If you still believe that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes‘ marriage was a totally legitimate affair brought about by pure heterosexual love, then leprechauns are real, the space shuttle landing was a hoax meant to trick the lizard people, and all pinatas are alive and feel pain. Anyway, back here in not-crazy-land, Vanity Fair is currently running an expose on Scientology, which involves Tom allegedly auditioning women to be his wife — which is totally something a heterosexual man would do! — and then destroying the lives of those who failed. Wholesome family entertainment all around! Here are some excerpts which more or less get the entire point across, but you really should read the whole thing in earnest:
According to several sources, the organization devised an elaborate auditioning process in which actresses who were already Scientology members were called in, told they were auditioning for a new training film, and then asked a series of curious questions including: “What do you think of Tom Cruise?” Marc Headley, a Scientologist from age seven, who says he watched a number of the audition videotapes when he was head of Scientology’s in-house studio, tells Orth, “It’s not like you only have to please your husband—you have to toe the line for Scientology.”
[…] According to Orth, Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-born, London-raised actress and Scientologist, was selected and dated Cruise from November 2004 until January 2005. Initially she was told only that she had been selected for a very important mission. In a month-long preparation in October 2004, she was audited every day, a process in which she told a high-ranking Scientology official her innermost secrets and every detail of her sex life. Boniadi allegedly was told to lose her braces, her red highlights, and her boyfriend.
[…] When a friend at a Scientology center in Florida, where Boniadi was subsequently sent, asked why she was crying all the time, Boniadi broke down and told her about her relationship with Cruise, which she had been forbidden to do. According to the knowledgeable source, the friend reported her. Boniadi’s punishment was to scrub toilets with a toothbrush, clean bathroom tiles with acid, and dig ditches in the middle of the night. After that she was sent out to sell Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics on street corners. Boniadi and her mother are no longer involved in Scientology.
So basically, the tl;dr version of this is … well, imagine The Bachelor. Only now imagine it that when a girl loses, she’s forced into slave labor and deemed a threat to your very way of living. But on the plus side, if she wins, then she gets to enter a loveless marriage! Yay! Actually, now that I think about it, this is exactly like The Bachelor. Never mind!
