Ashley Judd asks that police file on Naomi's death stays private

Decrying what she describes as a culture of insensitivity toward the families of those who take their own lives, Ashley Judd explained in an op-ed Wednesday why she and other survivors of the late country music star Naomi Judd want the subsequent police investigative file made private.

"Family members who have lost a loved one are often revictimized by laws that can expose their most private moments to the public," actor and activist Judd, 54, wrote in a New York Times op-ed, in reference to the self-inflicted gun death in April of her mother, who had struggled with mental health issues.

"In the immediate aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, when we are in a state of acute shock, trauma, panic and distress, the authorities show up to talk to us," Ashley Judd wrote. "Because many of us are socially conditioned to cooperate with law enforcement, we are utterly unguarded in what we say."

Because of this, she wrote, "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? 

Her op-ed placed no blame on the investigators, saying "the police were simply following terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma …. [L]aw 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."

While police reports generally are in the public domain, Naomi Judd's survivors last month   "filed a petition with the courts to prevent the public disclosure of the investigative file," Ashley Judd wrote, arguing that, "This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories."

She stressed they had done so "not because we have secrets. … We ask because privacy in death is a death with more dignity. And for those left behind, privacy avoids heaping further harm upon a family that is already permanently and painfully altered."

Naomi Judd died at age 76, a day before she and another daughter, fellow music star Wynonna Judd, were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.