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Brooke Shields offers more details about the fact that the public will argue with Tom Cruise — and why he wrote the 2005 op-ed.
“If Tom had taken a public swing at me before I became a mother, I probably would have kept quiet. I would have ignored his ridiculous rant. I may have been content to sit back while this very famous man hijacked my experience to promote his own (fraudulent) agenda,” Shields, 59, wrote in her latest memoir, Brooke Shields is not allowed to Age: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman. “I would have been satisfied that his behavior would speak for itself.”
Cruise’s comments from 2005 came just after Shields turned 40. She explained in the book – released on Tuesday, January 14 – how this changed her perspective.
“My attitude might have been to sit quietly and let someone attack me a decade ago – maybe I regretted sharing my story or felt insecure maybe my career was slowing down while a powerful male movie star was singing me, sure the I would never have stood a chance in that fight — but now I was emboldened by life experience,” Shields wrote, adding that she was “growing into my self-confidence.”
For a bit of history, Shields freed her Down Came the Rain memoir in May 2005, detailing her experience with postnatal depression after welcoming Rowan’s daughter, now 21. (Along with Rowan, Shields and husband Chris Henchy also shares 18-year-old daughter Grier.)
Brooke Shields is an accomplished actress, model and writer, but her favorite gig is motherhood. Former student Susan Suddenly shares daughters Rowan (born in May 2003) and Grier (born in April 2006) with husband Chris Henchy, whom she married in 2001. Although the New York native often shares joyful updates for the (…)
Following the release, Cruise went on the Today showed up and “disparaged me,” Shields wrote. Cruise, he said, referred to his “use of antidepressants” as “dangerous.”
“I was, according to Tom, spreading wrong information,” he wrote. “Interesting opinion, coming from someone without ovaries.”
In response, Shields published an op-ed in The New York Times.
“I was sticking up for myself, and for women who were suffering, against irrational and dangerous comments from an untrained actor who was speaking way out of his depth,” Shields wrote in Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old, noting that while it was a “burning truth” op-ed in Cruise, it also “sparked discussions on the reality and prevalence of postpartum depression.”
Brooke Shields, Tom Cruise.
Getty Images(2)Shields confirmed in her book that Cruise “ultimately” apologize for starting the argumentthough “not in public.” Per Shields, the actor went to her house and they had a conversation.
It wasn’t the best apology in the world, but it was what he could do, and I accepted it,” he wrote.
Brooke Shields Doesn’t Get Old out now.
