Judd Family: Truth Be Told (Propagate Content, Lifetime Entertainment, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 11) at 8 p.m. I wanted to watch the third and fourth episodes of the Lifetime mini-series documentary Judd Family: Truth Be Told, and my husband Charles joined me for most of it as he had the night before. The film was divided into four episodes: the hour-long A Mother’s Smile, Why Not Me?, and Love Can Build a Bridge, and the 90-minute series closer Child of the Light. The story of Naomi and Wynonna Judd, the mother-daughter singing duo who took the world of country music by storm in the early 1980’s, and Ashley Judd (Naomi’s other daughter and Wynonna’s half-sister), who because she didn’t have a singing voice looked for another outlet for her creativity and found it in acting, has the elements of a classic American Gothic tale. Though “Judd” was the name of Naomi’s father, Naomi herself was born Diana Ellen Judd in Ashland, Kentucky on January 11, 1946. After a childhood during which she played piano in church (adding The Judds to the long list of major music talents – not only the great Black rockers who grew up in gospel music but whites like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton – who began their careers as children in church) and got molested by her great-uncle Charlie when she was only 3 ½, Naomi dated a high-school football player named Charlie Jordan when she was just 15. The inevitable happened and she got “with child,” giving birth to Wynonna – or, as she was called at birth, Christina Ciminella (getting the last name from Mike Ciminella, whom Naomi didn’t love but agreed to marry to avoid the intense stigma of being an unwed mother, which had caused Naomi’s own mother to throw her out of the family home) – on May 30, 1964. Almost four years later, on April 19, 1968, Diana Judd and Mike Ciminella had their own child, daughter Ashley.

What’s most fascinating to me about this story is that all three female Judds were molested as children; Wynonna got it from some of her mother’s boyfriends after Diana broke up with Ciminella and moved to Los Angeles, and Ashley was invited at age 14 to enter a modeling contest in which first prize was a year-long stint as a model in Japan. Alas, the “prize” included systematic sexual abuse from the man who was supposedly her agent, as well as similarly unwanted attentions from a number of other males in the entourage, including a Frenchman who out-and-out raped her twice. I couldn’t help but think of the controversy surrounding Sigmund Freud’s publication of a study indicating that 25 percent of all women were sexually abused as children, and his later recantation of that and his statement that women were merely fantasizing that abuse – which led him to the Oedipal theory and a lot of speculation about human sexuality and its effect on behavior that was trendy for quite a while until most of it was finally rejected. Based on stories like this one – and the number of real-life victims of childhood sexual abuse I’ve met (and not all of them women, either!) – I find myself wondering if Freud’s original statistic was in error in the other direction and it’s really more than 25 percent of women who were sexually abused as children. The miniseries was framed by the story of Naomi Judd’s sudden and seemingly inexplicable death by suicide (at least that’s the consensus view) on April 30, 2022 at age 76 just on the eve of The Judds’ induction ceremony into the Country Music Hall of Fame and a major reunion tour Wynonna had planned for them. (Wynonna went ahead with the tour anyway, still calling it “The Judds” and recruiting other, younger women country stars – Martina McBride, Kelsea Ballerini, Ashley McBryde, Faith Hill, Brandi Carlile, Little Big Town, and Trisha Yearwood – to take her mom’s place.)

I remember The Judds as a major phenomenon in 1980’s culture that transcended the bonds of country music, even though I can’t remember ever actually hearing one of The Judds’ songs. Among the people interviewed for the show were Wynonna and Ashley Judd, Naomi’s brother Mark Judd, Naomi’s widower Larry Strickland (whom she’d been dating when The Judds rocketed to stardom in the early 1980’s but who broke up with her when The Judds started getting famous – apparently he didn’t want to be in the position of “Mr. Judd” the spouses of such other famous countrywomen as Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton found themselves in – only to get back together and marry her as The Judds were just starting their inevitable descent in popularity), and various people who knew them, including fellow women country stars Martina McBride and Reba McIntire and Rolling Stone writer Alanna Nash. Alanna Nash had an unusual connection with the story; after having co-written Dolly Parton’s autobiography and while researching what became a series of books about Elvis Presley, she wrote for Rolling Stone because as a native of Kentucky herself, she was considered the magazine’s expert on country music and its performers. She wrote a scathing review of the first of Naomi Judd’s two alleged autobiographies, Love Can Build a Bridge, called “Country Crock.” In it she said that Naomi Judd had actually grown up in the middle class and had exaggerated her girlhood poverty to create a more down-home image for herself and her daughter. Naomi’s book contains an elaborate account of how to make soap from lye – something the real Naomi never did, though she’d been shown doing it (or at least faking it) on a local country-music TV show in Nashville by a host who also saw it as a way to help the Judd family build up a suitably rustic image. One can readily see why Naomi Judd kept up this pretense; she and Wynonna broke through at a time when the biggest women country singers were Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, who proudly proclaimed their statuses as a coal-miner’s daughter (Lynn) or a tobacco-farmer’s daughter (Parton).

One of the interviews with Wynonna contains her complaint that whenever she and Naomi were interviewed together at the height of their fame, Naomi would launch into a series of embellishments of the truth and Wynonna would be forced to go along with her mom’s increasingly outrageous fictions about their past. One of the features of Judd Family: Truth Be Told is the producers were able to access surviving cassette demos Naomi and Wynonna Judd had recorded in the late 1970’s, with just their voices and Wynonna’s guitar. The show featured sequences with Wynonna, Ashley and their uncle Mark listening to these tapes and being astonished by their quality, which was equal to anything The Judds recorded professionally later despite the low-fidelity equipment they were recorded on. The tapes also mostly included songs Naomi had written but were never recorded professionally by The Judds or anyone else, though before The Judds hit it big Naomi had sold a few songs to already famous artists – one of the established ways to break into the field – including a song called “Had a Dream (For the Heart)” which Elvis Presley recorded in 1976 as the “B”-side for his single “Hurt.” (Elvis’s version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYszKu5yE08.) The show also features interviews with both Wynonna and Ashley Judd as well as Naomi’s story mostly told in her own voice reading audiobook versions of her memoirs, Love Can Build a Bridge (1993) and River of Time (2017). The latter was subtitled, with grim irony, My Descent Into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope. I think one could make the case with Naomi Judd that Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder’s biographer, made with Marilyn Monroe: that in their cases therapy might actually have been counterproductive because it awakened long-buried memories both Marilyn and Naomi might have been better off keeping buried.

One of the grimmest tales in 4 ½ hours of documentary television full of them is Naomi’s reaction when Ashley returned from her year-long stay as a sexual commodity in Japan; she read the parts about the Frenchman who raped her twice and derisively referred to him as “your boyfriend.” I briefly wondered how a woman who’d been sexually abused herself (not only by the great-uncle who raped her at 3 ½ but one of her later boyfriends who wouldn’t take no for an answer) could be so monumentally unsupportive of her own daughter’s victimhood, but that’s how the culture of abuse keeps going. Even the women (or men) who survive sexual abuse are all too often told, directly or indirectly, that it was “your fault” and “you were asking for it.” One of the odder things is that not only did Naomi and Wynonna Judd look more like sisters on stage than mother and daughter, but Naomi frequently looked like the younger partner. This was because, instead of using alcohol or drugs to overcome the strain of fame, Wynonna used food. She was always a large woman and her mom looked petite by comparison, especially since mom dressed in a sexually alluring fashion and pranced around the stage while singing her backing vocals, while Wynonna looked frumpier and less attractive. One therapist met Wynonna when she signed up for a rehab program that, unlike most others, didn’t focus on just one sort of rehabilitation but took a come-as-you-are attitude. Wynonna in turn brought in Naomi because one of this therapist’s rules was to meet the immediate family and observe the dynamics between them to see what about their family dynamics was proving toxic to his main client.

Judd Family: Truth Be Told is a sad, bitter story of a monumentally dysfunctional family which sold themselves to America – or at least that large swath of it which listens to country music – as a paragon of mutual love, respect and support. And yet the musicians and others who traveled with The Judds on their tour buses all agreed that, whatever hostility was going on between them offstage, onstage they were not only perfect professionals but exuded a sense of togetherness and camaraderie. Whatever they were arguing about offstage, onstage they were totally on the same wavelength and ideal partners. And Wynonna Judd as a solo artist has had the same problems as the individual Beatles did after their breakup. According to her manager, Wynonna’s first album sold five million copies, her second a bit over half that, and her third a comparatively meager 1.4 million. Just about everything Wynonna did after her mom’s retirement was going to be invidiously compared to what they’d done together, both artistically and commercially, which is why after Naomi’s bout with hepatitis C that forced her out of the act, as soon as she recovered (with massive doses of interferon, then a highly experimental drug), on the rare occasions that The Judds were reunited audiences literally flocked to see them and buy tickets for their shows.