Ashley Judd is opening up about a past rift with her late mother, Naomi Judd, sparked by a lesbian college professor.
On the debut episode of her new podcast, “A Table Prepared,” Ashley sat down with her co-host, former Christ Church Nashville Pastor Dan Scott. During their conversation, Ashley claimed that Naomi “threatened to stop paying my tuition at the University of Kentucky” over what she was learning, and also the professor’s sexual orientation.
“She didn’t like what I was learning,” Ashley said. “She didn’t like [that] I had a lesbian theologian professor that was taking me through Hebrew scripture and looking at the women listed as property after the donkeys.”
Ashley explained that her mother, who died by suicide in 2022, felt pressured to align politically with the country music industry out of fear of “disapproval and retaliation.” Behind closed doors, however, Naomi was much more open about expressing her personal and political beliefs “in the home.”
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“She could share all kinds of political and social views that would surprise people if they thought Naomi Judd thought, felt, said that,” Ashley said.
As an example of the issues that moved her mother, Ashley noted that Naomi felt “a lot of compassion” for women making headlines for harming their children.
“She would say they need help, not punishment,” Ashley recalled, adding that she wasn’t sure if Naomi “would have been comfortable in her lifetime saying that.”
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“I’ve debated with myself, is it okay for me to say that posthumously and attribute it to her? I’m still in relationship with my mother, and so I’ve asked her these things,” Ashley said. “I was up the other morning … and the part of my mother that lives in me said, ‘Honey, I told stories. You tell the truth.’”
In that moment, Ashley said she felt her mother had “passed [the] baton.”
Country music icon Naomi Judd died by suicide on April 30, 2022, at the age of 76, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her home near Franklin, Tennessee, where Ashley discovered her body.
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Her passing followed years of openly documented battles with severe, treatment-resistant depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, which she detailed in her 2016 memoir, “River of Time.”
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Tragedy struck just one day before she and her daughter Wynonna Judd were officially inducted as The Judds into the Country Music Hall of Fame. At the family’s request, her daughters still attended the ceremony after releasing a statement noting they had lost their mother to “the disease of mental illness.”
Following her death, Judd’s husband of 32 years, Larry Strickland, and her daughters successfully petitioned a Tennessee court to seal the police investigation records and autopsy photos to protect their family’s privacy.
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