Yahoo Lifestyle Brooke Shields Gets Candid About Tom Cruise’s ‘Ridiculous Rant’ About Her And Postpartum Depression
Nearly two decades after Tom Cruise publicly criticized Brooke Shields for using antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, Shields is looking back on his “ridiculous” attack.
In her new memoir, “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman,” the “Pretty Baby” star, 59, got candid about her rift with Cruise, a famous scientologist.
“I was, according to Tom, spreading misinformation,” Shields wrote. “An interesting opinion, coming from someone without ovaries.”
She said had Cruise “taken a public swing” at her before she “became a mother,” she “probably would have stayed quiet.”
“I would have ignored his ridiculous rant. I might have been content to sit back while this very famous man hijacked my experience to advance his own (deluded) agenda,” Shields continued in the memoir, according to US Weekly. “I would have been satisfied that his behavior would speak for itself.”
In a bizarre rant during a 2005 interview with Today’s Matt Lauer, Cruise said Shields didn’t “understand the history of psychiatry” while bashing her for using “dangerous” antidepressants. He deemed her “irresponsible” for taking medication while battling postpartum depression, alleging it “didn’t cure anything.”
Cruise’s comments came a month after Shields’ released her “Down Came the Rain” memoir in May 2005, in which she opened up about suffering from postpartum depression after birthing her daughter, Rowan, in 2003. Shields is also mom to daughter Grier, whom she welcomed with husband Chris Henchy, in 2006.
Shields responded to Cruise at the time by writing a New York Times op-ed. In the op-ed, she slammed Cruise for making comments that are “a disservice to mothers everywhere.”
Noting in her new memoir that Cruise’s tirade came shortly after her 40th birthday, she explained in her memoir that the inappropriate moment led her to feeling more self-assured.
“Sitting quietly and letting myself be attacked might have been my approach a decade earlier — I might have even regretted sharing my story or felt insecure that maybe my career was stalling while a powerful male movie star was singling me out, sure that I’d never stand a chance in that fight — but now I was emboldened by life experience,” she wrote.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Shields revealed that Cruise later apologized for his comments behind closed doors, but “it wasn’t the world’s best apology.” She claimed he visited her house where they discussed the incident before finally burying the hatchet.
“Eventually, Tom Cruise apologized to me. Not publicly, which would have been the right thing to do, but he came to my house and said he was sorry, and that he felt cornered by Matt Lauer and that he attacked me basically because he could,” Shields wrote, per Entertainment Weekly. “It wasn’t the world’s best apology, but it’s what he was capable of, and I accepted it.”
