Tom Cruise started to pull away from Scientology while filming the intense Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut” with then-wife Nicole Kidman in 1997, according to the new book “A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology.”
Former high-ranking church officer Mike Rinder writes that the star began to ignore Scientology head David Miscavige’s calls while filming in London. This allegedly prompted Miscavige to send Marty Rathbun, a top church exec, to the UK to audit Cruise — a process through which the subject is walked through events in their life to relieve negativity and reach a level of “clear.”
Cruise, Rinder writes, “was gradually drawn back into the world of Scientology.”
However, this rededication allegedly “created a distance between [Cruise] and Nicole.”
Kidman had been brought into the church by Cruise years before but “never expressed particular eagerness for her Scientology courses or auditing,” Rinder writes. It didn’t help that her father was a psychiatrist. (According to the Church of Scientology, psychiatry delivers improper care and an over-reliance on psychiatric drugs). “Had she not been Mrs. Tom Cruise, she would not have been eligible to participate in OT levels at all due to her familial connection to psychiatry.”
With the church apparently feeling threatened by Kidman’s influence over their most prominent celebrity, “Rathbun worked with [Hollywood lawyer] Bert Fields to hire infamous PI Anthony Pellicano to spy on Nicole and tap her phone,” Rinder writes.
Pellicano spent over a decade in prison for a host of offenses including wiretapping, racketeering, conspiracy and illegal possession of explosives and grenades.
“The Church never ordered or participated in any illegal wiretapping,” a church spokesperson told Page Six. “Mike Rinder is an inveterate liar who seeks to profit from his dishonesty. He supports himself by orchestrating the harassment of his former Church and its leader through false police reports, incendiary propaganda and fraudulent media stories.”
Rathbun also, the book claims, turned the couple’s two adopted children — Isabella and Connor — against Kidman by indoctrinating them into the L. Ron Hubbard teachings of Suppressive Persons.
According to reported Scientology canon, a suppressive person is someone deemed as an enemy by the church and who must be silenced or destroyed.
“When Tom and Nicole divorced, Miscavige was happy that the ‘negative influence’ of Nicole was no longer dragging Tom away,” Rinder writes. “Cruise thereafter became more fervent in his vocal public support of scientology and Miscavige.”
In her 2016 book, “Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology,” church defector Leah Remini wrote that she shared a shuttle with Cruise and Kidman’s children after their father’s 2006 wedding to Katie Holmes. The actress allegedly asked the siblings if they saw much of their mother since their parent’s 2001 divorce.
“Not if I have a choice,” Bella allegedly said. “Our mom is a f–king SP.”
