Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Tom Cruise is an intriguing person. His life
as a parent has frequently been shrouded in chaos and controversy. From public snubs to
Scientology summer camps, these are the things about Tom Cruise's kids that no one talks about.
Soon after Cruise's divorce from his first wife Mimi Rogers in 1990, he married Australian actress
Nicole Kidman, whom he starred alongside in the 1990 race car flick Days of Thunder. Years later,
Kidman revealed to Vanity Fair that she wanted to start having kids straight away, but it wasn't
meant to be, as she had a devastating miscarriage early in their marriage. After that trauma,
they decided to adopt a girl named Isabella, and two years later, they adopted a boy named Connor.
Alas, this family unit was not meant to last,
as the Hollywood power couple divorced in 2001. In the years that followed,
Kidman had a difficult time with her adopted kids. In 2007, she told the British talk show GMTV,
"My kids don't call me 'mommy.' They don't even call me 'mom.'
They call me 'Nicole,' which I hate and tell them off for it."
To add insult to injury, Cruise's next wife, actress Katie Holmes, reportedly
claimed that Isabella and Connor begann calling her "Mom" after just two years in their lives.
Isabella Cruise's birth mother was reportedly a practicing Scientologist who already had two
kids and couldn't afford to look after a third. According to the Daily Mail, the church connected
her to Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. Baby Isabella was reportedly placed in Kidman's arms moments
after being delivered, and Cruise reportedly stayed up that first night just watching her
breathe. Both parents clearly loved Connor with the same fervor, but following the divorce,
Kidman became an outsider in her children's lives, and she may not have had a choice in the matter.
According to the Daily Mail, she spent much of 2004 in Romania filming Cold Mountain. When
she returned, she was reportedly told that the children had been sent off to a Scientology summer
camp. By 2005, Isabella and Connor were reportedly with their dad full time and fully immersed
in the church. Kidman admitted that she felt depressed following the divorce and threw herself
into her work to combat those feelings. She won an Oscar for The Hours in 2003, but Hollywood's most
esteemed prize did little to dull the pain. At a Women in the World summit in 2015, she confessed,
"I was sitting in the Beverly Hills hotel,
and it was all extraordinary, and I was the loneliest I’d ever been."
When former Scientologist Leah Remini bumped into Tom Cruise's adopted
kids at his wedding to Katie Holmes in 2006, Isabella reportedly told her that
she considered her mother a Suppressive Person. According to Scientology.org,
"A Suppressive Person will goof up or vilify any effort to help anybody and particularly
knife with violence anything calculated to make human beings more powerful or more intelligent."
Remini addressed the awkward encounter in her book
Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, in which she wrote,
"When I asked if she talked to her Mum, Bella scoffed and said,
'Not if I can help it, she's a f------ SP'. Connor just looked out
the window. There was something human about his silence and the sadness I felt in it."
Nicole Kidman has refused to publicly discuss the drama surrounding the church
and maintains that she respects Isabella and Connor's decision to practice Scientology.
"Everybody has their own path, and when they find their path, it's such a relief as a parent."
When she was 23, Isabella Cruise married 29-year-old British IT consultant Max Parker in a
Scientology ceremony at London's glitzy Dorchester Hotel in September 2015. It was a low-key event,
so low-key that even her parents weren't invited, even though Isabella reportedly attended her dad's
wedding to Katie Holmes and was a bridesmaid at her mom's wedding to Keith Urban. When Parker
was asked by The Mirror if he regretted that his bride's parents weren't in attendance, he said,
"Yeah. It is what it is."
Her father apparently didn't take the omission to heart, though. A source told People Magazine,
"None of the parents were invited, and Tom was totally cool with it."
Kidman was in London preparing for a play at the time of her daughter's wedding,
but Isabella reportedly still didn't want her at the ceremony. An insider told the Daily Mail,
"Tom picked up the bill and paid for everything, but it was decided that
neither he nor Nicole should attend as it would have turned the whole event into a circus."
Kidman reportedly met her future son-in-law at a private dinner prior to the wedding,
and the newlyweds reportedly spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with Tom that year.
Connor Cruise remains an active⁠, and apparently pretty important, member of the Church of
Scientology. According to the Daily Mail, he lives a jet-setting lifestyle in Clearwater, Florida,
home of Scientology headquarters. A church insider told the tabloid that his yellow
$50,000 Mustang GT is regularly seen at the main Scientology building. According to the source,
"It's unprecedented for any member to be allowed to park right outside the main
entrance [...] Connor must be receiving special treatment because of his father's
influence. The security treat him like a god — they look starstruck whenever he arrives."
Connor's Mustang was reportedly a gift from his father. Sources claim that his dad also
paid for a $500,000 boat so that Connor could go deep sea fishing. When he's not at sea,
he can usually be found in his swanky three-bedroom townhouse,
located in an exclusive community consisting primarily of Scientologists. Unless, of course,
he's traveling with his old man. In October 2019, father and son were photographed approaching a
London helicopter pad, and they were reportedly in the UK together when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
According to the Daily Mail, they ended up at the Scientology HQ in West Sussex,
a luxury facility that's said to boast a Michelin-star chef among its staff.
Born in April 2006, Suri Cruise is Tom Cruise's biological daughter with Katie Holmes.
Her parents kept their little girl out of the spotlight at first, but it wasn't long before
Hollywood watchers started taking notice. In 2008, Suri was named "Hollywood's Hottest Tot" by Forbes
after she received more blog mentions than any other celebrity child and was referenced in over
1,300 news articles. Her popularity was boosted by a wardrobe that was reportedly worth a staggering
$3.2 million, including $150,000 worth of shoes, including some with custom-made heels.
Critics questioned if a child ought to be allowed to wear high heels,
and backlash mounted when Suri was spotted in public wearing red lipstick. Her dad defended
his daughter's grown-up appearance during an interview with Oprah Winfrey as he said,
"She likes to dress herself and wears whatever she wants to wear […] A girl
wants to wear what she wants to wear. I'm not going to tell her different."
When Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise split, their children appeared to grow distant from their mom,
and that was something Katie Holmes reportedly wanted to avoid. Sources close to her claimed that
she supported Suri having a relationship with her father but feared that he would never put
his child above his commitment to Scientology. Karen De La Carriere, a
former Scientology leader who left the church in 2010, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012,
"Katie ambushed Tom Cruise [with a divorce] and in so doing outwitted some of the most
controlling people on Earth [...] She had to have planned this very carefully,
right down to using disposable cell phones and laptops to throw people off her trail.
It had to have been a very cloak-and-dagger operation."
The first move in this escape plan was to fire Isabella Cruise from a
job at Holmes' clothing line. As a former church member told The Hollywood Reporter,
"She was fired out of the blue, and once Katie filed for divorce,
it all made sense. This was a carefully planned ambush.
Katie didn't want Bella working for her anymore because she was Tom's kid."
In 2016, Holmes talked about her relationship with
her daughter in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.
"She makes every day great and awesome."
Numerous insiders have speculated about how Scientology's "disconnection policy" prohibits
Tom Cruise from seeing his daughter Suri, who is more than likely on the Suppressive Person list.
According to a source who spoke to In Touch, he hasn't seen her since she was 7. Rick Ross,
founder of The Cult Education Institute and an expert on Scientology, told Hollywood Life
in 2018 that the actor probably considers his daughter a Potential Trouble Source.
The last time that Tom and Suri Cruise were photographed together was in 2013, the year
after he and Katie Holmes divorced. According to former Scientologist and writer Samantha Domingo,
this could've been an exercise in damage limitation. In 2019, she told Us Weekly,
"Maybe he did it for a photo op,
to make it seem like he was connected so he wouldn't be criticized."
Another source told Us Weekly that Cruise is actually allowed to see Suri for a set
number of days per month, but he chooses not to because she's not a Scientologist. Meanwhile,
the tabloid New Idea claimed around the same time that father and daughter have secretly connected
via a third party for years and that she was possibly planning a covert in-person visit.
"You know what? You never know what the kids are gonna do."
Nicole Kidman didn't get to see her daughter walk down the aisle, and reports suggest that
she won't be at her son's upcoming wedding either. Connor Cruise was reportedly dating
a non-church member at one point, but a source told Radar Online in 2019 that he's
now engaged to a so-called "Scientology princess." She's an Italian church member named Silvia who
relocated to Florida with her family. Insiders claim that Connor's famous father adores his
potential daughter-in-law, but he reportedly doesn't want Silvia to mix with his ex.
One church source claimed that Tom Cruise has made it absolutely clear
that Kidman should not be allowed to attend the wedding, which sounds like
it will be a Scientologists-only affair. According to the source,
"Tom is behind this and what he wants is as good as law. Tom made the call and Connor
followed […] Connor worships the ground his father walks on and would never disobey Tom."
The insider also mentioned that Tom wouldn't even entertain the
idea of Kidman being involved in the ceremony,
on account of her standing with the church as a Suppressive Person. As the source put it,
"He doesn't want her there. Tom turned his back on
Nicole a long time ago and he's never looked back."
The world got to see just how passionate Tom Cruise was about his faith in January 2008 when
a clip of him vigorously explaining why it's a privilege to call oneself a Scientologist
went viral. The video was originally shown at a 2004 International Association of Scientologists
meeting and was never meant to be seen by the wider public. Isabella Cruise experienced her
own version of this scandal in 2019 when a promotional email being circulated among
church members made its way into the hands of journalist and Scientology expert Tony Ortega.
The email contained a glossy portrait of Isabella and was written by her personally.
According to Ortega, it's not uncommon for these success stories to be published,
but this was the first time that Isabella had appeared in official Scientology promo
material. In a long and rambling message filled with Scientology jargon, Isabella revealed that
she became an auditor for the church and urged others to join her. As she put it,
"This is a gift to yourself and so many others [...] If you are going to make it as a being
for the long run you NEED this. That's the truth. You won't stay Clear or OT without it."
She finished the message by thanking her father for his unwavering support
and paying tribute to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard as she declared,
"Thank you to LRH, on so many levels. I’d need another few centuries to even find the words."
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