Two weeks after her mother, Naomi Judd, died on April 30, 2022, an emotional Ashley Judd sat down with Good Morning America to set the record straight. Her sister, Wynonna Judd, and her stepfather, Larry Strickland, had authorized her to share that Naomi, who was 76, had struggled with severe mental illness, which led her to take her own life the day before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her,” Ashley said. “The lie that the disease told her was so convincing — that you’re not enough, that you’re not loved, that you’re not worthy. Her brain physically hurt.” Ashley was only speaking out to release the details of Naomi’s death before they “become public without our control … whether it’s the autopsy or the exact manner of her death,” she explained. “Otherwise, it’s obviously way too soon.”
Three years later, Naomi’s family is finally ready to open up about their loss like never before. In Lifetime’s upcoming four-part documentary The Judd Family: Truth Be Told, Ashley, Wynonna and Larry share their untold story. “It was incredibly challenging to tackle the subject of Naomi’s death: It was a family tragedy that was still raw. My approach was to really focus this series on understanding Naomi and her life,” director Alexandra Dean exclusively tells Closer of the series, which also examines the Judd family’s struggle with generational trauma and rise to fame. Interviews with the singer’s loved ones, including her close friend Reba McEntire, adds Alexandra, “along with Naomi’s own notes and recordings, give us the context we need to understand her death, why it happened, with far more empathy for Naomi.”
Her family held nothing back. Ashley, 57, Wynonna, 60, and Larry, 79, “were incredibly open and brave,” Alexandra says. “All three spoke freely about Naomi, sometimes with sorrow but also humor and compassion. There are so many hilarious, painful, eye-opening stories that people won’t have heard before.” The documentary, which airs on May 10 and 11, features newly unearthed recordings of Wynonna and Naomi prior to their rise to fame in the 1980s. One tape “sat hidden in one of Naomi’s cabinets until after she died,” says Alexandra. “When we play these early songs for Wy and Ashley, we see raw emotion wash over their faces.”
Wynonna and Ashley Judd Had ‘Complicated’ Relationships With Mom Naomi
More tears were shed over revelations of generational trauma. “I grew up in a family of secrets,” Naomi confessed in a 2011 documentary, revealing that her first memory was of an attempted sexual assault when she was 3. “I kept it all to myself.” She identified her assailant as a great-uncle in 2016 and also revealed she’d spent time in psychiatric wards battling treatment-resistant depression and anxiety.
That same year, Ashley wrote in her memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet, that she was molested by a family friend and witnessed inappropriate sexual behavior and drug abuse while she was growing up. “She had no idea what I went through as a child,” the actress and activist says in the documentary. Wynonna, who has revealed that she and Ashley didn’t know they had different fathers until they were adults, characterized her relationship with her mom as “incredibly close” but “incredibly complicated” in a CBS interview in 2022. “It was magical on-stage, but off-stage … phew,” she admits in the Lifetime doc of Naomi, whom she has previously accused of being hypercritical of her.
The family dysfunction led to periods of disconnection between the women in which they didn’t talk very often, despite living on adjacent plots of land in Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. “The most emotional moment for me was when Ashley recalled how she and her mother had repaired their relationship after a yearslong rift,” Alexandra tells Closer. “Ashley described her mother crawling on the floor asking for her forgiveness. It really hit me how wounded Naomi was and how little she’d understood, up to that point, Ashley’s experiences as a child.”
Naomi and Ashley Judd Were United by Grief Over Mom Naomi’s Death
Their mother’s death also brought the sisters closer together than they had been in a “long time,” Wynonna told Today in 2022. “We love each other, and we show up for each other. We don’t agree on much, but we support one another. We’ve had some tough conversations lately about what are we gonna do now that we have each other?” They learned to respect that they are moving forward at different paces, Ashley noted on the “Healing With David Kessler” podcast in 2022. “We don’t have to be congruent in order to have compassion for each other, and I think that that’s a really important grace that family members can hopefully learn to give each other.” (Both women remain close with their “Pop,” Larry, who wed Naomi in 1989.)
That’s also one of the major lessons of the documentary. “The film taught me a lot about how generational trauma works, how hard it is to forgive and the power of forgiveness, when it is granted,” says Alexandra. “I also really learned the importance of taking the time to understand your parents, those people who have given each of us life but often remain misunderstood by us, and us by them.”
Ultimately, fans will understand Naomi better, too. “I think a lot of people want to know why Naomi killed herself the night before she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, which had been her big life’s ambition,” Alexandra acknowledges to Closer. “This documentary will definitely solve that mystery, but it will also give viewers much more insight into Naomi along the way. By the end of the film, I hope viewers realize that Naomi’s life is about so much more than the way she died. In fact, she wanted each of us to figure out a better way to live. She is the woman who wrote ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ after all.”
