Will Smith Once Had to Pay His Own Mother $140,000 in Child Support for Himself and His Siblings
Will Smith divorced his first wife Sheree Zampino. They have a son, Trey, together and presumably Smith pays all his required child support. We haven’t heard otherwise. But, that’s not the big child support story. The big child support story in Smith’s life is that he paid his own mother child support, $140,000 in total.
Smith writes about the incident in his new autobiography, Will. It happened in 1998, after which point Smith had already starred in the blockbusters Independence Day and Men in Black.
How child support came up after Will Smith was an adult
Smith referred to his parents as Daddio and Mom-Mom. They separated when he was still a teenager. In 1997, Mom-Mom was moving and found her unfiled divorce papers. So, she filed them to make things official.
“Mom-Mom’s filing of the divorce papers triggered the full weight of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” he wrote. “Daddio had taken care of us, but he had never officially paid child support, a fact that came to light upon the basic review of the paperwork. Mom-Mom was informed that with interest and penalties, Daddio owed her close to $140,000. And she wanted every single dime of her money. Under Pennsylvania law, if he refused, or couldn’t afford to pay, he could be arrested, jailed, and have his assets seized by the sheriff.”
Will Smith’s father didn’t want to sign the divorce papers
Daddio called a family meeting. Smith was on the set of Wild Wild West, which came out in 1999 so this was around 1998. For some reason, Daddio didn’t want to sign the divorce papers, “AND THROW IT ALL AWAY, JUST LIKE THAT?” as Smith recalled.
Neither Smith nor his siblings could understand why their father was refusing to sign.
“To this day, I have no idea what Daddio was thinking,” he wrote. “Maybe there was some bizarre finality in the signature that was too much to bear; maybe it was why he never signed them in the first place. But the first domino had been tipped.”
Mom-Mom didn’t want her rich son bailing her ex out
Mom-Mom told her son not to help Daddio but he was the only rapper turned actor turned movie star in the family. He had the resources to resolve all this, as improbable as it was.
“I was stuck,” he wrote. “Daddio didn’t have $140,000 and Mom-Mom was unwilling to make any concession whatsoever. And there was no version of me letting my father go to jail. So, in an underhanded, Ponzi-style, backdoor deal, I transferred $140,000 into Daddio’s account; he immediately cut a check to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the full amount, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania made Mom-Mom whole on back child support.”
At least Smith has a sense of humor about it now.
“This made me the first person in the history of Pennsylvania to pay their own damn child support,” he wrote. “(Note: When Mom-Mom found out that I had paid Daddio’s debt, she was pissed. And immediately wrote me a check for $140,000, making her the first person in the history of Pennsylvania to pay her own child back the back child support that they had paid for themselves.)”
