When we think of Hollywood, we think of luxury and glam, forgetting that not every celebrity was handed fame and fortune on a silver plate. Truth is that a number of celebrities had a rough start in life and struggled to get to where they are today.
Actress Ashley Judd is one of them. This Hollywood icon had a tough childhood, especially after her parents got divorced. Food wasn’t always on the table, and if they didn’t grow it or make it, they simply didn’t have it.
Her mother worked tirelessly to bring Ashley and her sister up in rural Kentucky where they often lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.
Eventually, Ashely’s mother, who worked as a nurse at the time, had her breakthrough in the music industry. And I’m sure you know who we are talking about, famous Naomi Judd. But at the time, that didn’t change much for Ashley who wrote in her 2011 memoir All That Is Bitter & Sweet that she was forced to change 13 different schools before reaching 19.
With her mother on tours, Ashley was shuffled between two sets of elderly grandparents and her substance-abusing father.
“I loved my mother, but at the same time, I dreaded the mayhem and uncertainty that followed her everywhere. I often felt like an outsider observing my mom’s life as she followed her own dreams,” she wrote.
In her memoir, she also revealed that she was sexually abused as a child by an unnamed member of the family.
“I was molested for the first time I remember at the age of seven,” she said when talking about her past while speaking at the World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Women and Girls in New Delhi.
“I experienced two rapes at the age of 14,” she added.
One of those rapes resulted in her becoming pregnant.
“As everyone knows, and I’m very open about it, I’m a three-time rape survivor. One of the times that I was raped there was conception and I’m very thankful I was able to access safe and legal abortion. Because the rapist, who is a Kentuckian, as am I, and I reside in Tennessee, has paternity rights in Kentucky and Tennessee, I would’ve had to co-parent with my rapist,” she said.
The actress has also described growing up in a “dysfunctional family system that didn’t work very well.” She remembered that her famous musician mother and stepfather, Larry Strickland, were “wildly sexually inappropriate in front of [both herself and her older half-sister].”
She added that, for instance, the sisters were made “to listen to a lot of loud sex in a house with thin walls,” which she now recognizes as “covert sexual abuse.”
Despite a very difficult childhood, the Ashley rose to fame and built a successful career. She went to college in Kentucky before moving to Hollywood with no connections, no training, and just $250.
She studied acting, worked as a hostess at The Ivy, and lived in a Malibu rental. In 1993, she landed the lead in Ruby in Paradise, a low-budget indie about a young woman escaping an abusive relationship. Her intense, authentic performance earned her the Independent Spirit Award for Best Actress.
In the late ’90s, Ashley Judd became known for strong, intelligent roles in films like Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy. Behind the success, she battled old trauma and sought help in 2005.
“I needed help,” she told Glamour. “I was in so much pain.”
“I was unhappy, and now I’m happy,” she shared “Now, even when I’m having a rough day, it’s better than my best day before treatment.”
After that, she focused on healing and visited war zones in Rwanda, Congo, and Kenya to be with victims of sexual assault.
In 2001, she married Scottish race car driver Dario Franchitti. The two didn’t have children, and Ashley spoke openly of the decision not to become a mother, saying, “It’s unconscionable to breed with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.”
The couple called their marriage quits in 2013.
In 2017, Ashley Judd became the face of the #MeToo movement after accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, including his infamous “Will you watch me take a shower?” request.
While she was blacklisted for speaking out, she decided not to stay silent.
Her battles with harassment began early; during her first audition, “[It] yielded a screen test and I was asked to take my shirt off,” and later recalled being “sexually harassed by one of our industry’s most famous, admired-slash-reviled bosses” on Kiss the Girls (1997).
Competing for a role, Judd refused to be pressured into exposing herself. She told the audience, “I said, that isn’t about our acting, that’s about evaluating a pair of breasts. And the answer was not ‘no’ but ‘hell no.’”
She still acts occasionally, her most recent role was in 2024, but has mostly shifted to activism.
On April 30, 2022, Ashley’s mother, singer Naomi Judd was found “unresponsive in her home by family.” Shortly after her passing, it was revealed that the 76-year-old died of suicide and that she left a note before taking her own life.
The official autopsy report stated, “[Naomi Judd] had an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound and was transported to Williamson Medical Center where she was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.” Further, it was revealed that Naomi’s family spoke of her intentions to claim her life in the past as she suffered from anxiety, as well as depression, bipolar disorder, chronic idiopathic pneumonitis, hepatitis C, hypertension and hypothyroidism, as per the NY Post.
Naomi’s lifeless body was discovered by Ashley herself.
Shortly after her mother’s tragic passing, Ashley appeared on Good Morning America and spoke of the pain the loss caused.
On the first Mother’s Day without her loving mother, Ashley said that she felt raged because her mom “was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl.
“My mama was a legend. She was an artist and a storyteller, but she had to fight like hell to overcome the hand she was dealt, to earn her place in history. She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world,” Ashley added.
Naomi gave birth to her daughter Wynonna a week before she was supposed to graduate from high school. Being a mother at 18 wasn’t easy, let alone a single mom. Her boyfriend left Naomi because he wasn’t ready to be a father so she was forced to raise her daughter all by herself. Some time after welcoming Wynonna into her life, Naomi met Michael Ciminiella whom she married in 1964. Four years after tying the knot, Naomi gave birth to her second daughter, Ashley Judd. Unfortunately, Naomi’s union with Ciminiella didn’t last long and she was once again left to take care of her children alone.
One day while on the job, Naomi met someone who helped change her life forever.
A patient at the hospital happened to be a man whose father was a record producer who arranged for Naomi and Wynonna to get to a live audition at the music label RCA in Nashville in 1983 and that was the start of something huge.
One thing led to another, and the mother-daughter duo became a sensation. They signed their first record and released their first album Wynonna & Naomi, as The Judds. The world became fascinated with the mother-daughter duo. They released number one hits and sold records for more than $20 million.
On January 2023, The New York Post shared an image that was allegedly obtained by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office and was a sticky note Naomi left before taking her own life.
The note read, “Do not let Wy come to my funeral. She’s mentally ill,” with the word “not” underlined. Wy, likely referred to Wynonna.
In an attempt to defend her mother and her sister, Ashley spoke of the note which she didn’t want published in the first place.
“Our family is deeply distressed by the galling, irresponsible publication of and ongoing requests for details and images of our beloved mother and wife’s death by suicide because of the trauma and damage it does to those who view such materials and the contagion risk they pose to those who are vulnerable to self-harm,” the actress wrote.
She then called out the publication that shared her mother’s note, and said, “this so-called ‘journalism’ is merely the crudest monetization of a family’s suffering and despair, and a flagrant, cynical disregard for public welfare.
“It is equally a deep violation of our right to a modicum of decency and privacy in death. We remonstrate media to take as fact the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s guidelines on coverage of suicide both for public safety and to avoid re-traumatization of survivors of such a devastating tragedy.”
Speaking of the note itself, and what was written on it, Ashley stated that those words “came from the complex disease of mental illness and not from her mother’s heart. We hope the public and elected officials now see, with us, the keen importance of strengthening and changing state privacy laws so that police reports in the event of death by suicide are not, in fact, public record. The consequence of the law as it is presently serves only the craven gossip economy and has no public value or good.”
Ashley then shared the details of a bill that has been adopted by Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson that is referred to as Tennessee Senate Bill 9. The goal of the Bill is to “limit access to death records, investigative reports, and 911 calls if no crime was involved in the death of an individual.”
“If passed, this bill will give Tennessee families the privacy they deserve without having to fight for it. Senate Bill 9 gives families the privacy that is critical for them to grieve appropriately, and it can be obtained without compromising the importance of government transparency,” Ashley wrote.
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