civil plaintiffs who put emotional injury at the heart of a case often face discovery into that same condition. Pinkett Smith’s lawyers are using that basic rule. Salaam’s filing paints a picture of fear, illness, family separation, and career fallout. The defense response is to make him sit for a full clinical work-up on those points.
Key dates still sit in the dark. The complaint is pegged to November 2025. The exact filing date of the mental-exam motion is not laid out in the reporting, and no ruling on the request is described. Case numbers and the full docket caption are likewise not detailed in the available account.
Will Smith’s own public record on the Oscars night remains separate from the civil claims against his wife. He apologized to Rock in the July 2022 clip, said he had reached out, and added that Rock was “not ready to talk.” He also apologized to his children and family “for the heat that I’ve brought on all of us.” None of that resolves Salaam’s suit.
For now the live fight is narrower and more procedural: a defendant accused of threats and emotional abuse is asking a court to put the plaintiff’s stated mental condition under standardized testing before the damages story hardens into a payday.
When a plaintiff builds a multimillion-dollar case on claimed psychological collapse, a court-ordered exam is not cruelty, it is the minimum check on whether the injury story can survive daylight.
