Jessica Betts (L) spoke about her relationship with Niecy Nash (R) during the interview. (Facebook)
Niecy Nash told Red Table Talk the story of how she told her children she was in a relationship with another woman for the first time.
Nash married wife Jessica Betts in September 2020, news that came as a surprise to many fans as she had two earlier marriages with men.
During an appearance on Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk, Niecy Nash opened up about how she told her children she was dating Betts, who had been a close friend for some time.
Nash told Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne ‘Gammy’ Banfield-Norris about the remarkable conversation she had with her children about her new flame.
“My daughters were like, ‘wait, what?’” Nash said.
“My youngest daughter, she reminded me, she was like, ‘Wait a minute mom, are you the same mom who was like, ‘Girl I’m strictly dickly’?”
“I was like, ‘wah, wah.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but no.’ And my son was like, ‘Wooow’,” she added, to laughter.
Niecy Nash told Red Table Talk her children had already built a relationship with Betts before they started dating because of their close friendship.
“They were able to meet her and form their own opinion about her as a person, and they all were like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s so cool, oh my god, I like her.’ They was exchanging numbers and all of this and that so they already liked her,” she said.
Niecy Nash said her mother is trying to gain ‘understanding’ about her sexuality
When asked by Jada Pinkett-Smith how her mother took the news, Niecy Nash replied: “Girl, come on now.”
She continued: “Well, it’s a little bit different because of her generation. I have never doubted for one second that my mother loves me. I feel like her fear was, how will you be received, how will I be perceived?”
Nash said she comes from “a long, long line of women” who felt that their identities were intimately connected to whether or not they were in a relationship with a man.
“My mother would jump in front of a truck for me. And because she loves me like she does, she’s trying to get this understanding.”
The Claws star opened up about falling in love with her wife Jessica Betts, saying she felt like she was in “a situation” with her “soulmate”.
She had never dated a woman or been with a woman romantically before meeting Betts, who she described as a “beautiful soul”.
“It was the first time in my life I had ever felt fully seen, and it changed me,” she said, before jokingly describing herself as “LGBTQ Niecy”.
Betts joined the interview halfway through to discuss how their burgeoning friendship turned into something more.
The couple revealed that they went to eat crabs together before going home to watch a film. It was then that Nash reached out and touched Betts on the back of her neck.
If I had to label myself in this moment, I would label myself with the term ‘free’.
That evening set the one-time friends down a romantic path, and they quickly fell in love.
When asked by Willow Smith how she feels when people describe her as a lesbian, Nash replied: “Labels are such an interesting thing.”
She went on to recount how her youngest daughter encouraged her to define her sexuality when she started dating Betts – but Nash didn’t feel that any labels suited her.
Niecy Nash told Red Table Talk she didn’t “come out” and she didn’t have a sexually repressed life before meeting Jessica.
“If I had to label myself in this moment, I would label myself with the term ‘free’,” she said.
Elsewhere in the discussion, Nash denied that she and Betts had been having an affair when she was still married to her last husband.
“There is this misinformation in the world that we became a thing on the set of a TV series that I was doing called Claws on TNT. People thought not only were we a vibe years ago, but they also thought she was the wedding singer at my wedding to my second husband,” she said.
“There was no hanky panky, no footsies, no ‘how you doing girl’, no flirting. I never cheated on my last husband, I never did that, and when we got together, it was when that was over.”