Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673.
Wynonna and Ashley Judd admitted in a new docuseries they had a complicated relationship with their late mom, Naomi Judd, who also dealt with her own trauma on her road to success.
In the A&E docuseries “The Judd Family: Truth Be Told,” the sisters opened up in the first three episodes about growing up with a young mom, the abuse they experienced from one of their mother’s exes when they were children, leaving Los Angeles behind to move home to Kentucky and how Wynonna and Naomi found and dealt with superstardom in country music.
“I’ve loved her more than I’ve loved myself, but mother was both in love with me and terrified of me because I represented what she didn’t know and couldn’t control,” Wynonna said at the beginning of the docuseries.
Wynonna said she believes her mother’s suicide was partly to blame on “generational trauma” her mother experienced.
WYNONNA JUDD RECALLS LAST PERFORMANCE WITH MOM NAOMI: ‘SHE WAS VERY FRAGILE’
“One of the reasons I have decided that Mom left this world is because of trauma, generational trauma, family stuff that never got healed or fixed,” Wynonna said in the first episode of the show.
Growing up, Naomi Judd had a judgmental mother, her younger brother died of Hodgkin lymphoma as a child, and she was a teen mom when she gave birth to Wynonna.
Wynonna called the closeness with her mother a “blessing and a burden” because she felt “responsible for making her feel better.”
“As a child, she did not get what she needed,” Wynonna said. “That is a fact.”
But she admitted that she was “not allowed to be a child” growing up.
“I was the adult,” Wynonna said of her relationship with her mother.
Ashley added that their mother lived with a “constellation of her sufferings” that spiraled into severe depression before her death.
Wynonna said, from a young age, Naomi was always looking for approval from her own mother, who judged her for loving an audience as a kid, which Ashley said continued into her professional music career.
“It wasn’t about ego and grandiosity and self-importance,” Ashley revealed. “It was actually something much more humble than that. It was about basic self-worth.”
Naomi died by suicide in April 2022.
After splitting from their father, their mother met a man who Wynonna described as “creepy,” Ashley and Wynonna said.
“Mom had a really, really not healthy boyfriend,” she explained. “She saw him as James Dean. The reality was he’s not James Dean. He’s a guy who’s creepy.
“I was old enough to know that something was wrong. I just remember being very, very aware of this man watching us in the bathtub, and, you know, laying on top of me while I was watching television.”
Wynonna said their mother often wasn’t home, and she became “incredibly, incredibly protective of Ashley.”
Ashley said one time the live-in boyfriend discovered the girls had written on the walls, “and he hung me out the bedroom window by my ankles.”
Naomi wrote in her memoir about how he moved to an apartment across the street from them after she broke up with him so he could stalk her.
One night, she said, she discovered someone was inside her house. When she went inside, her ex grabbed her in a jealous rage, demanding to know if she’d been with another man.
“As he was raping me, I prayed he wouldn’t kill me because my kids needed me,” she wrote.
Ashley said she felt “abandoned” by her parents as a child, adding that everyone thought she was a “very capable child” and so “nobody needed to take care of me.”
Naomi’s widower, Larry Strickland said that while he was on the road touring with Naomi and Wynonna, Ashley was left alone.
“Ashley, I’m sure, felt left behind. You know, she suffered, she suffered because of that. It changed her,” Strickland said in the docuseries.
She moved in with her father in her junior year of high school, but she said he wasn’t home much and was using drugs as well.
“My hunch is the justification for abandoning me came from this belief that I was this very capable child … so nobody needed to take care of me. And both of my parents had those beliefs,” Ashley said.
She also remembered dealing with chickenpox by herself in a motel room when she was a young girl.
“Mom was working and then going out at night, so I was in this strange place with the chickenpox. I just slept all the time,” Ashley said.
Naomi had moved with the girls back to Kentucky at that time, but she was still struggling with nine-to-five jobs, before she and Wynonna found musical success.
“That was a bout of childhood depression,” Ashley said, referring to a disease she would continue to battle, much of the time unnoticed.
“I would just watch the commercials and get out the cleaning products that were advertised and just copy what I saw on television,” Ashley remembered of taking care of herself at the motel.
When she was 14 years old, Ashley was sent to model in Japan, where she said she was raped twice.
She said that when her mom later found out from Ashley’s diary about the assault, Naomi “sneered” at the idea, referring to the man who raped her as her “boyfriend.”
“But I was a little girl. I was not a participant. I was a victim. There’s no such thing as consent, and Mom and I had a lot of these conversations later in life,” Ashley said. “And her understanding of sexual assault and rape was not the perspective into which she grew and evolved. She just didn’t have that information and perspective.
“So, her reaction was to sneer at me. I was shut down. My own experience and reality invalidated and denied, which in her heart today would be a very painful lament.”
But she added that her experience of her mother is a “description not an indictment. Everyone was doing the best they could.”
Dan Potter, musical director for the Judds, said he understood why Wynonna struggled with her weight in her singing career.
“She was wanting to not be attractive,” he told the producers of the documentary. “Things happened to her that caused her to not want to be attractive.”
“I was molested at 12, so my whole sexuality thing was really stamped out because I, just at 12, really shut down,” Wynonna revealed. “So, I carried the weight, literally and figuratively.”
Her weight, which she said she put on because food became a “soother” to her like drugs or alcohol, became an issue after she and her mom found success as a country duo.
“Mom was very hard on me,” she said, “because she was terrified of losing me, of course, but she never would say it that way. It was always, ‘Well, if you lost 20 pounds, you’d be a pop star.’ I remember that conversation very well.”
Wynonna noted it was the same kind of thing her grandmother said to her mom growing up.
“That’s why I would get so angry because I knew it was being passed down,” she added.
She said her mother’s sexuality on stage when they performed together “so aggravated” her.
“She was 36 years old. She was ready to be fire,” Wynonna laughed. “As kids would say today, she had drip. She was foxy and ready to rumble. Man, she had the modes down, but then I was so aggravated by her sexuality.”
She added that she wished her bond with her mom could have been harmonious like their music, but “there was a lot of dysfunction.”
Strickland, who is also a musician, admitted in the docuseries he was “jealous as crap” of Naomi’s success early on in her career.
Naomi wrote in her memoir that after she found out that their song “Mama He’s Crazy” was No. 1, Strickland stood up and walked out the door.
“I was jealous as crap of her, you know,” the 76-year-old admitted of his late wife, “so we just kind of fell apart a little bit.”
Naomi described in a 1987 interview played in the docuseries that Strickland “left me” when he found out that “Mama He’s Crazy” had gone No. 1. “But we’re back together now.”
Naomi wrote in her memoir that she met Strickland in 1979 when his gospel group, The Stamps Quartet, walked into the building where she was a secretary in Nashville.
The group had toured with Elvis Presley for the last three years of his life.
“I mean, it was almost a love at first sight kind of thing,” Strickland said of Naomi in the docuseries.
He said they didn’t have any money at that time, and he’d started his own band, Memphis, which toured around the country playing clubs.
“I was trying to find my way,” he said. “Naomi, she was the breadwinner. We were dirt poor. It was trying times, very trying times.”
Strickland said Naomi would work during the night at her new job as a nurse, and she would knock on doors on Nashville’s Music Row during the day.
“So, she was doing it all,” he said.
“Only a handful of people make it through [into the industry],” he added.
After years of hard work, Naomi and Wynonna got their big break after meeting Nashville producer Brent Maher at her nursing job and signing with RCA Records in 1983.
“If you can imagine all of those years of Naomi fighting the fight, all of the meetings, all of the ‘no’s, it had to be staggering,” Maher said of when they signed with RCA.
Naomi wrote in her memoir that, one night, while she and Wynonna were on the road, Strickland called long distance.
“He wanted to change his life,” she wrote of Strickland. “‘I’m getting off the road. I love you, so I’m asking you to marry me. What’s your answer?’”
“I was just being funny, but I said, ‘How would you like to be buried with my people?’” Strickland told the producers of the docuseries. “That’s an old saying.”
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Naomi wrote in her memoir of that time, “We’d had the greatest year of our entire lives, not only professionally but personally as well.”
Strickland and Naomi wed in 1989 and remained married until her death in 2022.
