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The TomKat’s out of the bag: a heated deposition transcript reveals what happened behind Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes‘ divorce, and how Cruise was largely absent from his daughter Suri‘s life following the split.
These revelations come from a September 9 deposition, carried out as part of the actor’s $50 million lawsuit against Life & Style and In Touch magazines. The grand irony here? The actor filed the defamation lawsuit in response to the magazines’ stories that Cruise had “abandoned” Suri.
Cruise admitted that he had not seen Suri for 110 days after the marriage ended and that he had only seen his daughter a total of ten times between June and Thanksgiving of 2012.
In a bewildering defense, Cruise explained, “As I said, I’ve gotten pretty good at communicating and I also find that, you know, Suri…is a very happy child and confident and has a good sense of herself.”
“…Telephone is to some degree a poor substitute for physically being there, isn’t it?” asked the publishing company’s lawyer Elizabeth McNamara.
“No question,” Cruise responded. “You have to work at it…I tell wonderful stories and they like it.”
“But you don’t often — it really doesn’t substitute for being able to hug them, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” the actor conceded.
When asked if he was responsible for his absence from Suri’s life, the actor answered, “No,” explaining that the divorce was “not an ideal situation.” When asked if he couldn’t simply fly from shooting in London to visit Suri in New York, he also replied, “No.”
Later, Cruise also admitted that Katie Holmes filed for divorce in part due to his religion.
“And Ms. Holmes has never indicated in any way that was one of the reasons she left you?…To protect Suri from Scientology?” the magazines’ lawyer asked.
“That was one of the assertions, yes,” Cruise responded.
And thus concludes what is hopefully the saddest news you’ll hear from us today. I fully encourage everyone to treat themselves to some dancing Tom Hiddleston and furry animals wearing scarves.
This article was originally published on November 8, 2013.
