Nicole Kidman Says Her Marriage to Tom Cruise Shielded Her from Sexual Harassment

"I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed"

Nicole Kidman has accomplished so much in the last two decades, it’s hard to even remember the up-and-coming twenty-something she was when she wed Days of Thunder co-star Tom Cruise.

And though the duo’s marriage spanned the entirety of the '90s, Nicole and Tom rarely open up about that time of their lives.

In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Kidman loosed her reservations about discussing the past, writing, "Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I'm always reluctant to talk about, because I'm married now to the man who is my great love [Keith Urban], and it almost feels disrespectful. That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn't power for me — it was protection," she continued.

Kidman went on to explain that her marriage to Cruise acted as a necessary shield between her and the harassment her female peers were often subjected to.

"I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed," she wrote. "I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it's almost like I had to grow up."

After her divorce, Kidman, 51, insists she felt the full weight of the problem and encountered her "share of #MeToo moments."

"But do I want to expose them in an article? No. Do they come out in my work? Absolutely," she wrote. "I'm open and raw. I want to have my well of experience and emotion tapped into — used, and I'm not just talking about sexual harassment. I'm talking about loss, death, the full array of life. But it has to be by the right people so it's not abused again."