Tyrese Gibson says depression medication led him to a false money claim involving Will Smith. Tyrese announced in 2017 that the Oscar-winning actor had given him $5 million to cover legal fees in a custody battle he was having with his ex-wife Norma Mitchell, prompting controversy. “My wife kept the news away from me ’cause I’ve been on with lawyers all day, but our family and our sister Jada Pinkett-Smith and my brother Will Smith just sent us 5 million dollars to help keep us afloat. … The Smiths and their whole family has always shown up for The Gibson’s,” he wrote on Instagram at the time. “Uncle Will you’re an uncle for real.” A source close to the Smiths immediately denied these claims to TMZ but added that Will and Jada were concerned about Tyrese’s mental state. Now, in the wake of the incident, he has acknowledged that those concerns were justified.
On this week’s episode of Sway’s Universe, the 44-year-old revisited the issue when he honestly assessed his mental health and his experiences with psychiatric medication during a candid interview. “Will Smith is gonna give me $5 million? I never even talked to Will Smith. I was out of my mind,” Tyrese said around the 29:10 minute mark in the video below. The Fast X star claimed he made the assertion while taking the medication Rexulti, which is intended to treat depressive disorders. Tyrese said he was prescribed the drug after losing custody of his daughter Shayla, who he shares with Mitchell. After the mother accused him of physically abusing Shayla in late 2017, she was given custody of the child. The case was dropped weeks after Tyrese denied the accusations.
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“I travel, and I move all the time. I’m used to being away from my baby,” he told Sway. “But to take my baby away for 100 days? Oh, I was f— miserable. So then the psychiatrist says, ‘Here’s some psych meds that’ll help stabilize your mood because you barely sleep, you’re stressed the f— out, and your first-born was taken away from you…’ They gave me these psych meds called Rexulti. F— me up.” In his interview with Sway, he admitted to abstaining from illicit drugs, which may explain how he reacted to the medication badly. “You put some shit like Rexulti in my system, it’s going to have the worst adverse effects ever,” he said. “So I’m online talking about Will Smith giving me $5 million. I never talked to Will Smith, and I still haven’t recovered from the damage that I did to him and his family. They didn’t deserve them phone calls.”
