Paparazzi reportedly chased Tom Cruise and daughter Suri across New York City on Wednesday morning, with Cruise's driver breaking speed limits and blowing through red lights and the photographers following suit in cars, on motorcycles and on bicycles, according to the New York Daily News.
A rep for Cruise, Amanda Lundberg, on Thursday denied that any chase to the heliport had occurred. "Never happened," she told Newsday in an email. Police told Newsday they had received no complaints of near-accidents. The Daily News has since removed details of the alleged chase — the ones cited above — from its account of events, which the Ministry has linked to in the next paragraph.]
Cruise, who was visiting with Suri for the first time since Katie Holmes filed for divorce, was taking his daughter from the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa to a heliport at 12th Avenue and West 29th Street, the Daily News reported. At least 10 cars and six folks on two-wheeled vehicles were following the Cruises' Chevy Suburban for 20 minutes, the paper said, at speeds about 15 to 20 mph above the speed limit.
Daddy and daughter, who'd been video-chatting while he was filming the sci-fi thriller "Oblivion" in the L.A. area, couldn't get together in person sooner than Tuesday because the elder Cruise couldn't shut down production, People said. He'd last seen her in mid-June in Iceland, where he was shooting scenes for the same movie.
Cruise took an overnight flight Monday to see his daughter in New York City. Holmes and her daughter had a minor incident with paparazzi on Friday when they were heading home from the FAO Schwarz toy store, where Suri had been treated to some toys and face paint.
Holmes' Mercedes was reportedly hit by one photog's vehicle. On Monday night, the car the two were riding in was sideswiped by a garbage truck in another minor incident. In Los Angeles, prosecutors are considering testing the state's relatively new anti-paparazzo law in prosecuting photographers who allegedly followed Justin Bieber on a 15-mile high-speed chase down the 101 Freeway earlier this month.
The incident earned Bieber a ticket for driving in excess of 80 mph behind the wheel of his chrome Fisker Karma hybrid sports car, L.A. Now reported. L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine, who witnessed the chase and called 911, has called it "a tragedy waiting to happen."
A coroner's jury in 1998 blamed Princess Diana's 1997 death in a Paris car crash on reckless driving by her chauffeur and paparazzi in pursuit of the car she was riding in, sans seat belts, with her companion Dodi Al-Fayed.