‘She used a firearm’: Naomi Judd’s daughter speaks about singer’s suicide

The daughter of late US country singer Naomi Judd has revealed during an interview on Good Morning America that her mother took her own life.

In an interview on the ABC news show on Wednesday 11 May, Ashley Judd opened up  about her mother’s tragic passing, saying that she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The 76-year-old musician who formed part of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds, died on 30 April, according to a statement by the family.

The actress and political activist explained that the family had decided to reveal the late singer’s cause of death in order to shed light on mental illness, Fox News reports.

“She used a weapon… my mother used a firearm,” Ashley said.

“So 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,” she went on.

On Friday 29 April, the Country Music Hall of Fame announced on its Instagram account that The Judds would join its ranks on May 1. The organisation said that this was for helping “take country back to its roots in the 1980s with lean, tuneful songs influenced by traditional folk music, acoustic blues, and family harmony acts.”

“Our mother couldn’t hang on until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by her peers… That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her, because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn’t penetrate into her heart, and the lie the disease told her was so convincing,” Ashley explained.

NAOMI’S BATTLE WITH DEPRESSION

Naomi had been open about her mental health struggles in the past. In a 2016 interview on Good Morning America where she discussed her memoir River of Time, she shared that she had battled “life-threatening depression,” explaining that the public may have not been aware.

“Because, they see me in rhinestones, with glitter in my hair. That really is who I am. But then I would come home and not leave the house for three weeks, and not get out of my pyjamas… It was really bad,” CBS News quoted her as saying.