By Roger Friedman
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Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise
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Tom Cruise’s Xmas Campaign vs. Nicole
Tom Cruise’s press campaign against ex-wife Nicole Kidman takes a nasty turn this weekend.
Cruise lets new wife, Katie Holmes, tell Parade magazine that his two older children with Kidman, Connor and Isabella, call her "Mom."
For Kidman, who’s working in Australia wrapping up an epic film with director Baz Luhrmann, this had to sting. It’s bad enough that she has more or less acknowledged in interviews that the children, whom she and Cruise adopted as babies and whom she raised until the couple’s 2001 divorce, live full-time with Cruise. At the time of the divorce the boy was 8 and the girl 6. They certainly knew who their mother was.
Kidman also is a devout Catholic but has been forced to let Cruise raise the children as Scientologists — another blow, sources say. Cruise's sister home-schools Conor and Isabella in the works of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
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Holmes also was raised as a Catholic, but Cruise refused to let their baby, Suri, be baptized in the Church.
"You can be a Catholic Scientologist or a Jewish Scientologist," Cruise told Diane Sawyer in an interview. "We are just Scientologists."
The Cruise-Kidman divorce commenced unexpectedly in February 2001, when Cruise swiftly filed just a few weeks after the couple’s 10th anniversary. On his divorce petition, Cruise claimed the couple had not been married for a full decade, which was untrue. It was thought this was to avoid paying Kidman extra alimony.
What followed was bizarre: Six weeks after the filing, Kidman announced that she’d had a miscarriage. A mystery ensued: Why would Cruise have filed for divorce when his wife of a decade was six weeks’ pregnant with their baby? The couple previously had been unable to have children and instead adopted Isabella and Connor.
This latest jab of Cruise’s through wife Holmes is made even more bitter because of comments Kidman recently made about the children. She told interviewers last month that the children often call her "Nicole" and not "mommy." But that may have been taken out of context. As parents of teens know, they often are disrespectful or glib just to get attention.
Holmes, who is 29 and under Cruise’s constant control, may not fully understand the impact of what she told Parade. Friends say that being away from her children is "painful" for Kidman, who is considered one of Hollywood’s most agreeable and friendly players. She didn’t need to be blindsided while doing her job half a planet away from the children she loves.