Wynonna Judd and sister Ashley are opening about their late mother, Naomi, in the new Lifetime docuseries The Judd Family: Truth Be Told.
The four-episode event kicked off on Saturday, May 10, with two episodes about Naomi’s youth and her early ambition to become a country superstar. “She loved that feeling that she got in that moment [of being on stage],” Wynonna, 60, said of her mom in the first episode. “It hooked her, and I think that became her drug of choice.”
While Naomi thrived as a performer, she battled mental health issues behind the scenes, and her daughters witnessed many of her difficulties. “Mother lived with a constellation of sufferings and with a secret,” Ashley, 57, said. “We’re only as sick as our secrets.”
Wynonna, meanwhile, admitted she didn’t know how much her mother was struggling toward the end of her life. (Naomi died by suicide in April 2022 at age 76.)
“One of the things I didn’t know is how much she struggled on the couch. That stupid couch, that’s where she spent a lot of time, and I did not know that,” she recalled. “I was so caught up in my own success and trying to keep it going and be that person. One of the reasons I have decided that Mom left this world is because of trauma, generational trauma. Family stuff that never got healed or fixed.”
Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations from parts 1 and 2 of The Judd Family: Truth Be Told. Parts 3 and 4 air on Lifetime Sunday, May 11, at 8 p.m. ET.
“[My grandma] Nonna knew how Mom loved an audience and wanted it so bad, and I think she judged her for it,” Wynonna theorized. “Mom was so looking for approval from Nonna that she could not ever get over that. It never got healed or fixed, ever.”
As Ashley and Wynonna explained, Naomi got pregnant with Wynonna at 17 and married Michael Ciminella, who was not Wynonna’s biological father but agreed to parent her. “She told [Michael] that he was the father, and he took on this role, I don’t know if happily is the word, but willingly,” Ashley said.
Naomi’s mother wasn’t happy about her daughter becoming a mother so young, which only made their difficult relationship even more turbulent. “Nonna was very hard on mom,” Wynonna claimed. “She was a son of a bitch. And if she didn’t like you, you were screwed. Mom tried to get her approval. It was painful to watch. ‘Your lipstick’s too dark’ or ‘you need to lose weight.’ Very strict, very harsh and very judgmental.”
Early Tension Between Mom and Daughter
As the older daughter, Wynonna felt she was saddled with different expectations than Ashley. “Mother was a good mother, she was just a young mother and didn’t know any better,” Wynonna said. “I wasn’t allowed to feel and to be more than ‘be quiet, sit up straight, don’t talk back, be seen not heard.’ I felt like I was responsible for a lot of the angst in the family. It was like, ‘You talk too much, you ask too many questions.’”
Ashley agreed, saying that her sister “started to get this rap at a young age that she was a little more difficult.”
As Wynonna got older, her relationship with Naomi only got more fraught, especially after they started singing together. “Mom lived very colorful in her way because that’s the way she was,” she explained. “You’ve seen the morning show where she’s swaying. I was so aggravated by her extreme movements and words and just the way she wore her makeup and did her lips and wore perfume. I was always introverted and she’s always extroverted, so those two, it works musically. Personally, sometimes it clashed. I could have said no. I could have said. ‘I’m not comfortable with that,’ and I didn’t, so that’s my role in all of this, being somebody who just kind of let things fly.”
Wynonna’s Relationship With Her ‘Dad’
Wynonna didn’t find out Ciminella wasn’t her biological father until adulthood, but even as a child, she felt something was off. “We lived with Michael Ciminella’s parents, but there was this disconnect between the Judds and the Ciminellas because I was born to two very young kids,” she said. “And everybody was pissed that my mom got pregnant. I think I knew that Michael Ciminella didn’t like me, and Mom didn’t really love him. So there was that disconnect as well.”
She added, “I don’t have many memories of Michael and me.”
An Abusive BoyfriendAfter her split from Ciminella, Naomi moved on with a man Wynonna described as a “really not healthy boyfriend” who her mom saw as a James Dean type. “The reality was, he’s not James Dean, he’s a guy who’s creepy,” Wynonna remembered. “I was old enough to know that something was wrong. I just remember being very, very aware of this man watching us in the bathtub and laying on top of me while I was watching television. My mom was not home and I became incredibly, incredibly protective of Ashley.”
Ashley, meanwhile, said he once “hung me out the bedroom window by my ankles” after he came home and saw the girls had colored on the walls. At one point, the boyfriend raped Naomi, who reported his abuse to the police, and the family moved back to Kentucky.
Ashley is a successful actress, but she says she never had any ambition to be a musician like her mother and sister. “Of course, in my own way, I was a part of everything. Because I was deeply affected by everything, but I wasn’t interested in being a part of the singing,” she explained in episode 1. “I mean, I had a fiddle and there’s a picture of me on that fiddle, and I look as miserable as it sounded.”
How Naomi’s Ambition Affected Her Daughters
Naomi’s pursuit of success meant that her daughters were often left alone, including once when Ashley was sick with chickenpox. “I just slept all the time. That was a bout of childhood depression. I didn’t know if it was night or day,” she recalled, noting, “My experience of my mom is a description; it’s not an indictment. Everyone was doing the best they could at the time, but I would say she was distracted.”
Wynonna, for her part, said she often felt like a parent to her younger sister. “I find myself going back to those memories of Mom having me do dishes and make the bed or fixing Ashley something to eat,” she explained. “I was not allowed to be a child because I was always doing something. I was really the adult. I was the spouse, if that makes sense. And once Mom cried because Ashley said, ‘I feel like Wynonna’s my mother.’”
Eventually, Wynonna began coping with food, which led to gaining weight — another topic that became a point of contention between her and Naomi. ”I knew I needed more, so I learned to self-soothe instead of attachment parenting,” she said. “And self-soothing became the reason I had an unfortunate relationship with food, because it was my soother. Whether it’s exercise, drugs, alcohol, we find something to soothe ourselves, and I found food. And it worked for me — and it did not work for me.”
Naomi’s Law is a proposed bill to protect the privacy of deceased persons and their family members in cases of suicide. To support this legislation, please email the policy and advocacy office of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention at [email protected] and mention bill SB009. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
