Naomi Judd shot herself to death, daughter says

When Naomi Judd, the Grammywinning country music singer, died last month, her daughter Ashley Judd said she had lost her mother to the “disease of mental illness.” On Thursday, Ashley Judd was more candid, saying Judd 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.

AshleyJudd, an actor, told 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.” In the interview Thursday, she said she was visiting her mother at her home outside Nashville when she died. Ashley 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.

Ashley Judd said she had suffered “grief and trauma” since, and that it was important to distinguish her mother from her mental illness.

“Mom was a brilliant conversationalist, she was a star, she was an underrated songwriter,” Ashley Judd said.