Ashley Judd is opening up about her family’s efforts to seal police reports and recordings related to her mother’s death, saying the “profoundly intimate personal and medical information” doesn’t belong in the public domain.
Naomi Judd died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in April at her home in Tennessee. The country music singer was 76. Ashley Judd said in an interview weeks after the death that she was the one who discovered her mother following the suicide.
“The trauma of discovering and then holding her laboring body haunts my nights. As my family and I continue to mourn our loss, the rampant and cruel misinformation that has spread about her death, and about our relationships with her, stalks my days,” Judd, 54, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times published Wednesday.
“The horror of it will only worsen if the details surrounding her death are disclosed by the Tennessee law that generally allows police reports, including family interviews, from closed investigations to be made public,” wrote Judd.
The Judd family filed a petition in August in the Volunteer State that asked the court to prohibit the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office from releasing the police records.
Judd said now that she knows the “pain inflicted on families that have had a loved one die by suicide,” she intends “to make the subsequent invasion of privacy — the deceased person’s privacy and the family’s privacy — a personal as well as a legal cause.”
“This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories,” she said.
“Family members who have lost a loved one are often revictimized by laws that can expose their most private moments to the public. In the immediate aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, when we are in a state of acute shock, trauma, panic and distress, the authorities show up to talk to us,” Judd said in her Times op-ed.
“Because many of us are socially conditioned to cooperate with law enforcement, we are utterly unguarded in what we say.
“I gushed answers to the many probing questions directed at me in the four interviews the police insisted I do on the very day my mother died — questions I would never have answered on any other day and questions about which I never thought to ask my own questions, including: Is your body camera on? Am I being audio recorded again? Where and how will what I am sharing be stored, used and made available to the public?”
Judd said she felt “cornered and powerless” while she was being questioned by authorities as her mother died.
The actor said while she doesn’t fault the police for “following terrible, outdated interview procedures,” she said the questions from officers “felt mandatory and imposed” on her.
“And at a time when we ourselves were trying desperately to decode what might have prompted her to take her life on that day, we each shared everything we could think of about Mom, her mental illness and its agonizing history,” Judd said.
The move to keep the police recordings under wraps, Judd said, isn’t “because we have secrets.”
“We ask because privacy in death is a death with more dignity,” she said. “And for those left behind, privacy avoids heaping further harm upon a family that is already permanently and painfully altered.”
If you or someone you know is thinking of harming themselves, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides free support at 1-800-273-8255. United States residents can also be connected to the Lifeline by dialing 988. For more about risk factors and warning signs, visit the organization’s official website.