The Mud Slinging: Is Tom Cruise Controlling? Is Katie Holmes Defaming Scientology?
It only took a week for Tom Cruise’s asleep at the wheel legal team to mount a defense against Katie Holmes’ master chess moves and PR ticks. To which Team Cruise countered with the single most hostile rebut ever.
About an hour after the news broke on People.com, the day after the filing, Cruise’ rep responded with a contrite: “Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy to work this out.” Clearly stunned and before the Scientology scandals and leaks, the Holmes sympathy, the Cruise smearing, the custody drama and the of questioning their parenting skills and their decision-making. That was Friday. And then, yesterday, Cruise’s lawyer, Bert Fields, released this in response to a week of Holmes successfully painting herself as sympathetic: “Tactically we can’t say where Tom will file a divorce case and if he’ll be seeking joint custody of Suri. We are letting ‘the other side’ (Katie and her team), play the media until they wear everyone out and then we’ll have something to say. It’s not Tom’s style to do this publicly. He is really sad about what’s happening.” Uh, yeah. What a difference a week makes. That said, the terse tone jibes with founder L. Ron Hubbard policy tangentially related to “fair game”, a practice of countering perceived calumny: “ Don’t ever defend. Always attack.”
In the interim, it’s been… interesting. Outlets are picking sides and alliances with sources already.
For instance, The Village Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog is hardly taking sides but it’s gleefully partisan right now with stories about high profile Scilon defections (Hubbard’s granddaughter left as did current leader David Miscavige’s father). And RadarOnline.com seems to be Team Holmes too, mostly, with leaks aplenty from disillusioned apostates, and stories about Nicole Kidman’s past repeating itself. TMZ.com, however, seems to flip sides, and it seems to be regurgitating “source” information from current church members: stories like how, counter to its earlier report, Suri Cruise, 6, is “not old enough” to be in the Sea Org yet (a pointless qualifier, since the original report talked about how Holmes NEVER wanted her daughter in the Sea Org, not really specifying it’s a fear right now). Incidentally, there are stories of kids age 15 being members, and there’s also the “Cadet Org” primarily for Sea Org members’ kids although it functions a little like the Sea Org for children… certainly for kids age 6 or perhaps younger. The general claim of “Nah, Suri’s too young for grown up indoctrination” is evidently untrue when it appears the chuch audit babies and Suri Cruise is old enough at 6 for what Hubbard called the Children’s Security Check. (Note: TMZ has been unreliable, ill-researched, ill-informed, facile, obfuscated, counter-intuitive, slow, and plain wrong, at times, about this saga, so be warned.)
Other TMZ stories were biased by Scilons posing as “Cruise sources,” alleging that “Katie is using Suri as a weapon in the divorce,” and “Katie is vilifying Scientology, lying about its ills even though she was a willing and happy participant who did courses because she loved Tom” (to paraphrase). TMZ was Team Holmes most of this week until, it would appear, the website was swayed by Scientology “black PR,” an attempt to discredit church opponents, or to “Dead Agent” which is another Hubbard policy to disprove information unflattering to the church so that information is no longer credible (there’s a useful glossary at ExScientologyKids if you’re lost).
But Holmes sources seem pretty clued in to the blogs, and her team is leaking right back (Scilons will counter again later today, be sure, since TMZ is the only one biting and, get this, copying and pasting some info from the official Sci website rather than doing its due diligence). Today, Holmes sources allege she was literally controlled, spied upon, followed and reported upon. All the time. With information being fed back to the church.
On Wednesday, The Hollywood Reporter published a four-page expose about the church, its defectors, how Sci minders allegedly poisoned Cruise’s older two kids against Nicole Kidman telling them, in daily sessions, that their mother was a “sociopath.” That was apparently Sci minders, not Cruise. Although TMZ.com today says Cruise was manipulative too: apparently, when Holmes filmed Thank You For Smoking in 2005, movie studio sources allege Cruise demanded there be no promotional photos of new girlfriend Holmes and her co-star Aaron Eckhart kissing or “anything else compromising.” THR continues that, later in the relationship, “Katie was monitored as if she lived under the Stasi.” And the tabloids concur, although make of that what you will: The National Enquirer says Cruise phoned it in as a husband, working away from his family for months and only checking in for pre-premiere photo ops and joint red carpets. And Star Magazine says “Katie first saw Tom’s control as love, but that changed… Tom had taken to having their home phones and her cell phone and email monitored.”
It’s said, hoped really, by THR’s ex-Sci sources, that since Holmes has “blown,” in church parlance someone who “left without permission,” she could ”blow Scientology wide open… what Katie is doing is going to drive a wedge in a door that Scientology was trying to keep closed…Katie ambushed Tom Cruise and in so doing outwitted some of the most controlling people on Earth.”