Ashley Judd has written a powerful essay arguing for her “right to keep private pain private” after the death of her mother, singer Naomi Judd, in April.
In the essay published by The New York Times this week, the actor voiced deep concerns that private and traumatic exchanges she and her family had with police during and following her mother’s death would be made public under a Tennessee law that allows police reports from closed investigations to be publicly released.
“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,” she wrote. “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?”
Naomi Judd, the Kentucky-born singer of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds, died by suicide in April, just days before she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. She was 76.
Ashley Judd said she felt “cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading.” But she doesn’t blame the officers involved on the day, she said. Rather, the issue lies in the system, she wrote, which must be reformed.
“I want to be clear that the police were simply following terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma and that the individuals in my mother’s bedroom that harrowing day were not bad or wrong,” she wrote.
“It is now well known that law enforcement personnel should be trained in how to respond to and investigate cases involving trauma, but the men who were present left us feeling stripped of any sensitive boundary, interrogated and, in my case, as if I was a possible suspect in my mother’s suicide.”
She said she and her family had filed a petition with the courts at the start of August to prevent the police file from being publicly released.
“This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories,” she said.