Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes went through an unspeakable event, but only one of them was villainised.
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There’s an interesting duality that comes with living life in the public eye.
On one hand, if you’re a successful Hollywood actor you’ll have financial security. On the other, this life comes with scrutiny, prying eyes, loss of privacy and the public having access to information about your personal relationships.
There’s always been an intense interest in how the breakups and divorces of celebrities play out. Tom Cruise is one celebrity who has always garnered quite a bit of attention and in recent decades that focus has shifted from his professional work as an actor to his personal life and divorces.
Namely to two women who are famous in their own right, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes.
Thanks to their respective marriages and divorces to Tom Cruise, the way the post-divorce narratives around these two famous women have played out in the public eye have been vastly different.
Holmes has been praised for ‘escaping’ a situation in order to protect her daughter and just this week, she spoke out in defence of Suri, shutting down the rumours that she had a trust fund from her father that gained access to at 18.
On the other hand, Kidman has been painted in a very different light and has sometimes been condemned for ‘abandoning’ her two eldest children.
But if we look deeper at these two women and what they did in order to walk away from a marriage (and institution) that wasn’t serving them, they deserve the same amount of grace and empathy.
When Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise first began dating in 2005 the world instantly became caught up in the vortex of their love. After a whirlwind courtship, an engagement came quickly towards the end of 2005 and their daughter Suri was born in April 2006.
Holmes proclaimed how excited she was to convert to Cruise’s controversial religion Scientology and by November 2006 they were married after dating for just over a year. As they said their vows to each other the leader of the Church of Scientology, David Miscavige, stood by Cruise’s side as his best man. His connections to this religion ran deep — but perhaps naively Holmes didn’t know just how intertwined her new marriage would become with Scientology.
It didn’t take long for rumours to start swirling that Cruise’s religious ties were impacting both Holmes and her career.
It has been implied that he would steer her away from any acting projects that didn’t align with Scientology’s core value beliefs and before long the promising career she once had was fading away into the background.
In a series of secretive moves, it has been alleged that Holmes devised a plan with her father Martin to finally remove herself from her marriage, and take her daughter with her.
What Holmes saw and heard during her time in the Church of Scientology may never fully come to light, but at the time the public sentiment was that she had pulled off a deft escape.
“This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family,” said Holmes’ representative in 2012 in the wake of the divorce announcement. “Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.”
Then, like the speed of lightning, a divorce settlement was agreed upon in the courts and Holmes gained full custody of her daughter, Suri.
It has often been rumoured that the stipulations of the custody agreement meant that Holmes was gagged from talking about Scientology and Cruise in order to fully remove Suri from her father’s care.
Suri Crusie is now 18 years old and attended her senior prom and high school graduation earlier this year. Tom Crusie was not present at either event, at least from what the public could see.
Just over a decade earlier, in 2001, Cruise filed for divorce from Kidman citing “irreconcilable differences.” After 11 years of marriage and sharing two children, Isabella and Connor, one of Hollywood’s most enduring golden couples had come to an end.
The circumstances surrounding what ultimately led to their divorce remain a mystery, but Kidman has touched upon that time period of her life in interviews since then.
“I had a miscarriage at the end of my marriage, but I had an ectopic pregnancy at the beginning of my marriage,” Kidman told Marie Claire in 2007. “It was incredibly traumatic for me. Sometimes you share your grief.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.mamamia.com.au/katie-holmes-nicole-kidman/.
