Chris Rock says the collapse of his 20-year marriage to Malaak Compton-Rock came down to his own behavior, including heavy porn use and cheating, according to a new GQ interview.
“I was not a great husband. I watched a lot of porn. I don’t watch porn anymore. I haven’t watched porn in five, six years,” Rock said.
Rock and Compton-Rock divorced in 2016 after two decades of marriage. In the interview, Rock compared his own past behavior to a newly empowered Marvel superhero who starts out selfish and testing limits before eventually coming back to earth. “Then they start helping people,” he added.
Rock said he turned to therapy to work through the fallout. “We do have this thing where everybody’s like — they brag about their therapy. Put it this way, my personal life wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and I’ll leave it at that. And that’s my relationship with everybody. So yeah, I went in there crying like a bitch. Like: What the fuck is going on?” he said.
On the Oscars slap
Rock also briefly addressed the 2022 Oscars incident in which Will Smith slapped him on stage. “Whatever happened happened. Everybody saw it. I don’t really like talking about it,” Rock said, adding that he has no plans to appear at the Oscars or any other awards show again.
Other recent remarks
Rock has made headlines in recent months for other comments. In a September interview with Variety, he gave Donald Trump a measured compliment on one point. “I’m not a fan. But it’s weird when somebody gets one thing right, and the one thing almost clears them of all their other sins. The news is fake. He got that right,” Rock said.
In October, Rock also criticized what he called the lack of forgiveness in “woke” culture. “The problem with wokeness is we’re in the Old Testament right now,” he said. “And the Old Testament has no forgiveness. The Old Testament didn’t work. So they had to write a remix called the New Testament.”
He continued with a comparison to the Salem witch trials: “The Salem witch hunts. I’m sure the first three witches they caught were actually fucking witches. But then you open up a witch office and now you’ve got to start lying. Now you’ve gotta fucking make shit up because you’ve got overhead. You’ve got to justify the witch hunters’ fucking pensions and shit.”
