Tom Cruise has filed a $100 million defamation suit against a male adult film actor, who allegedly claimed he had an affair with Cruise that resulted in the breakup of his marriage to Nicole Kidman.
Cruise's suit, filed in Los Angeles, asserts that Chad Slater, who goes by the name Kyle Bradford in his movie credits, gave an interview to the French magazine Actustar detailing an alleged relationship with Cruise. In the suit, Cruise's attorneys charge that Slater "concocted and spread the completely false story that he had a continuing homosexual affair with Tom Cruise and that this affair was discovered by Mr. Cruise's wife, leading to their divorce," according to E! Online.
Kidman and Cruise are now separated. Cruise filed for divorce in February citing irreconcilable differences.
The court documents insist that Cruise "had no relationship of any kind with Kyle Bradford and does not even know him," ABCNews reported.
Referring to the Actustar interview, Cruise's attorney Bert Fields told E! Online, "It is absolutely 100 percent false. Cruise is a great respecter of homosexual rights but he's not gay, and he's ready to prove this in court. Tom is tired of it and it hurts his children. It's something that will be there forever. And damn it, he's going to stop it."
Actustar has agreed to publish a retraction, Fields told the Associated Press.
The lawsuit claims rumours that Cruise is gay could cause him to lose "the respect and enthusiasm of a substantial segment of the movie-going public" which would, in turn, "cost Cruise very substantial sums." It further states that "vast numbers of the public throughout the world" do not share Cruise's open-minded attitude about gays and "believing that he had a homosexual affair and did so during his marriage, they will be less inclined to patronize Cruise's films, particularly since he tends to play parts calling for heterosexual romance and action adventure."
Rumours about Cruise's sexual orientation date back to his first marriage to Mimi Rogers. After they separated, Rogers allegedly told Playboy there had been problems between them sexually, but retracted the statement almost immediately. Kidman and Cruise won a lawsuit against the Star tabloid newspaper in 1999, after it ran a story claiming the couple had to hire a sex coach to pull off the filming of the love scenes in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."
The media's attempts to reach Slater since the suit was filed have been unsuccessful. On his Web site, (http://www.kylebradford.com/), a message denies the Actustar report, saying, "I have never been to France, I have never spoken with Actustar Magazine, and have never said any of the statements allegedly said by me."