Hopefully this news finds you better than this email found Jennette McCurdy. In a new episode of the Pinkett-Smith family’s warts-and-all Facebook series Red Table Talk, the I’m Glad My Mom Died author read a disturbing — and, to be frank, wild — email her late mom sent to her after McCurdy and her then-boyfriend went to Hawaii in 2012, a year before her mother’s death. Throughout the talk, McCurdy remained consistent in the description of her mother she gave in her runaway best seller, a portrait of her late mother that includes the abuse and exploitation of the former iCarly star.
“I am so disappointed in you,” her mom wrote in the email. “You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT, a FLOOZY, ALL USED UP. And to think — you wasted it on that hideous OGRE of a man.” Jada Pinkett-Smith, Willow Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris’s aghast expressions are a stand-in for our own. In the email, her mother went on to call McCurdy a “LIAR, CONNIVING, EVIL,” and shamed her daughter for looking “pudgier” because she was “EATING” her guilt. The email ends with gross sexual imagery (“Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. SICK.”) and more name-calling (“UGLY MONSTER”). She claimed that her sons joined her in disowning McCurdy and signed the letter “Mom (or should I say DEB since I am no longer your mother).” The postscript was especially egregious: “P.S. Send money for a new fridge. Ours broke.”
The episode wasn’t without tenderness. In one moment, McCurdy described how “very grateful” she is for her friendship with co-star Miranda Cosgrove, one that provided her a lot of comfort and was “hugely healing” to her concept of relationships with women. The women of the Red Table also prepared messages of love and encouragement for McCurdy. In a series of warm videos, Bella Thorne, Alyson Stoner, David Archuleta, Mayim Bialik, Nia Dennis, Abby Jasmine, Rosie McClelland, and Violet Benson told the memoirist how proud they are of her. “And I hope that tonight you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror dramatically and say, ‘I know who I am in truth. I am free. I am free. I am free,’” Stoner said. Free from circling back on that email, at least.