Daughter Ashley Judd says Naomi Judd died of self-inflicted gunshot wound

NEW YORK • When Grammy-winning country music singer Naomi Judd (right) died last month, her daughter Ashley Judd said she had lost her mother to the "disease of mental illness".

On Thursday, actress Ashley Judd was more candid, saying in a television interview that her mother had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her home in Tennessee, and encouraging people who are distressed to seek help.

Judd, 54, told host Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America that she was speaking out about her mother's death because her family wanted to share the information before it became "public without our control".

Naomi Judd and her other daughter, Wynonna Judd, dominated the country music charts in the 1980s as the mother-daughter duo The Judds.

Naomi Judd died at age 76 on April 30, a day before The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In the interview on Thursday, Ashley Judd said she was visiting her mother at her home outside Nashville, Tennessee, when she died.

Judd said she went outside to greet a friend of her mother's who had stopped by, and when she went upstairs to tell her mother that the friend had arrived, she found her mother dead.

"Mother used a firearm," Judd said. "That's the piece of information that we are very uncomfortable sharing, but understand that we're in a position that if we don't say it, someone else is going to."

Suicides have historically accounted for a majority of gun deaths in the United States.

In 2020, 53 per cent of suicides involved firearms, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Naomi Judd lived in California before moving to Nashville in 1979, as a single mother with two daughters.

She supported her family by working as a nurse while pursuing a music career with Wynonna Judd, now 57.

Their break came in 1983, when Naomi Judd cared for a patient who turned out to be the daughter of an executive at RCA Records.

A record deal, nine Country Music Association Awards, five Grammys and 14 No. 1 hits followed.

Ashley Judd encouraged people in distress to seek help and cited resources, including the national suicide hotline and the National Alliance for Mental Illness, a mental health organisation that also has a hotline.

NYTIMES