While holding her mother as she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Ashley Judd criticized police for treating her “like a suspect” during their interrogation. In an op-ed published by The New York Times, the 54-year-old actress wrote, “I assume they did as they were taught” about the officers who arrived while she clutched her mother’s “laboring body” and began questioning her.
Ashley, who found her mother after the suicide attempt, continued, “It is now well known that law enforcement personnel should be trained in how to respond to and investigate cases involving trauma, but the men who were present left us feeling stripped of any sensitive boundary, interrogated, and, in my case, as if I was a possible suspect in my mother’s suicide.”
When Ashley found her, she stated that all she wanted to do was “comfort” the musician since she could tell that her “life was fading.” She said, “many of us are socially conditioned to cooperate with law enforcement,” and that she considered it “mandatory” to stay with the officers and answer their inquiries.
“I gushed answers to the many probing questions directed at me in the four interviews the police insisted I do on the very day my mother died — questions I would never have answered on any other day and questions about which I never thought to ask my own questions, including: Is your body camera on? Am I being audio recorded again? Where and how will what I am sharing be stored, used and made available to the public?” the “Double Jeopardy” star wrote.
Ashley was also anxious that no details about Naomi’s death, including any interviews with family members, be made public. “This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories,” Ashley wrote.
A long battle with mental illness led to the singer’s death on April 30, her sister Wynonna Judd and daughter Ashley confirmed the news shortly after. “We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public. We are in unknown territory,” they stated in a joint statement.
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