by Jake Adams

Just two weeks ago Katie Holmes shook the Hollywood world to its synthetic, botox-injected, silicone-enhanced core by filing a divorce complaint against Tom Cruise. A scant 14 days later, or close thereto, the parties have already reached a settlement agreement. How’d they reach a settlement so fast? Well, as you might have guessed I wasn’t there, but I have a few hunches.

First, there’s no doubt in my mind that Tom and Katie signed a prenuptial agreement before they got hitched. Tom Cruise, a.k.a., “Maverick” is a very wealthy man. Katie was his third marriage, and Tom had children from his previous marriage to Nicole Kidman to think about. You can bet Mav and Katie signed a prenuptial agreement that spelled out in very specific terms exactly what, if any, of Tom’s estate Katie would get in the event of a divorce. My guess is she got a little something in the agreement. By yours and my standards “a little something” is still a lot (My guess is that it was a number that included the word “million”), but by Tom Cruise’s mega-millions standards it was probably just a small amount and nowhere near what Katie might have been entitled to without the prenuptial agreement. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Katie received more for having been married to Cruise a certain number of years and had a child. It’s not uncommon in prenuptial agreements for the award to the less wealthy spouse to increase according to the number of years married.

Next, with a prenuptial agreement in effect, the only thing left to dispute was the custody of Suri Cruise – Tom and Katie’s 6-year-old daughter. In all likelihood, given Tom’s star power and his career making blockbuster movies that get filmed all over the globe, Katie was the primary care giver for Suri. This means that in a custody battle Katie would probably have had the leg up in the fight. Furthermore, any fight over custody would have been 24-hour news. One of the major issues in the divorce was going to be Tom Cruise’s freaky weird religion – Scientology. I confess I don’t know just a ton about Scientology, but any religion that was created by a man who wrote a book about aliens and has as it’s most high-profile front-men actors from Top Gun and Saturday Night Fever is probably some pretty wacked out church. Tom’s reputation has suffered enough due to his public embrace of Scientology (Psychiatry, Brooke Shields, etc., etc.). His reputation and the religion itself would have been on trial in a custody fight over Suri. That means for 24-hours a day for months and months on end (divorce trials don’t happen fast – especially when high-priced lawyers are trying to earn their money by out-lawyering the other guy’s high-priced lawyers) every tabloid magazine, news show and internet gossip site worth its salt would be telling us everyday folks more than we ever wanted to know about Scientology and by implication, Tom Cruise.

Tom has hundreds of millions of dollars. That money buys him some skilled legal counsel. They surely told him the cards were stacked against him in a custody fight and they advised him of the damage a custody trial could cause to his movie career. Settlement just made cents – and sense.

With that decided Tom’s people made a reasonable settlement offer to Katie’s people including full physical custody for Katie, liberal visitation for Tom and some very generous child support for young Suri. And just like that, the deal was done.

And that my friends is how Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got divorced F-14 fast. Permission to buzz the tower?

*Jake Adams has never represented a movie star in a divorce, but he’d like to one day.