Tom Cruise became angry when lawyers quizzing him about his daughter Suri compared him to his own absent father.
The star got testy when the lawyers asked if he was like his own dad, Thomas Cruise Mapother III. Cruise — who was brought up by his mother, Mary, after she left Mapother in 1974 — replied, “My father worked, he worked. My parents were divorced and I didn’t see him.”
When asked if he saw any similarity to himself, Cruise responded, “Absolutely none. My father didn’t pay money, he didn’t call . . . Even the fact that you would suggest that I was being like my father, it’s the same thing my father did, and suggesting that that’s something that I’m doing in terms of abandoning my children, I find that greatly offensive.”
Partial transcripts of Cruise’s Sept. 9 grilling in Los Angeles have been filed in court papers as part of the “Mission: Impossible” star’s libel suit against two magazines that reported that he had “abandoned” Suri following his divorce from Katie Holmes.
A lawyer for In Touch and Life & Style magazines asked an increasingly defensive Cruise about why he didn’t see Suri for more than 100 days after he and Holmes split. He responded, “When a divorce occurs, things change . . . now you have to ask for permission and organize schedules to make things happen . . . It’s not an ideal situation . . . Things change. And certainly what doesn’t change is the love that I have for my daughter, the fact that I didn’t abandon her emotionally, physically or otherwise.”
Asked why he didn’t come to New York for Suri’s first day at school, he replied, “If Suri asked me to be there, I would have been there.”
The papers also reveal that Cruise had initially asserted that “protecting Suri from Scientology was one of the reasons she [Katie] left Cruise . . . that was one of the assertions.” But he later asked to change his statement to, “Katie has never told me that this was a reason for our divorce.”