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Tom Cruise has been flying high on Hollywood goodwill this year, thanks to the success of Top Gun: Maverick. But there’s at least one celebrity who likely won’t be rooting for Cruise at the Oscars this year—Brooke Shields.
In her upcoming Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields—which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this weekend—the actor remembers that time Cruise publicly slammed her in 2005 for taking medication to address her postpartum depression. “It was so ridiculous to me,” Shields says of the incident in the documentary. “It’s not about the moral thing, or the right thing, or the good thing. It’s about who has more power.”
In the documentary, Shields talks about her decision to go public with her experience with post-partum depression, following the birth of her oldest daughter. She spoke openly about taking anti-depressants and seeing a therapist on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and in her 2005 book, Down Came the Rain. “I decided to talk about the experience publicly because I was made to feel that somehow the fault was with me and that it wasn’t that common, because nobody was talking about it,” Shields says.
Enter Tom Cruise—a famous member of the Church of Scientology, which frowns upon medication use—who went on The Today Show shortly after Shields published her book, to condemn her for “irresponsible misinformation.”
“There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance,” Cruise told then-host Matt Lauer. “The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation. She doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry.” When Lauer challenged him on the issue, asking why it should be a problem medication helped Shields recover, Cruise responded, “I disagree with it. She doesn’t know what these drugs are, and for her to promote it is irresponsible.”
Shields fired back with her own New York Times op-ed, in which she wrote, “If any good can come of Mr. Cruise’s ridiculous rant, let’s hope that it gives much-needed attention to a serious disease.”
Doctors told Cruise that he was misinformed, and, eventually, Cruise publicly apologized to Shields the next year, and she publicly accepted his apology. And Shields got her wish: more people did start talking about postpartum depression. The actor was even involved in advocating for new legislation to help expand postpartum research and treatment. Say Shields in the documentary, “That changed everything for me.”
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields will premiere as a two-part documentary on Hulu at a later date. The release date has not yet been announced.
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