Wynonna & Ashley Judd Reflect on Family Secrets, Childhood Trauma, and the Healing After Their Mom’s Tragic Passing

Country legend Naomi Judd wrote the uplifting anthem “Love Can Build a Bridge” — but it was her shocking suicide three years ago that finally helped build a stronger one between her daughters, Wynonna Judd and Ashley Judd.

“We love each other, and we show up for each other,” says Wynonna, 60, who shared the spotlight with her mother as one half of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds. “We don’t agree on much, but we support one another. We’ve had some tough conversations lately — about what we’re gonna do now that we have each other.”

Actress Ashley, 57, echoes the sentiment: “We don’t have to be congruent in order to have compassion. That’s a really important grace that family members can, hopefully, learn to give each other.”

For decades, Naomi fought a private, brutal battle with depression that she kept hidden behind her dazzling stage presence. Her suicide at age 76 came just one day before she was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame — a heartbreaking act that left both daughters shattered.

“That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside her,” Ashley explains. “The lie that the disease told her was so convincing — that you’re not enough, not loved, not worthy. Her brain physically hurt.”

In the aftermath, long-buried truths have surfaced — about pain, secrets and survival.

Both Naomi and Ashley were molested as children, though neither knew of the other’s trauma for years. Naomi once revealed that one of her earliest memories was of a sexual assault by a great-uncle when she was 3 years old.

“I grew up in a family of secrets,” she confesses. “I kept it all to myself.”

Ashley, in her 2011 memoir “All That Is Bitter and Sweet,” disclosed she was also molested — by a family friend — and endured a childhood surrounded by drugs and inappropriate behavior.

“She had no idea what I went through as a child,” Ashley wrote of her mother.

The deep emotional scars contributed to years of family estrangement. Though the sisters and their mother lived on neighboring properties in Leiper’s Fork, Tenn., they often went long stretches without even speaking.

“It was magical on stage,” Wynonna says in the new Lifetime documentary The Judds: Truth Be Told, “but off-stage…phew.” Their relationship, she admits, was “incredibly close — but incredibly complicated.”

Documentary director Alexandra Dean hopes viewers understand that Naomi’s life was defined by far more than how it ended.

“In fact,” she adds, “Naomi wanted each of us to figure out a better way to live.”

Today, Wynonna and Ashley are trying to do just that by honoring their mother’s legacy, not just with music or memories, but by choosing connection, even when it’s hard.

And maybe, they agree, that’s the bridge Naomi always hoped they’d cross.