Comment in response to Pinsky’s mention of Cruise in ‘Playboy’

By Matthew B. Zeidman

NEW YORK (Hollywood Today) 6/13/08 – Tom Cruise will be playing a key figure of the German resistance in next year’s World War II drama, “Valkyrie,” but it’s his lawyer who is stirring up controversy by comparing medical doctor and media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky to an infamous Nazi.

“He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill,” Cruise’s attorney, Bert Fields, told “New York Post” gossip column Page Six. “The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”

The comparison to Goebbels (who was responsible for propaganda under the Nazi regime) was in response to Pinsky’s suggestion in next month’s issue of “Playboy” that Cruise may have become a member of the Church of Scientology because he was neglected as a child.

“Take a guy like Tom Cruise,” Pinsky told the publication. “Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood—maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.”

In a statement issued Thursday, Pinsky apologized for offending Cruise, but firmly maintained that it was not his intention to make a “blanket diagnosis” of Cruise or his fellow Scientologists and that he was simply using Cruise “as an example of someone who is recognizable to help the public understand.”

Pinsky is a specialist in addiction medicine, a medical field that often incorporates elements of psychiatry to treat patients. Scientology opposes the use of modern psychiatry, and Cruise, himself, suggested a connection between psychiatry and the Nazi regime in a 2005 interview in “Entertainment Weekly,” when asked about similar correlations made in Scientology textbooks.