Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise attend the 2012 Vanity Fair Oscar Party at Sunset Tower on Feb. 26, 2012 in West Hollywood, Calif.
The only thing bigger than a celebrity scandal is a bitter celebrity divorce, and the only way a story could top that is if it involves one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. Thank you, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. In June, after five and a half years of marriage, Holmes filed for divorce from Cruise. The decision reportedly left the Mission: Impossible actor stunned, and for weeks the media speculated about Holmes’ reasons. Was she fed up with Cruise’s devotion to Scientology? Did she fear she was being followed and that Cruise might try and abduct their daughter, Suri? Nobody really knew, in large part because neither Cruise nor Holmes nor anyone in their tightly cloistered circle was talking openly about it. Despite thousands of stories in nearly every form of media — including a Celebritology item in the Washington Post titled, “TomKat in memoriam: A timeline of the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes love story”, the entire incident was nearly devoid of actual facts, as readers jumped from one speculative story to the next.
In the end, the split was uneventful, if not amicable. Cruise agreed to let Suri live with her mother in New York City, and because the divorce documents remain sealed, the exact terms aren’t publicly known. The real winners in this ordeal were the celebrity glossies that covered it. According to the New York Post, People magazine saw its newsstand sales climb 27% during the scandal.