Oscar-winning director of corpulent, affected movie yarn, Crash, and former member of Scientology, Paul Haggis, supports Vanity Fair‘s bombshell story about the Scientology audition process that was set to find Tom Cruise a wife.
The story centers on how actress Nazanin Boniadi was courted to play the lead in a real life off-screen romance with Tom Cruise that was supposed to end in a sort of arranged marriage between the two. Reportedly, once Cruise creepily started to demonstrate “overwhelming” feelings for the actress, telling her that he “never felt this way before” she began to retreat once she “first sensed that this was possibly going to be an arranged marriage,” to which Cruise’s response was to complain, “I get more love from an extra than from you.”
All of this came after Boniadi was “told to lose her braces, her red highlights and her boyfriend” and was moved into Cruise’s home and given a credit card issued in the name of his production company as her only source of income.
The selection process that ended with Boniadi was positioned to unsuspecting women as an audition for Mission Impossible 3 (a horrible movie that co-starred Katie Holmes look alike, Michelle Monaghan, incidentally), but was really an audition to be hooked up with the mega-star, who apparently has so much influence, that when Boniadi was found wanting, and confided in a friend about the sham of a relationship, she was reportedly punished for not finding Cruise irresistible and breaking a confidentiality agreement. Vanity Fair alleges she was given chores and manual labor that included, “scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush, cleaning tiles with acid and digging ditches in the middle of the night” while Cruise told religious leaders that he wanted “someone with her own power, like Nicole Kidman.” Enter Katie Holmes three months after he broke things off with Boniadi.
Haggis says:
“Naz was embarrassed by her unwitting involvement in this incident and never wanted it to come out, so I kept silent,” Haggis wrote in the email published on the ShowBiz411.com Sunday. “I was deeply disturbed by how the highest ranking members of a church could so easily justify using one of their members; how they so callously punished her and then so effectively silenced her when it was done.”
The Church of Scientology said in a statement today:
“The entire story is hogwash. There was no project, secret or otherwise, ever conducted by the Church to find a bride (audition or otherwise) for any member.” “No church members were ‘used,’ nor were they punished, nor silenced.” “The Church does not punish people, especially in that way.”
They also called Haggis an “apostate” and that he is “attempting to grab headlines and falsely slander his former religion.”
Nah, after reading Haggis’ extremely telling article in the New Yorker about his experiences with the cult religion we tend to take his word on it. That and we’re pretty sure Tom Cruise saw Katie Holmes one day at a restaurant and told his minions to “get her” and “make her my wife. Use the microchips and the implantation procedure if you have to.” Nothing else about their courtship, his exceedingly obsessive nature with regard to his undying love for her, and the quickie divorce six years later makes any sense.
A rep for Holmes told ABC News that she has no comment on the story. (But we believe she has plenty of comments on her marriage that she’ll never, ever share without witness protection.)
