Will Smith’s former friend, Bilaal Salaam, is begging a judge not to make him pay five-figure attorney’s fees he owes to Jada Pinkett Smith, claiming he is broke and homeless.
In court documents obtained by TMZ, Salaam asked the court to reconsider a decision ordering him to pay Pinkett Smith more than $32,000 in attorney’s fees after she convinced the court to dismiss his claims of emotional distress.
Salaam claims he is “certified homeless,” receives welfare benefits, and cannot pay the judgment. He agrees he owes Jada legal fees but asked that the amount be reduced greatly or that some sort of payment plan be arranged due to his situation.
As TMZ first reported, Salaam sued Pinkett Smith for allegedly having friends threaten him after he refused to help Will clean up the mess over the infamous Chris Rock slap at the Oscars. Pinkett Smith denied all claims of wrongdoing.
In his own lawsuit last year, Salaam accused Pinkett Smith of threatening him if he continued “telling her personal business.” He alleged that she launched a “smear campaign” against him after he refused to participate in “crisis management” PR for Smith’s Oscars altercation with Chris Rock.
In a statement last December after filing his suit, Salaam claimed, “Ms. Pinkett Smith, along with her close associates, including her husband, Will Smith, orchestrated a coordinated smear campaign intended to silence me, damage my credibility, and retaliate against me for speaking truthfully.”
In his complaint, Salaam called himself Smith’s “best friend” of four decades and claimed that at a private birthday party for the actor in Calabasas, California, Pinkett Smith threatened that “if he continued ‘telling her personal business,’ he would ‘end up missing or catch a bullet,’ and demanded he sign a non-disclosure agreement ‘or else.'”
The complaint also claimed that Pinkett Smith was flanked by approximately seven of her associates during the alleged confrontation, and that one of those associates allegedly followed him to his car while continuing to issue verbal threats.
Salaam is still seeking $3 million in damages, along with interest, costs of the suit, and a public retraction of Pinkett Smith’s statements. However, at the hearing this week, the judge denied his immediate request to bring the matter to trial, ordering both him and Pinkett Smith to first attend a case management conference in August.
The legal battle stems from a 2023 podcast interview in which Salaam publicly claimed that he witnessed Will Smith engaged in a sexual act with actor Duane Martin years ago. Both Smith and Pinkett Smith denied the claim.
