Charles Guerin-Morgan Dessalles/ABACAUSA
Katie Holmes leaves the New School on Seventh Avenue amidst a swarm of fans on Monday.
Katie Holmes emerged from seclusion Monday, shedding remnants of her life with Tom Cruise — including her wedding ring.In her first public appearance since she filed for divorce Thursday to save her 6-year-old daughter from the clutches of Scientology, a smiling Holmes surfaced in New York to tape a TV spot.
EX-SCIENTOLOGIST: HOW I ESCAPED THIS CULT AND WHAT KATIE IS UP AGAINST NOW
Holmes sits in the back of her luxury car without a ring on her finger. (Steffman,Turgeon/Splash News)- She returned to her premarriage mouthpiece, Leslie Sloane at BWR, sacking the publicist she had worked with since 2007.
- She fired her husband’s security team, which had guarded her as recently as last week, TMZ reported. According to the website, the bodyguard and driver had worked for Cruise for years, even before he met Holmes, and had followed her every move while in New York.
- The actress was convinced Cruise planned to prep their young daughter Suri for an early entrance into the ultrazealous Scientology group called Sea Org, leaving her no choice but to cut ties, TMZ reported.
Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise back in 2009. (Angel Fernandez/AP)Seemingly relishing her newfound independence, Holmes smiled at photographers as she breezed into a taping of Lifetime’s “Project Runway: All Stars” show at Parsons The New School of Design in Manhattan.
“She did great,” show judge Isaac Mizrahi told People.com after the six-hour shoot, for which Holmes acted as a guest judge.
Holmes was surrounded by a new group of self-selected handlers, a clear sign the beautiful brunette is making a major break from the Cruise-controlled, Scientology-centered world she’s inhabited for the last 51/2 years.
PHOTOS: A LOOK BACK AT TOM CRUISE AND KATIE HOLMES' ROMANCE
Raised a Catholic in Ohio, Holmes fired Sloane in 2005, just months after meeting the “Top Gun” star, paving the way for Cruise’s Scientologist sister, Lee Ann DeVette, to take over as the couple’s public rep.
The “Dawson’s Creek” star later hired respected West Coast publicist Ina Treciokas in 2007 to restore some sanity after DeVette’s disastrous run, but the return to Sloane sent an obvious message.
“It happened in the last week,” a source close to Sloane told the Daily News of the rehiring.
Cruise boards a helicopter to take him from Reykjavik to his film location in Iceland on July 2. (Uffe Kongsted/FameFlynet)Her paperwork, filed anonymously, cited “irreconcilable differences” and stated that the union broke down more than six months ago — language necessary for Holmes to use New York’s new no-fault divorce law.
Cruise, who has been in Iceland filming his new movie “Oblivion,” a $140 million post-apocalyptic science-fiction epic, was said to have been blindsided by his spouse’s flight.
Mystery men who may be from Church of Scientology sit inside white Cadillac Escalade shadowing Holmes. (Richard Harbus for New York Daily News)Just three weeks ago, Cruise happily told the magazine he was “blessed” to be able to “live (his) dream and have the family that I have, the wife and children that I have.”
Cruise was said to now be planning to file for divorce in California, where Scientology is more accepted and where experts say he’d have a better chance at getting at least partial custody of Suri.
The “Mission: Impossible” megastar has hired Los Angeles legal ace Dennis Wasser to handle what is shaping up to be a contentious child custody battle.
Wasser repped Cruise in his first two divorces, from Mimi Rogers in 1990 and Nicole Kidman in 2001. Both wives were 33 when they went to splitsville.
Richard Harbus/for New York Daily News
Men who got out of white Escalade.
The final deciding factor for Holmes was her fear that little Suri would be ripped from her clutches and inducted into the hard-core Scientology priesthood known as Sea Org — despite the church’s denial that she was a candidate, TMZ reported early Tuesday morning. According to reports and sources interviewed by The News, parenting issues and fears about Sea Org weighed heavily on the actress who lived in Cruise’s shadow for much of their time together.
“I think it is more than plausible (Sea Org) wanted Suri,” Marty Rathbun, a former high-ranking Sea Org member who defected in 2004, told The News. “The educational process has been geared more and more toward getting kids to go into the Sea Org earlier and earlier, at around 10, 12 or 14.”
He said Suri is at the age now where private tutoring and “casual” indoctrination could set the stage for her eventual move to Sea Org’s base in Hemet, Calif.
“The whole purpose for being a tutor for the kids is not education; it’s to get them on to be full-blown zealots at an early age. The thought process is to turn them into zealots,” he said.
He recalled watching Cruise’s adopted son Connor, now 17, when he visited Scientology’s Los Angeles-based Celebrity Center in 2001, around the time of Cruise’s split from Kidman.
Connor was 6 years old back then, the same age Suri is now, and Rathbun said he casually introduced the curious tyke to an E-meter — the electronic device that acts like a lie-detector test in Scientology counseling sessions called “auditing.”
“I showed him the E-meter, and he was playing around with it. Tom was thrilled, and the next thing you know, they started doing indoctrination with him, within a matter of days,” said Rathbun, author of the book “What is Wrong with Scientology?”
“They were talking to him, telling him what it’s about, maybe reading to him, translating it to a language he could understand,” Rathbun recalled.
Sea Org, started by L. Ron Hubbard aboard a ship in the 1960s, has often been compared to a boot camp and criticized by ex-Scientologists for its military-like conditions. According to the official Scientology website, Sea Org members sign “a one-billion-year pledge to symbolize their eternal commitment to the religion.”
Connor Cruise, who was homeschooled by his dad’s stern Scientologist sister Cass Mapother, posted a Twitter message Monday that appeared to be a declaration of loyalty.
“La Familia Always. Friends Come And Go, But Family Is Forever,” the message read.
Reports suggest Holmes signed a prenup that would give her $3 million for each year of marriage and a $3.5 million home in Montecito, Calif. Cruise has reportedly amassed a fortune of more than $275 million.
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