Earlier this week, Kevin Hart and wife Eniko stepped out for the first time since welcoming their son Kenzo into the world last month. They also stepped out on the red carpet as a couple for the first time since his extortion scandal in September. It was for the premiere of his Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and on the red carpet he talked about having a “tough year” and growing to be a better person from it. He touched the surface at the event, but he went very much in-depth about the cheating scandal and how it impacted his marriage during an interview on The Breakfast Club on Thursday. He admitted that the effects of being caught cheating was “a gut-punch from God” and he claims he won’t be stepping out on his wife ever again.
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It all started early in the conversation. Literally, like a minute into the start of the interview, Charlamagne pretty much asked him what he was doing in Vegas that got him caught up in quite the public mess.
“It’s beyond irresponsible,” Hart said. “Now, there is no way around it. The best way to do it is to address it right on, you got to just f–king say what it is. That’s Kevin Hart’s dumbest moment. That’s not the finest hour in my life. With that being said, you make your bed and you lay in it. You can’t even say, ‘What were you thinking?’ Because you weren’t thinking. You can’t say, ‘Kevin what were you thinking when you did it?’ That’s where the false reality comes in to a f–k up. You don’t plan to f–k up. You f–k up and then you go, ‘Oh sh-t I f–ked up.’ You don’t plan to go to jail. You do some sh-t, get locked up and then go ‘Cot damn I’m in jail.’ That was my f–k up. So I rightfully stand in front of my f–k up, hands in the air, I’m guilty. Regardless of how it happened and what was involved and the chick I can’t talk about, I’m guilty. I’m wrong. Me being wrong, I’m going to face the music. I’m going to address it. I’m going to make my wife fully aware of the situation that I’ve now put us in, and I’m hoping that she has a heart to where she can forgive me and understand that this is not going to be a reoccurring thing, and allow me to recover from my massive f–king mistake. That’s what I’m trying to do not only as a man but in teaching a lesson to my son. If you do something wrong, stand in front of your wrong sh-t. This was dad’s wrong sh-t.”
We know that Eniko has stood by her man despite everything, but how did she take it when he let her know what he’d done? When he confessed to cheating and revealed that he’d found himself being extorted? According to him, she gave him the hard time he deserved for his behavior. However, he didn’t appreciate other people bringing up his past behaviors from his first marriage as though cheating and tearing apart his family is a pattern for the comedian.
“Your woman is not a f–king rug. You’re not going to walk over your woman’s back,” he said. “Any woman is gonna…you’re going to get some sh-t. It’s a cold house! It’s a very cold house for a minute and rightfully so. There’s good days and there’s bad days. Take your humble pie and you f–king eat it. But here’s the difference though. There’s a difference between f–cking up and trying to recover from a f–k up because you realize what you almost lost. That’s the real difference here. I don’t feed into the people. Granted, I am very much in front of the world. I’m in front of everybody. I’m on a platform where I have volunteered to put my life on display, so I’m not going to complain about the negative sh-t that comes from it. You’re going to have good sh-t, you’re going to have bad sh-t. But the reality is, ‘Kevin f–cked up again! Oh my God, again!’ No I didn’t. I didn’t f–k up my first marriage. Stop it. Stop the talk. I don’t like people bringing up my first marriage. I left my first marriage. I got a divorce. I filed. I’m the one that said ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not happy.’ The infidelity and sh-t was because we were both off, we were done! So I walked away from it. People that have really followed me, you know that. That’s not f–king up. But this time, granted, I f–ked up. But in f–king this up I’m like, I got to repair this because this is what I want. This is my foundation. This is my wife. This is my kids. I worked for this. Nine plus years into this! Cot damn! Alright babe, this is bad on all accounts, but I’m going to work to fix it. That’s the difference. When you want to work to fix it and you want to fight for what you have.”
They’ve made progress and found themselves back on good terms, but Hart said there are days where he can still feel her anger.
“You got to be patient and literally give your woman the time that she needs to recover from that and afterwards, still know that sh-t’s gonna come back up,” he said. “There’s days where we ride in the car and I catch her staring at the side of my face. I act like I don’t feel it. I just act like I don’t feel it and just keep driving. But I know. The difference is, I love my f–cking wife. My wife know my heart. You know who your man is and what I stand for. You know the foundation we’ve built. At the end of the day, the negativity that comes from outside, it comes from a place of people being unhappy. Unhappy people like to see other people unhappy. So when you get people throwing negativity at you, negativity loves company.”
The hardest part though, out of all the public embarrassment and criticism though, was for Kevin to watch people take enjoyment in Eniko’s pain. Prior to the incident, she was criticized for saying that she was never the mistress in Kevin’s marriage to ex-wife Torrei, and that Torrei tried to say she was so she could be a victim. Those comments led people to say that what happened to her was karma for not being more sympathetic about the role they believed she played in the ending of his first marriage.
“When people try to put the sh-t on her of ‘karma’ or ‘homewrecker’ that’s karma! That’s the sh-t that almost got under my skin and I had to f–king breathe for a minute,” he said. “That title was put on her by my ex out of anger out of whatever. You can go look up anything in history, you’ve never heard me bad talk my ex. Never. I don’t do it, it’s not my character. But in her most emotional time, she lashed out against Eniko. So those titles of homewrecker, mistress, all that was put out and portrayed from an image that wasn’t true. When people try to run with that, that woman didn’t have nothing to do with my marriage. She didn’t have nothing to do with me leaving my wife. Nothing! I’m separated. You have to be legally separated to file for a divorce. I was legally separated for a year before I even filed for divorce. I had tons of women during that time. Me and my wife, we stuck. So the image that was intended to be put on this woman’s back wasn’t a fair image and that’s what I don’t like. I don’t like that, because she’s not that and she’s nothing near that. And the fact that I have a prize in finding me what I feel is a f–king amazing woman, a woman that I’m lucky to call my wife, lucky to have put up with the sh-t that she put up with and still say that I’m her husband, that’s an amazing quality that she has that I bow down to. So the fact that people try to take that quality and diminish her character, that’s where I almost lost it for a second.”
And that’s why Kevin says he didn’t go into hiding after the scandal. He continued posting pictures of himself, shooting his films and going out with his wife so that any criticism or lashings people wanted to give, he would take the brunt of. He wanted to own it, so he did. Even at Eniko’s baby shower.
“I’m the one who had to walk into a f–king baby shower — you talk about some sh-t? You talk about the cot damn lava tank? The baby shower!” he said. “You talking about the women lined up on the wall that I know that are in my house on a regular basis. You got to walk through that sh-t with the Denzel in Glory when the motherf–ker knew that sh-t was coming? I faced that. Rightfully so. I didn’t try to run away from that. ‘Babe I’m gonna go. I’m going to face the music from everybody. I’m going to stand in front of it. I’m going to take that because I need to take as much of this off of you because you’re not wrong. I’m wrong.'”
The conversation about his infidelity is the largest part of the interview, starting from the beginning and going for about 40-45 minutes of the 56-minute interview, meant to promote Jumanji and his Saturday Night Live hosting gig this Saturday. Check out everything Kevin had to say, in his own voice, below:
