When It Comes to Legal Bills, Tom Cruise Is Cheap

Tom Cruise may be a millionaire many times over, but he’s not forking over his hard-earned cash… especially to the people he’s taken to court.

Forget the $50 million at stake in the defamation lawsuit he filed against In Touch and Life & Style magazines, they won’t get one penny more than what Cruise (and his lawyers) think they deserve.

In new legal docs filed Dec. 10, and obtained by Entertainment Magazine, Cruise is firing back at the defendants’ bill of $73,000, to which Cruise has to pay over $36,000.

Bauer Publishing’s legal team says they worked over 165 hours on just one motion for a protective order in the high profile case, which Cruise’s legal eagles call “grossly excessive” and any work actually done was “unnecessary” to the case anyway.

Cruise’s legal peeps even want the court to omit entire categories altogether because the hours claimed have nothing to do with the motion. But also because their responses were simply cut and paste job they refer to as “identical boilerplate objections.”

Other hours, 39 to be exact, the actor’s attorneys claim weren’t to “meet and confer,” but to do research Bauer’s attorneys repeated in multiple motions (so basically the superstar won’t pay for the same thing twice.)

Cruise’s legal team continues to slam Bauer in an effort to get out of paying the big bucks by pointing to the defendants research in “reporting on [Cruise] and Scientology by other news organizations.”

“Cruise’s theory that a pro Nazi/anti Semitic/anti Scientology conspiracy among the Bauer family members in Germany caused the reporting about him in Life & Style and In Touch is also premised on the faulty notion that because of this religious bigotry the two magazines reported on Scientology in general, and Cruise in particular, in a manner different from the reporting by other publications,” wrote the defense team.

Only, Cruise’s high paid lawyers dispute that: “The only thing these articles prove is that Scientology is a target for widespread discrimination. But regardless of the motives of other magazines, this does not change the fact that Defendants in our case were motivated by their demonstrable bigotry and animus toward Plaintiff’s religion.

“Having created their strawman argument out of whole cloth, Defendants proceeded to spend scores of hours and thousands of dollars gathering and reviewing other negative media articles about Mr. Cruise and his religion,” which his lawyers call “irrelevant.”

So just how much change is Cruise willing to spare ? Only $18,259.

That’s a drop in the bucket for Forbes’ highest paid actor in 2012, who made over $205,000 a day, which is roughly over $8,500 an hour.

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