With War of the Worlds now in theaters, Tom Cruise presumably is done jumping on talk-show couches. But Brooke Shields is not done jumping on the hyperkinetic hyper critic.
"I was hoping it wouldn't come to this," Shields writes in an op-ed piece published in Friday's New York Times, "but..."
The "but" was Cruise's June 24 appearance on NBC's Today, in which the devout Scientologist lectured host Matt Lauer on the "dangerous" drugs prescribed to treat postpartum depression and again held up Shields as a cautionary tale.
In the Times, Shields, who suffered postpartum depression following the 2003 birth of her daughter, Rowan, painted Cruise as out of his depth.
"I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mr. Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression," Shields writes.
In the column, as in her recently published memoir, Down Came the Rain, Shields says that the antidepressant Paxil and therapy saved her and her family.
"To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression, and that I instead should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general," Shields writes.
Vitamins and exercise are two of the alternative treatments Cruise prescribed during his off-the-rails publicity tour for War of the Worlds, which opened to relatively strong business Wednesday. Interviews ostensibly booked to promote the Steven Spielberg-helmed sci-fi epic often took long detours into Cruise's passion for fiancée Katie Holmes and Scientology, the L. Ron Hubbard-founded religion which eschews psychiatry and its associated pharmaceuticals.
"Am I making people aware of it by discussing it openly and saying what a fraud psychiatry is?" Cruise asked on Access Hollywood in May. "You bet I am. I feel responsibility. Because I care, man. I care. I care about you. I care about your children. I care about these people here in this room, every one of you."
In the same interview, Cruise expressed acute concern for Shields, his long ago Endless Love costar, who recently had concluded her own publicity tour for Down Came the Rain. Cruise suggested Shields wasn't as happy as she let on, and that her career was suffering for her Paxil prescription.
Cruise's remarks led to Shields' first retort in early June--"Tom Cruise's comments are irresponsible and dangerous," she said. Undeterred, Cruise picked up--and at--the Shields thread on Today.
"The thing that I'm saying about Brooke is that there's misinformation, okay," Cruise told Lauer. "And she doesn't understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn't understand in the same way that you don't understand it, Matt."
At the conclusion of her Times article, Shields pointedly notes that, no, she has not detailed the history of psychiatry--"but it is my history, personal and real."
Shields, currently starring on the London stage in a production of Chicago, has an ally in the American Psychiatric Association. Where Shields slammed Cruise for his "ridiculous rant," the group this week slammed the actor for his "irresponsible" comments.
Cruise, meanwhile, has an ally in Kelly Preston. The actress, married to Hollywood's other A-list Scientologist, John Travolta, told AP Radio on Wednesday that Shields has responsibility issues, as well.
"If you're going to be advocating drugs, which [Shields] does in her book, you need to be responsible for also telling the people of the potential risks," Preston said.