When Jada Pinkett Smith told The Breakfast Club that she and Will Smith were planning to sue over explosive allegations made by a former friend and assistant, her two-word response — “We suing” — became an internet sensation. The controversy began in November 2023, when Brother Bilal, who described himself as Will Smith’s close personal friend and assistant for nearly 40 years, appeared on the Unwine with Tasha K podcast and claimed he had walked in on Will Smith having sex with actor Duane Martin in a dressing room. Will Smith’s representatives called the allegations “completely fabricated and unequivocally false,” while Duane Martin’s team told TMZ the claims were so ridiculous they didn’t deserve a response. Jada dismissed the story as “nonsense,” saying Will laughed when he heard it because it was so absurd.
But Bilal did not back down. In December 2025, he filed a $3 million lawsuit against Jada, claiming that at Will Smith’s birthday party in September 2021, she had warned him he would “end up missing or catch a bullet” if he kept talking about their personal matters. In February 2026, Jada filed a motion to dismiss using California’s anti-SLAPP statute, arguing the lawsuit was designed to silence protected speech. A judge agreed, and by April 2026, Jada was seeking $49,181 in legal fees from Bilal after winning the case.
This legal battle is just one of several stories from Hollywood history involving marriages that were built on secrets the studio system demanded be hidden. In the 1940s and 1950s, major studios controlled their actors’ images completely. If an actor was discovered to be gay, they faced a career-ending choice: hide it or lose everything. The result was a pattern of pressured marriages to women who often had no idea what they were walking into.
Judy Garland was 23 when she married director Vincente Minnelli in 1945, after he directed her in Meet Me in St. Louis. What she didn’t know was that Minnelli had lived openly as a gay man in New York before the studio system buried that part of his life. According to biographer Emanuel Levy, Garland came home one day to find Minnelli in bed with their gardener, and later caught him with a bit player from MGM.
Levy reported that Garland threatened suicide after these discoveries, and writer Mark Stein said she actually attempted it once — her first known suicide attempt. By 1947, two years into the marriage, she was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. The marriage ended by 1949. Garland’s second marriage in this pattern was to Mark Herron, who also turned out to be gay.
According to biographers, Herron physically beat her before she finally left him. Two of Garland’s four husbands were gay men, and biographers noted that her deep insecurity about her looks made her vulnerable to men who seemed emotionally safe — men who gave her warmth and attention without the pressure of real physical desire. Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli walked an almost identical path, and her discovery came on her wedding night. In March 1967, Liza, then 21, married songwriter Peter Allen.
Hours after the ceremony, she walked into the honeymoon suite and found him in bed with another man. In a 1996 interview, Liza said, “I married Peter, and he didn’t tell me he was gay. Everyone knew but me. ” She added, “I found out, well, let me put it this way.
I’ll never surprise anybody coming home as long as I live. ”
The betrayal went deeper. Peter Allen was having an affair with Mark Herron — the same man who was married to Judy Garland at the time. Liza’s husband was sleeping with her mother’s husband.
Despite the wedding-night discovery, Liza stayed for eight years, hoping things would change. They didn’t. Biographer Gerald Clarke wrote that Liza and Judy shared the same deep insecurities about their bodies and looks, and both turned to men who felt emotionally safe without making them feel exposed. Both ended up in marriages that looked like love but were built on something else.
Liza later married David Gest in 2002, with Michael Jackson as best man. That marriage also ended in a lawsuit. She joked afterward, “I grabbed Michael and said, ‘Why did you let me marry this idiot? ‘”
Angela Lansbury’s story was shorter.
She was 19 in 1945 when she married Richard Cromwell, an established actor more than a decade her senior. Cromwell had a documented connection to billionaire Howard Hughes, and gay rumors had followed him around Hollywood for years, but Angela knew none of that. She later described herself as a “naive greenhorn” — mature in some ways, completely inexperienced in others, especially about sexuality. She was drawn to his personality, his sense of fun, his connections to old movie stars like Joan Crawford.
The marriage lasted less than a year. When Richard decided he was done, he didn’t sit down and talk about it. He left Angela a handwritten note that said simply: “I can’t go on. ” No explanation, no apology.
Angela later told the Daily Mail, “He was such an attractive man, so full of fun, but the marriage was probably not a good idea. ”
Richard likely married her because that’s what you did in Hollywood in 1945 if you wanted to survive. Being openly gay meant the end of your career. So you found a beautiful young actress, hoped the marriage would solve something, and when it didn’t, you wrote a note and left.
After Richard, Angela married Peter Shaw, and that marriage lasted 53 years until his death. She learned the lesson at 19 and never needed to learn it again. Fran Drescher’s story took 21 years to unravel. She and Peter Marc Jacobson met when they were 15, married in 1978, and built The Nanny together.
Their entire world — career, identity, creative life — was wrapped up in each other. Behind the scenes, Peter was struggling with something he had never fully faced. He told Fran during the marriage that he might be bisexual, but he didn’t want to pursue it. He had been born in the 1950s, when being gay wasn’t something most people knew how to navigate.
Everyone got married at 20. That was the path. There wasn’t another one. But repressing it didn’t make it disappear.
Fran has said that Peter’s inability to face who he really was made him angry, bitter, and controlling. She was living with someone who was taking out an internal war on her and didn’t even know why. In 1999, after 21 years, Fran ended the marriage. Peter didn’t want the divorce and was furious.
He moved to New York, and they didn’t speak for a full year. Then, in 2000, while wrapping the final season of The Nanny, Fran was diagnosed with uterine cancer. When Peter heard the news, everything cracked open. He burst into tears, all the anger melted, and he came back.
Two years after the divorce, Peter told her the full truth: he wasn’t bisexual, he was gay. He came out to her specifically and directly so she wouldn’t hear it from someone else. He told her, “I don’t want you thrown if someone says your husband is living as a gay man now. ”
In 2011, Fran and Peter turned their story into Happily Divorced, a sitcom based directly on their real lives — a woman whose husband comes out after 18 years of marriage.
Today, Fran calls him her gay ex-husband, and her parents still see him as a son. They’re best friends. Not a breakdown, not a lawsuit — a genuine friendship that survived the truth.
