Naomi Judd, 76, committed suicide with a gun at her Tennessee home on April 30th. “We have always shared honestly both the joys of being family and its tragedies,” the family said. “One aspect of our story is that an unjust adversary pursued our grandmother.”
According to an autopsy report acquired by Fox News, Naomi Judd died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Ashley Judd is now speaking up about her feelings during her final moments with her mother. She wrote a personal essay, which The New York Times published under the title:
“The Right to Privacy Regarding Private Pain.”
She began her essay by remembering on the day her mother committed suicide. “The trauma of discovering and then holding her suffering body haunts my dreams,” she wrote. She explained that the “rampant and vicious disinformation about her death, and our ties with her,” “stalks” her days.
Ashley Judd stated that she plans to “make the following violation of privacy – the deceased person’s privacy and the privacy of the family — a personal as well as a legal matter.”
She argues that laws that allow them the right to reveal intimate moments to the world “revictimize” family members who have lost a loved one. “I felt cornered and powerless when law enforcement personnel began questioning me as the last of my mother’s life faded,” she claimed.
“I sought to console her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she ‘went away home,’ as we say in Appalachia,” she said. She also spoke about her experience in a series of interviews described as “necessary and pressed on me, drawing me away from the end of my mother’s life.”
Her piece condemns police enforcement for using “poor, outmoded interview processes and methods of communicating with family members who are in shock or trauma.”
In her essay, Ashley Judd proposed that “privacy in death is a more dignified death.” She continues, “There is just no compelling public interest in the case of my mother to justify disclosing the films, photos, and family interviews that were done in the course of that investigation.”
Ashley Judd concluded her post by saying that her mother “should be remembered for how she lived, which was with goofy fun, splendor onstage, and unending generosity offstage — not for the private circumstances of how she died.”
The Judd family filed a petition earlier this month, hoping that the police reports and recordings from the investigation into Naomi Judd’s death would be kept confidential from the media and the broader public.
Ashley Judd was in “clinical shock, active trauma, and severe grief” after her mother died, according to the paper. She did not want the recordings of the interviews to be made public.
It is difficult to mourn the loss of a loved one. Hopefully, everyone, famous or not, will have the heart to pay respect to people in mourning.