Jada Pinkett Smith’s long-running legal tangle with Bilaal Salaam, the Los Angeles musician and self-described longtime friend of Will Smith, has taken another twist, and this one is less about damages and more about whether Jada will actually have to sit down and answer questions under oath.
According to new court documents obtained by TMZ, Salaam is asking a judge to force Jada to appear for a deposition within 30 days, claiming she was supposed to show up on May 20 and simply didn’t.
It’s the kind of procedural move that sounds dry on paper but carries real weight in a case that has already produced a dismissed restraining order, a partially gutted lawsuit, and a $32,836 attorney fee bill that Salaam is still trying to wriggle out of.
For two people who reportedly go back decades, this is about as far from friendship as it gets, and the filings keep piling up like receipts nobody wants to pay.
What Salaam Actually Wants to Ask Her
Salaam’s camp says the questions he wants to put to Jada fall into two buckets: communications she allegedly had about him, and whether she authorized or had any hand in threats he claims were made against him.
Those threats, as he’s told it in filings dating back to his original December 2025 lawsuit, stem from two flashpoints.
The first is the aftermath of the 2022 Oscars, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage and, according to Salaam, the Smith camp leaned on him to help with damage control, something he says he declined to do.
The second is his decision to write a memoir about his time with the Smith family, which he alleges triggered a wave of intimidation once word got out.
Salaam has claimed in his complaint that Jada told him he’d “end up missing or catch a bullet” if he kept discussing her personal business, a claim she has never conceded and one that remains, at this stage, exactly that: an allegation attached to a lawsuit that has already lost several of its legs in court.
Jada, for her part, has been consistent in her public denials long before any of this reached a courtroom.
Back in 2023, well before Salaam’s lawsuit was even filed, she addressed his claims directly during an appearance on The Breakfast Club, dismissing them as “nonsense” and indicating that she and Will were prepared to pursue legal action over what he’d been saying publicly.
That interview has effectively become the throughline of her defense ever since, cited repeatedly in her legal team’s filings as evidence that her position hasn’t shifted an inch since Salaam first went public.
It’s worth sitting with that consistency for a second, because in celebrity legal disputes it’s rare to see someone’s public statements and their courtroom strategy line up this cleanly for years running.
Here’s where the story gets a little more layered than a simple “he wants to depose her” headline suggests. Salaam’s own filing includes a letter from Jada’s legal team, and it reveals that her side isn’t outright refusing to make her available.
Instead, her attorneys argue she already sat for a deposition in a separate legal proceeding that Salaam brought against her, and since this lawsuit overlaps heavily with that earlier case, any additional questioning should be capped at one hour.
That’s a meaningfully different posture than stonewalling entirely, and it complicates the narrative that Jada is simply dodging accountability.
It reads more like a negotiation over scope than a flat refusal, which matters because a judge weighing this motion will likely care a great deal about whether Jada’s team offered a reasonable alternative rather than just ignoring the request.
The Case Has Already Gone Sideways for Salaam More Than Once
To understand why this deposition fight matters, it helps to rewind through how lopsided this legal battle has been so far.
Salaam originally filed a $3 million lawsuit in December 2025, accusing Jada of confronting and threatening him during a 2021 encounter at the Regency Calabasas Commons.
He followed that up with a request for a restraining order, asking a judge to keep Jada at least 100 yards away from him, citing the same incident and ongoing safety concerns.
That petition collapsed in February 2026 when the judge found insufficient evidence to support it, handing Jada an early win. She then went further, filing a motion under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, a law designed to shut down lawsuits that target free speech, and her team succeeded in getting the bulk of Salaam’s claims tossed.
Her lawyers didn’t hold back in that filing either, calling his allegations “false, uncorroborated, and nonsense,” and framing the entire suit as part of a pattern of harassment aimed at generating attention rather than pursuing legitimate legal relief.
Winning the anti-SLAPP motion came with a financial reward, too. Jada’s team asked the court to make Salaam cover her attorney’s fees, initially requesting just over $49,000 for what her motion described as “her reasonable attorneys’ fees incurred.”
The judge trimmed that number to $32,836, finding that some of her lawyers billed at unusually high hourly rates and spent more time than necessary drafting motions given their experience.
Salaam didn’t take that news well. He later told the court he’s “certified homeless,” living on welfare benefits, and asked for the payment to be reduced or restructured into something manageable.
The court denied the request outright, largely because he raised his financial hardship argument for the first time at the hearing rather than including it in earlier filings, a procedural misstep that left him with no wiggle room.
So where does that leave things now? Salaam is still sitting on a $3 million claim that survived the anti-SLAPP cut, and he clearly believes Jada’s testimony is the key to proving whatever remains of his case.
Whether a judge agrees that a full deposition is warranted or sides with Jada’s team’s push to limit any additional questioning to a single hour is still an open question.
Nothing in the latest filing has been ruled on yet, and it’s worth being clear about that, because it’s easy for a headline like “Salaam wants to grill Jada” to read as though a courtroom showdown is imminent when really this is just one side asking a judge for permission to schedule something.
A case management conference is already on the books, and until a judge weighs in on the deposition request, this remains exactly what it’s been for months: a slow, expensive, filing-heavy standoff between two people whose relationship apparently soured somewhere around a slap heard around the world.
What’s clear is that neither side is backing down easily. Jada has spent the better part of a year methodically dismantling Salaam’s case piece by piece, while Salaam keeps finding new procedural angles to keep the fight alive, even as his financial situation seems to be working against him.
Whether this latest deposition push actually gets him closer to proving his remaining claims, or just adds another line item to a legal bill he’s already struggling to pay, is something only the next few court dates will tell.
