Ashley Judd is sharing how she felt during her final moments with her mother.
She penned a personal essay that was published by The New York Times on Wednesday titled, “The Right to Keep Private Pain Private.”
Opening her essay, Ashley Judd reflected on the day her mother, Naomi Judd, took her own life.
“The trauma of discovering and then holding her laboring body haunts my nights,” Ashley Judd wrote.
She goes on to express her frustration with the “rampant and cruel misinformation that has spread about her death, and about our relationships with her,” saying it “stalks” her days.
According to Ashley Judd, she intends to “make the subsequent invasion of privacy — the deceased person’s privacy and the family’s privacy — a personal as well as a legal cause.”
The actress explained that family members who have lost a loved one are “revictimized” by laws that can release their private moments to the public.
“I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading,” Ashley Judd recalled.
The essay continues, “I wanted to be comforting her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she ‘went away home,’ as we say in Appalachia.”
Ashley Judd reflected on her experience with a series of interviews that “felt mandatory and imposed on me that drew me away from the precious end of my mother’s life.”
The piece criticizes law enforcement for “terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma.”
Diving deeper into privacy, Ashley Judd suggested that “privacy in death is a death with more dignity.”
Acknowledging that law enforcement are required to investigate a “sudden violent death by suicide,” she added, “There is absolutely no compelling public interest in the case of my mother to justify releasing the videos, images and family interviews that were done in the course of that investigation.”
Concluding her essay, Ashley Judd wrote that her mother “should be remembered for how she lived, which was with goofy humor, glory onstage and unfailing kindness off it — not for the private details of how she suffered when she died.”
Earlier this month, the Judd family filed a petition to seal police reports and recordings from the investigation into the death of Naomi Judd, as People reported.
The documents say that Ashley Judd was in “clinical shock, active trauma and acute distress” following her mother’s death and did not want the public to have access to the recordings of the interviews.
An autopsy report obtained by Fox News shows Naomi Judd died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
