Tom Cruise admitted that Katie Holmes left him because of his ties to Scientology – and that she wanted to protect their daughter Suri from the secretive “Church.”
Cruise made the admission during a deposition in his $50 million libel suit against two magazines that claimed he abandoned Suri, an allegation which the “Mission Impossible” star strongly denies.
In the legal quizzing, an increasingly defensive Cruise was quizzed by a lawyer for Bauer Media who repeatedly asked if Katie fled their marriage because of the Church.
The lawyer asked whether “Katie Holmes left you in part to protect Suri from Scientology.”
Cruise answered: “That was one of the assertions, yes.”
Cruise also admitted that Suri is no longer a member of Scientology.
But according to the LA court filing, Cruise bizarrely later asked to change his statement about Katie leaving him to protect Suri from Scientology. He asked to change his statement to, “Katie has never told me that this was a reason for our divorce.”
On Thursday, Page Six reported that 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.”