Brooke Shields Takes Back Praise for Tom Cruise’s ‘Heartfelt’ Apology

Brooke Shields doesn’t find Tom Cruise as charming as she once did when he finally apologized for disparaging her postpartum depression treatment on national television in the early 2000s, according to her memoir.

Shields writes in Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, that though she’d found Cruise’s apology “heartfelt” when he apologized (privately) a year later, “it wasn’t the world’s best apology.” Shields continues in the book, “But it’s what he was capable of, and I accepted it.”

Cruise remarked during a 2005 appearance on Today with former host Matt Lauer, “There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance,” as Shields struggled with postpartum depression. “The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation,” he told Lauer. “She doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry.” He also called Shields “irresponsible” for “masking the problem” taking medication to treat her condition.

As a Scientologist, Cruise’s belief system has a lot to say about psychiatry. The faith’s founder L. Ron Hubbard consistently held that psychiatry was a malevolent profession that should be dismantled, as he believed psychiatrists sought to “enslave mankind through drugs, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies,” according to the L.A. Times.

Cruise tried to push those views as he publicly attacked Shields over her openness about taking antidepressants. Instead of staying silent, Shields responded at the time with an op-ed in The New York Times, slamming Cruise’s “ridiculous rant,” and snapping back, “To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression, and that instead I should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general.”

Shields writes in her new memoir that when Cruise apologized “eventually,” he made several missteps that should have caused her to have more trepidation about accepting. “Tom Cruise apologized to me. Not publicly, which would have been the right thing to do,” she writes in the book.

“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,” she continues. Even though she knows she deserved better, Shields writes she accepted his apology as “heartfelt” since “it’s what he was capable of.”

Cruise “didn’t have a leg to stand on” as he showed “his ignorance on the issue” of post-birth women’s health, she writes. And though she initially squashed the beef, she was happy she wrote that 2005 op-ed—against the advice of her (since-fired) publicist.

“I was sticking up for myself and for women who were suffering from irrational and dangerous comments from an unschooled actor who was speaking way out of his depth,” she concludes.