Jordyn Woods Finally Tells Her Side of the Tristan Thompson Cheating Scandal

Jada Pinkett Smith has known Jordyn Woods for the younger star’s whole life—Woods’s father was a sound engineer on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Pinkett Smith’s husband Will Smith’s star-making vehicle; Pinkett Smith’s son, Jaden, and Woods became friends as infants, and it was through Jaden that Woods and Kylie Jenner became friends.

Given this tangled web of friendships, it makes sense that Woods would turn to Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk to air her side of the recent nasty rumors indicating that Tristan Thompson, Khloé Kardashian’s notoriously cheating baby daddy, had an affair with her. Their shared history is also how Pinkett Smith chose to open the interview, setting the scene for what was to come. “This is real grown-woman stuff,” she said.

Will Smith Skyped in from the set of Bad Boys 3, saying he wished he could be there, and before they got into it Pinkett Smith asked him if he had any fatherly advice: “I would say, take your medicine and tell your truth,” he said. “This is a part of what growing up is; this is a part of what learning is.” (This is not, in fact, part of what growing up is; this is a part of what growing up is if you’re in the orbit of the Kardashian-Jenners.) “This is a huge lesson,” Woods replied.

So, as Pinkett-Smith says, let’s start with what happened, in Woods’s words. It was a Sunday night; she went to dinner with friends, and they went to a party. “I was minding my business, dancing, drinking. Tristan was there. He was doing his own thing. That was it,” she explained. “After the club, normal L.A. culture, when you’re young, go to the bar, go to the club, it ends early, we all go to a house after. We’re not thinking about whose house or where it’s at; we’re all having fun. We’re in the moment. The group of girls that I’m with are like, you know, we’re going to go to a house.

“On the way out, they’re saying it’s Tristan’s house. I’m like, cool, that’s okay, feels like a safe environment. I’d rather it be his house than a random stranger. He didn’t even personally invite me there. It wasn’t like, ‘Come see me,’” she continued. They arrived at the party, where they continued drinking and dancing, Woods said—though she denied being aware that anyone had been told to put their phones away or that any phones were taken away, as had been reported.

“I’m not thinking I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “That’s my first step where I went wrong.” She doubled down on this: “The first step is: I should have gone home after the party. I shouldn’t have been there.” While at his home, she sat on the arm of his chair, her legs draped over the lower half of his. Still, she maintained that “never once was I giving him a lap dance, making out with him, sitting all over him,” and that the two of them never left the main party area—“we’re all in plain sight.”

Per Woods, Thompson did invite her to stay over, but she declined, heading for the door around 6 a.m. “On the way out, he did kiss me,” she said, adding that she was in denial that it had happened in the immediate aftermath. “I was in shock.” She explained that she did speak with Kardashian in the morning, assuring her that “he was chill” and denying that anything had happened. “I just knew how much turmoil was going on that I was like, let me not throw more fuel on the fire,” she said. “She doesn’t deserve this, either.”

Still, there’s one thing Woods will not claim responsibility for: “I know I’m not the reason that Tristan and Khloé are not together,” Woods said. This last point finally prompted a statement from Kardashian, who had remained relatively quiet about the whole thing, at least publicly—posting emotive quotes to her social media and liking other people’s posts but never naming Woods outright. That changed in a tweet she posted Friday, tagging Woods. “BTW, you ARE the reason my family broke up!” Kardashian wrote. In the interview, Woods said she was briefly in touch with Kardashian and Jenner after the scandal blew up, and that she had apologized to Kardashian. Kardashian tweeted that Woods went public before calling her to apologize.

After a series of commenters remarked that Kardashian was very publicly coming for Woods, instead of Thompson, Kardashian set the record straight there, too.

In the Red Table Talk interview, Woods goes on to criticize how the media has treated her story, placing the burden of responsibility on her. (Thompson has seemingly been cut out of the narrative almost entirely, while the Kardashians have unfollowed Woods en masse.) “If you’re looking for a story, I can understand why that would be the story,” she said. (Later on, she denied that it was a publicity stunt.) Pinkett Smith underlines the racial dimension that undoubtedly contributed to the way the story was spun publicly: “Black women can be the most disrespected and disregarded creatures on the earth,” she says. As Lena Dunham, remarkably, put it, “Can you imagine if who you’d made out with when you were 21 had massive public shaming consequences?”