During her 20/20 interview Friday, Leah Remini revealed that it was at Tom Cruise's 2006 wedding to Katie Holmes that she first began to seriously doubt Scientology. And now the New York Daily News has published excerpts from Remini's Scientology exposé Troublemaker, out tomorrow, in which she discusses that wedding in more detail. Five of the weirdest claims:
- The church asked Remini to bring along her friends Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. "The church was really the one who invited them. On Tom's behalf," she says. Then the church constantly tried to "extract" her and separate her from Lopez and Anthony, she says. "I could only assume because they wanted to make Jennifer a Scientologist and maybe I was barring that road for them."
- Cruise serenaded Holmes with "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," in an apparent nod to his famous Top Gun scene. "We're like, 'That's an interesting song to sing to your bride,'" Remini says. In her book, she also reveals that Cruise stood at the altar waiting for Holmes for 20 minutes, as Lopez asked Remini, "Do you think Katie is coming?"
- Suri Cruise was 7 months old at the time, and Remini says she heard the baby crying and followed the noise to a bathroom, where she found Suri lying on the floor as three women (including Cruise's sister and his assistant) stared at her as if she were "L. Ron Hubbard incarnate," Remini writes. Remini says she persuaded the women to pick Suri up and give her a bottle.
- Remini says that after the wedding, she rode to the airport with Cruise's children from his marriage to Nicole Kidman, Bella and Connor. After Remini asked if they'd seen Kidman recently, Bella replied, "Not if I have a choice. Our mom is a f---ing SP." That's "Suppressed Person," the Daily News explains, a Scientology insult.
- Remini—who says she was snubbed by Cruise and Holmes in the reception line—was annoyed by other behavior she saw at the wedding as well (church chairman David Miscavige's wife didn't show and he flirted with his assistant; the ceremony officiant was "humping Brooke Shields on the dance floor"; and more) and ended up filing a complaint noting that "Tom Cruise seems to be running our church." But the church sided with Cruise and Holmes, she says, and she found out many other guests had filed complaints about her; she ended up being questioned for months, billed $300,000 for the "audit," and forced to apologize.
Holmes was one of those who supposedly complained about Remini, and in response to the uproar, the actress released a simple statement: "I regret having upset Leah in the past and wish her only the best in the future." The church, on the other hand, has released a few statements in response to Remini's claims; in
one, it claims this is all "a thinly veiled effort to gin up publicity to boost an otherwise sagging career." (Click to see
what Remini's husband has to say.)
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