Carmelo Anthony Racquel Smith dating rumours exploded on Thursday, 11 June 2026, after the model posted Instagram photos and videos showing the retired NBA star on a luxury Saint-Tropez getaway with her.
The pair appear together across a carousel of holiday content from the French Riviera, including an elevator clip that fans immediately read as a soft launch, as reported by TMZ.
Neither has publicly confirmed a relationship, but the optics are doing plenty of talking.
How Carmelo Anthony and Racquel Smith went public
The moment everyone is screenshotting sits on the fifth slide of Smith’s carousel.
She films herself waiting for an elevator, phone flash on, while a grinning Anthony strolls into frame behind her, and the two walk in together like it is the most natural thing in the world.
Other clips show the pair coordinating in all-black outfits during an evening on the water, the kind of matching-fit energy that rarely happens by accident.
Smith stitched the post together with inspirational musings rather than any direct announcement about her travel companion.
“We are not here long enough to be living unhappy,” Smith wrote in the caption accompanying the getaway content, which is about as close to a statement as either party has come, and followers have been dissecting every word of it since the post went live.
Who is Racquel Smith?
Racquel is the widow of former New Orleans Saints defensive end Will Smith, who was shot and killed in a road-rage incident in New Orleans in April 2016.
She was wounded in the same shooting and has spent the years since raising their children largely out of the spotlight.
Anthony, meanwhile, has reinvented himself as a broadcaster since retiring from the NBA, and his romantic life has stayed tabloid catnip ever since his divorce from television personality La La Anthony.
A mystery-woman sighting at a Bad Bunny concert last year had fans speculating long before this trip.
The Saint-Tropez post finally puts a name and a face to the chatter, and social media wasted no time connecting the basketball royalty dots between the two, with commentary flooding the replies within hours of the carousel landing on timelines everywhere.
So what happens next? Unless one of them speaks up, the confirmation will come the way it always does in 2026, through another tagged location, another shared sunset and another carousel slide.
Both have lived very public lives touched by very public loss, which means an official confirmation would instantly become one of the biggest celebrity stories of the year.
Watch Smith’s Instagram grid closely.
