Ashley Judd Calls For Privacy Protections Of Those Impacted By Suicide, Says She “Felt Cornered And Powerless” By Police On Day Of Mother Naomi’s Death

deadline.com:

In a heartfelt new column for The New York Times, actor and activist Ashley Judd is calling for revisions to law enforcement and court practices that “wreak havoc on mourning families” coping with the deaths by suicide of loved ones.Recalling the “most shattering day” of her life – April 30, 2022, when mother Naomi Judd “had come to believe that her mental illness would only get worse, never better” and “took her own life,” Ashley Judd says in “The Right To Keep Private Pain Private” that she “felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading.”“I wanted to be comforting her,” Judd writes, “telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she ‘went away home,’ as we say in Appalachia.

Instead, without it being indicated I had any choices about when, where and how to participate, I began a series of interviews that felt mandatory and imposed on me that drew me away from the precious end of my mother’s life.

And at a time when we ourselves were trying desperately to decode what might have prompted her to take her life on that day, we each shared everything we could think of about Mom, her mental illness and its agonizing history.”Earlier this month, Ashley Judd, sister Wynonna and Naomi’s husband Larry Strickland petitioned authorities in Tennessee to seal the police reports related to her death, with Strickland indicating he did not know the interviews were being recorded.Writes Ashley in The Times, “At the beginning of August, my family and I filed a petition with the courts to prevent the public disclosure of the investigative file, including interviews the police conducted with us at a time when we were at our most vulnerable