Nicole Kidman Recalls a Benefit of Marriage to Tom Cruise

Since their split in 2001, Nicole Kidman has remained relatively mum about what happened to break up her marriage to Tom Cruise. Now, the Washington Post notes, she's spilling on at least "one aspect of their relationship that she hasn't discussed before." That revelation comes via an as-told-to essay in The Cut, in which Kidman admits her wariness about talking about her union with Cruise, especially because she's now married to her "great love," Keith Urban. "It almost feels disrespectful," she notes. But she allows that her marriage at age 22 to Cruise, while definitely for love, also brought another benefit: "protection."

"Being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed," she says. Noting that she remained "cocooned" while still married to the star, she says once they broke up, she had to "grow up." She also says that even her ties to Cruise couldn't totally fend off her own #MeToo moments, saying "of course" she'd experienced them, "since I was little." "But do I want to expose them in an article? No. Do they come out in my work? Absolutely," she says. More from Kidman here. (She's compared her marriage to Cruise to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's.)