Ashley Judd on her fight to keep images of suicide private: ‘We can avert misery and death for others’

Actor speaks of the retraumatization she endured after some news outlets published images of the scene of mother’s death and her push to reform the state law that gave media outlets access

Even if she could do it in anonymity and privacy, the actor Ashley Judd would be struggling to recover from the suicide of her mother last year.

But a couple of sensational, insensitive and – experts say – dangerous tabloid media reports containing graphic details about Naomi Judd’s death forced the Grammy-winning country musician’s daughter to “double down” on the trauma counseling work that she’s done as she has grieved, she told the Guardian in an interview on Friday.

Ashley Judd explained how she had spent three months during last fall in outpatient sessions of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a physically and mentally taxing type of psychotherapy known as EMDR which involves patients moving their eyes in a specific way while they process traumatic memories.

It can take weeks, if not longer, for the therapy to relieve the mental distress associated with just a single such memory. And the actor known for her roles in Double Jeopardy and Kiss the Girls was done with that series of sessions when media outlets earlier in January published pictures of the scene of her mother’s death and the content of a brief Post-It note her mother had written.

Judd, who had unsuccessfully fought in court in her mother’s home state of Tennessee to keep those salacious details out of the public eye, has since said she needed to go back to EMDR.

“I re-enrolled myself … just to make sure that my healing was concretized and stout and was going to hold,” Judd said.

Judd’s revelation about her need to resume EMDR not only illustrates the re-traumatizing effect that an editorial decision like the one made by the outlets which chose to publicize the note and death scene pictures can have.

It also gives the public insight into what Judd is grappling with as she and her family push to reform the state law that gave the media outlets access to the information, which they hope protects others from having to endure something similar.

“The dark past, in God’s hands, becomes our greatest asset,” Judd said of the legislative effort she’s helped mount. “With it, we can avert misery and death for others.”

With a lengthy history of anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder, Naomi Judd died by suicide at her home during the morning of 30 April. It was a day before she and her daughter Wynonna were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville after a run that saw their duo – the Judds – rack up 14 No 1 hits, five Grammy wins and more than 11m album sales.

Ashley Judd found her mother on the day she died and called first responders for help without realizing that photographs, officers’ body-worn camera video and other evidence taken by police could be obtained through public records requests. Media outlets filed requests for that material, citing a Tennessee state law which they argued considered it a matter of public record.

Naomi Judd’s survivors, citing their rights to privacy, filed a lawsuit arguing that there was a provision in the statute which should have blocked the materials’ release. A local judge had ruled against the Judds after preliminary proceedings before the state supreme court sent the case back for a full hearing, but the family ultimately dropped the lawsuit in part because media outlets walked away from their requests for images of Naomi Judd’s body.

Nonetheless, other materials remained legally obtainable. And the outlet Radar Online published photographs of a large bloodstain at the scene as well as a Post-it note suggesting that Wynonna not be allowed at the funeral. Other outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and Sun newspapers, reported on one or both images.

Those pieces blatantly violated standards on how to safely and responsibly report on such a death, said Dr Christine Moutier, who is the chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

In its guidelines on how the media should report on suicides, the foundation says outlets should exclude graphic depictions of such deaths while avoiding details about their location or publicizing any notes left behind.

For one, suicide notes do not reflect what the people who write them “would be thinking or saying when they are in their baseline or more well state of physiological, cognitive health,” Moutier said.

Moutier added that the recommendations against publicizing the contents of such notes, along with graphic depictions of scenes where suicides happened, are rooted in research which shows that it can actually bring people who are at risk of dying like that closer to doing so.

Furthermore, an expert in psychological trauma who has worked with Ashley Judd since her mother’s death said it was “profoundly disempowering and retraumatizing” for those grieving a loved one who died by suicide to be reminded of that loss so callously and publicly.

“For these sensationalistic media outlets to just profit – you know, just draw clicks and sell ads based on [this] family’s suffering, and the images and the note and things like that – is … horrific journalism,” said Harvard medical school psychologist Jim Hopper.

But as she both works to overcome the trauma associated with her mother’s death and some of the objectionable media coverage surrounding it, Ashley Judd and her family have chosen to be what the world of psychology refers to as “wounded healers”, Hopper said.

Ashley Judd, for one, has called on all media outlets to familiarize themselves with and adopt the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s guidelines on responsibly covering newsworthy suicides to spare others from being treated how her family has.

“Each workplace should be held to the highest standards of decency, professionalism, respect and humanity,” Judd said. “When we know better, we do better, and the outlets that chose to publish in such a flagrantly depraved away were obviously … pandering to the crudest monetization of salaciousness.”

She declined an opportunity to directly comment on the editors who made the final call to publish the pictures of the note and the bloodstain. But she did say: “I do believe that I can’t hurt another person without hurting myself. And so if that is true, then on a spiritual plane, I believe that they’re hurting themselves, too, in some way.”

Meanwhile, Naomi Judd’s daughters and widower, the former Elvis Presley-backing vocalist Larry Strickland, have been advocating for a change in Tennessee law that would keep confidential many records pertaining to deaths under non-criminal circumstances.

The family’s attorney, Michael Shipman, said he was drawn to the case in part because his father died by suicide, and many who have gone through losing a loved one like that in Tennessee don’t even realize how much can become public and how difficult it could be for them if that happens.

Shipman said the Tennessee state senate’s Republican majority leader, Jack Johnson, filed a bill for the 2023 legislative session that would introduce limits on what is releasable in non-criminal deaths, protections that are somewhat similar to ones in place in California and Florida, which have relatively public records-friendly reputations.

It had not been brought before the legislature for consideration. But, Shipman and Ashley Judd said, they are hopeful it will pass because there has been bipartisan support for it, especially after some negative reader reactions to the tabloid reporting on the scene of Naomi Judd’s death.

Shipman, Hopper and Moutier lauded Ashley Judd for carving out the time and energy to lobby for the legislation as she manages her trauma therapy, professional career and responsibilities to her family.

But on Friday she downplayed her involvement. She suggested she was simply following an instinct that she knew she had when she was the lone named interviewee in the original October 2017 New York Times investigation that documented sexually predatory acts by movie producer Harvey Weinstein against women in the film industry.

The article that quoted Judd – who won a sexual harassment lawsuit against the since-convicted rapist Weinstein – helped kick off the #MeToo social justice movement.

“I have some precedent in my life from taking sharp pain – devastating calamity, really – and directing it toward purpose,” said Judd, who has described herself as a “three-time rape survivor” in public before. “It’s a decision that doesn’t require much decision from me.”

Ashley Judd also said that she hopes memories of how her mother died eventually give way to a renewed focus on how she lived. The actor said she got a reminder of that when she hosted a party for what would have been her mother’s 77th birthday on 11 January.

One of the guests was a woman who spent three weeks as a teen at a hospital where Naomi Judd worked as a nurse before her famous music career.

As attendees dined on cake, fried chicken and biscuits, that guest regaled Ashley Judd with stories of her mother’s “compassion, empathy and her sense of humor”, and how a man who was at the hospital for an extended stay fell in love with the nurse and woman who was born Diana Ellen Judd.

“I had never heard stories from the perspective of a patient of mom’s,” Ashley Judd said. “And it was just beautiful.”

This article was amended on 30 January 2023 to remove some incorrect personal details.

• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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