Tom Cruise Used Intimidation Tactics To Squash Stories -- Read The Threatening Letters To Journalists
Nov. 12 2013, Published 6:36 a.m. ET
All publicity is not good publicity, as far as Tom Cruise is concerned.
As the actor continues to battle Bauer Media in a down and dirty $50 million lawsuit about stories published in In Touch and Life & Style, Breaking Celebrity News has obtained shocking new emails that prove his high-priced lawyers have repeatedly used similar legal intimidation tactics to attempt to squash other stories by journalists for The Hollywood Reporter, The New Yorker -- and more.
In September, 2012, Cruise's attorney, Bert Fields, sent a pre-emptive strike at Kim Masters of The Hollywood Reporter, who was preparing a story on the effect a recent Vanity Fair takedown piece on Scientology would have on Cruise's career.
"I'm told you're writing about Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth's hatchet job and its supposed impact on Tom Cruise's career," Fields wrote in the document uncovered as part of discovery in his client's bitter case against the publisher.
EXCLUSIVE DOCUMENTS: Read Team Cruise's Threatening Legal Letters To Journalists & Commentators
After dismissing the VF piece as "old tabloid lies spewed before by bitter ex-Scientologists," Fields suddenly decided to compare Masters to a Nazi, which is a favorite Fields tactic, as Breaking Celebrity News has exposed.
"Your suggestion that Tom may have to quit the Church to save his career begins to sound like Germany in the 1930s, where a man's professional career could be ended because of his religion," he wrote. "You're too good a reporter to let your feelings about Scientology, which you and I discussed years ago, cause you to hurt Tom, who's a very good guy and who doesn't deserve it."
Masters proceeded with the piece, but it ended up being largely favorable towards Cruise.
Fields sent another letter to a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright, in March 2012, after he published an article on the Church of Scientology. That article "contained false and defamatory ass