Ashley Judd has spoken about a past disagreement with her late mother, Naomi Judd, over a lesbian professor at the University of Kentucky.
On the first episode of her new podcast, “A Table Prepared,” Ashley told co-host Dan Scott, a former pastor, that Naomi threatened to stop paying her tuition because of what she was studying and the professor’s sexual orientation.
“She didn’t like what I was learning,” Ashley said. She recalled that her professor taught Hebrew scripture and examined how women were treated as property in biblical texts.
Ashley said Naomi sometimes felt she had to match the political views of the country music industry to avoid criticism or professional consequences. At home, she was more willing to share her personal and political opinions, Ashley said.
Some of those views, Ashley added, might have surprised people. Naomi felt compassion for women who made headlines after harming their children, and believed they needed help rather than punishment. Ashley wasn’t sure whether her mother would have felt comfortable saying that publicly while she was alive.
Ashley said she had wrestled with whether it was right to share her mother’s views after her death. She described feeling that Naomi had given her permission, recalling an inner voice that said, “Honey, I told stories. You tell the truth.” Ashley said it felt as if her mother had passed the baton to her.
Naomi died by suicide on April 30, 2022, at age 76, at her home near Franklin, Tennessee. Ashley found her body. Naomi had previously spoken about living with severe, treatment-resistant depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, including in her 2016 memoir, “River of Time.”
Her death came one day before she and daughter Wynonna were due to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame as The Judds. At the family’s request, her daughters attended the ceremony and said in a statement that they had lost their mother to “the disease of mental illness.”
After Naomi’s death, her husband of 32 years, Larry Strickland, and her daughters successfully asked a Tennessee court to seal police investigative records and autopsy photographs to protect the family’s privacy.
