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Tom Cruise once blew up over a roll of cookie dough and Leah Remini was there to see it all. In her 2015 memoir Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, Remini dropped jaws when she claimed that the Top Gun star “lit into” his assistant simply because he couldn’t spot cookie dough already sitting on the counter (via CheatSheet). Yes, cookie dough. One roll. Whole tantrum.
“Goddamn it!” Cruise reportedly shouted as his staff scrambled around his Beverly Hills home. Katie Holmes, who was dating him at the time, tried to calm him down. But Remini said his voice—though lowered—“still had a seething quality” that left everyone on edge.
It got worse.
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Remini claimed the assistant was so nervous, she couldn’t speak. Cruise, she wrote, screamed at her to “get in the f*cking present time.” To save the poor woman, Remini pretended she just spotted the cookie dough. Problem solved. But not before Cruise did something that still gives off major cult-leader energy.
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She remembered him raising his hand high and declaring, “LRH is here,” then lowering it to his chin to show his own and Scientology leader David Miscavige’s worth. The assistant? He gestured to his waist.
That wasn’t a one-time meltdown, according to Remini. In the same book, she included a secondhand account of another tantrum over—wait for it—a chipped mug. A friend told her Cruise once snapped at a staffer: “You served me tea in a chipped mug? Do you know who gets served with a mug that’s chipped? F*cking DBs.”
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“DBs,” she explained, stood for “Degraded Beings,” a Scientology term used to describe spiritually inferior people.
For Remini, moments like these weren’t just uncomfortable. They were eye-opening.
She’d been raised in the Church of Scientology since she was eight and had once looked up to Cruise as its most celebrated face. But his behavior—and the way others enabled it—started to crack that image.
She believed Cruise was “the church’s most coveted, celebrated, and protected celebrity member.” His status, she argued, let him get away with things no other member could.
Remini detailed several visits to his home, where she said “people were terrified of offending Tom, and not without reason.” She also recalled feeling a strange tension at his gatherings: “It was hard to place, but there was an energy in the air, like we were being watched.”
She even got into trouble for asking a simple question at his 2007 wedding to Katie Holmes—“Where’s Michele Miscavige?”—which she said triggered years of scrutiny from the church.
Through her memoir, her A&E docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, and her Scientology: Fair Game podcast, Remini kept pushing for transparency.
But that one night, the cookie dough tantrum said it all. A Hollywood megastar. A compound full of assistants. And a meltdown that turned a dessert moment into a full-blown disaster.
For more such throwback stories, stay tuned to Koimoi!
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