Will Smith says he's spent most of his life feeling like he's failed 'every woman I interact with'

• Will Smith said that he's spent most of his life feeling like he's failed "every woman I interact with."
• Smith made the comment during an interview with Oprah Winfrey while promoting his new memoir.

Will Smith said that he feels like he's failed most women he's encountered in his life, and it stems from seeing his late father abuse his mother.

"I've carried, most of my life, the sense of failing every woman I interact with," Smith, 53, said in a new episode of season one of Oprah Winfrey's Apple TV+ show "The Oprah Conversation," released on Friday.

"There are two women on earth I feel like I haven't failed: my grandmother, Gigi, and Willow," the actor said, referring to Willow Smith, his daughter that he shares with wife Jada Pinkett Smith.

Smith's comments were sparked by Winfrey reading an excerpt from his upcoming self-titled memoir, in which he detailed the pivotal moment when he, then a child, witnessed his father physically abusing his mother.

"When I was 9 years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of her head so hard that she collapsed," Smith wrote, per Winfrey. "I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am today."

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When asked about how that incident influenced the person he became, Smith said that it has affected the way he interacts with women.

"For the most part of my adult life, from that moment in that bedroom, I carry a sense of not being good enough, not being able to protect the women I love, not being able to understand enough to make the right decision," the "King Richard" actor said.

He continued: "It's felt like everything that I've done has been driven by an unspoken series of apologies to my mother for my inaction."

Smith said that he still carries that trauma and guilt with him decades later. The actor and his mom never spoke about that moment until recently, when he read her that chapter of his memoir.

"I read her the chapter and she had no idea that I was carrying that around, that I had processed it that way."

Smith previously opened up about witnessing domestic abuse in his household during a takeover of an episode of Pinkett Smith's Facebook Watch series "Red Table Talk."

"A part of the whole creation of Will Smith, the joking, [the] fun, [the] silly, was to make sure that my father was entertained enough not to hurt my mother or anybody in the house," he said. "People laughing and people having fun was my defense mechanism."

Smith also said that "disapproval is the central greatest pain in my life and [especially] from women, female disapproval."

"Because of my dynamic with my mother, [because] as a little boy my father beat my mother and I couldn't protect her, female disapproval is unbearable and my body can't handle it," he said, calling it his "central wound."

The actor said that his relationship with his daughter has been a "major part of healing."

"Willow's the only female relationship I've ever had that I didn't mess up," he said. "And I'm sure there are aspects from Willow's point of view [that would make her] say, 'No, you messed some stuff up Dad.' But in my mind, I did right by her."