Today is Suri Cruise’s 18th birthday so I’m posting these pictures of her mother, Katie Holmes, in New York yesterday in a really great shirt over an equally great pair of trousers, plus brand new shots of her from today.
But, like, can you believe it’s been 18 years?
Well, actually, it’s been 19. Yes, pretty much exactly 19 years ago this week news broke that Katie was dating Tom Cruise. She’d accompanied him to Rome where, among other commitments, he was receiving an award. And they made their red carpet debut right away – basically as soon as the world found out that they were indeed together, Tom was presenting her on a red carpet.
And it seemed like every time we saw them together during those first few weeks, he was… like…trying to eat her.
Two months later they were engaged. Exactly a year later Suri was born.
This was one of the wildest times in gossip history. Legacy media was still super influential back then, social media had yet to become the dominant form of mass communication it is now. And everyyyyyyone was locked into this chaos. But it also coincided with a rise in cynicism about celebrities, an increasing reluctance to just believe what PEOPLE Magazine was telling us to believe.
LaineyGossip.com predates TomKat, as we called them back then, but the site really picked up momentum in this era as brand name couples of that decade fueled celebrity gossip interest starting with Bennifer, and then TomKat, and remember, TomKat happened the same year as Brangelina. In fact, both of those couples happened in the same quarter of 2005. It was a TIME!
But back to the cynicism…
That was the mood of that decade – and, of course, if you were around these parts back then, you would have seen the cynicism reflected in the ugliest of ways, not just here but online in general. That said, as mean as many of us were during those gross years, even people who didn’t sink so low were side-eyeing TomKat, especially after what happened on Oprah. Their relationship, in many ways, became the symbol of a major shift in how celebrities were perceived and what the public was and wasn’t willing to believe. This shift rapidly became a swing, a huge swing over to the other side of the spectrum, which is where we find ourselves now, to the point where it’s almost like, if TikTok is any indication, no one wants to believe anything anyone says and is looking for conspiracy everywhere. And that isn’t good for good gossip either.
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