Everybody knows (and still talks about) the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes divorce, since that is the failed relationship that most recently covered every tabloid in the country and required Holmes’ dad to pull some real Mission Impossible maneuvers to get her out of the marriage. But before TomKat there was a worse breakup, and one that might have had even more to do with the influence of Scientology on a relationship: that of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Anybody who pays attention to Hollywood developments, even if they aren’t interested in the rise and fall of couples that grace the gossip pages, probably knows about the fallout of the Kidman/Cruise breakup. Obviously they both went on to other marriages and happiness, but the role of Scientology was widely discussed at the time of their divorce and now it is being analyzed once again.
A report by the Sydney Morning Herald details a new investigation that supposedly reveals all of the suspicious activity carried out by David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology as a whole that led to the end of Cruise’s second marriage. As many fans remember, Cruise was married to his first wife (Mimi Rogers) when he met Kidman on the set of Days of Thunder. Nobody could blame Nicole for falling for Tom, it’s surely difficult to resist Tom Cruise dressed as a racecar driver after all. However, this report supposes that Miscavige actively encouraged Cruise to cheat on his then-wife with his new co-star. Already, not a great look for the Church.
The report goes further into Cruise and Kidman’s private life while in the Church, from how the organization handled Kidman’s father being a psychologist (AKA a “Suppressive Person”), to the Church using “millions of man hours” of low-paid or unpaid labor to make them comfortable in their new home at the church’s base – including a private tennis court and full-on rose garden. But when Kidman tried to take Tom away from the Church, based on reasons that have only become more apparent as the years have gone on and reporting on Scientology has only grown more complete, things predictably went South. Once the couple bought a house in Australia and started filming movies away from the US (like the infamous Eyes Wide Shut they acted in together), apparently Miscavige had had enough of Nicole and decided to end their marriage.
The report alleges that the Church slipped negative comments about Nicole into “audits” and eventually tapped the phones in their Los Angeles home. What’s craziest is possibly that the powers that be in Scientology tapped Nicole’s phones from the main phone company, not even just by using the already-creepy-but-less-horrifying method of adding bugs to the house’s phone line only. Not to mention the disparagement of Nicole to her children after the divorce was complete (they won’t speak to her to this day).
The details in this report are astonishing, but would honestly be more so if we didn’t already know so much about how Scientology operates, intimidates, and manipulates their members. As this proves, their star members are reportedly no less susceptible to manipulation than any average Joe.
