Brooke Shields says Tom Cruise apologized to her after postpartum depression

Nearly two decades after Tom Cruise publicly criticized Brooke Shields for using antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, Shields is looking back on her “ridiculous” attack.

In her new memoir, “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman,” the “Pretty Baby” star, 59, opened up about her breakup with Cruise, a famous Scientologist.

“According to Tom, I spread misinformation,” Shields wrote. “An interesting opinion coming from someone with no ovaries.”

She said that if Cruise had “taken a public swing” at her before she “became a mother,” she “probably would have kept quiet.”

“I would have ignored his ridiculous horror. I could have been content to sit back while this very famous man hijacked my experience to advance his own (deluded) agenda,” Shields continued in the memoir, according to US Weekly. “I would have been satisfied that his behavior would speak for itself.”

In a bizarre rant during a 2005 interview with Today’s Matt Lauer, Cruise said Shields didn’t “understand the history of psychiatry” while bashing her for using “dangerous” antidepressants. He deemed her “irresponsible” for taking medication while battling postpartum depression, claiming it “didn’t cure anything.”

Cruise’s comments came a month after Shields released her “Down Came the Rain” memoir in May 2005, in which she opened up about suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth to her daughter, Rowan, in 2003. Shields is also a mother to daughter Grier, whom she welcomed with husband Chris Henchy in 2006.

Shields responded to Cruise at the time by writing one New York Times op-ed. In the op-ed, she slammed Cruise for making comments that are “a disservice to mothers everywhere.”

Noting in her new memoir that Cruise’s tirade came shortly after her 40th birthday, she explained in her memoir that the inappropriate moment led her to feel more confident.

“Sitting by and letting myself be attacked might have been my approach a decade earlier – I might even have regretted sharing my story or felt insecure that my career might stall while a powerful male movie star singled me out, sure that I would never stand a chance in that battle — but now I was encouraged by life experience,” she wrote.

Elsewhere in her memoir, Shields revealed that Cruise later apologized for his comments behind closed doors, but “it wasn’t the best apology in the world.” She claimed he visited her house where they discussed the incident before finally burying the hatchet.

“In the end, Tom Cruise apologized to me. Not publicly, which would have been the right thing to do, but he came to my house and said he was sorry and that he felt cornered by Matt Lauer, and that he basically attacked me because he could,” Shields wrote. per Entertainment Weekly. “It wasn’t the best excuse in the world, but it was what he was capable of and I accepted it.”