The Judd Family: Truth Be Told is a documentary two-part series, directed by award winning film director Alexandra Dean, born in Hampstead England and who fashioned her career in the United States. She has gained a reputation for at times taking on hard stories to tell and sometimes of people who were misunderstood or their accomplishments were understated. She has however been at the forefront of often telling the stories of women who helped shape our world, who far too often became the fodder for a bloodthirsty media whose appetite for sensationalism far outweighed their desire for fairness and reasonableness. Do you know that Hedy Lamarr, a beautiful actress was instrumental in pioneering the technology that launched the widespread use of cellphones and just about anything else that relied on what became Wi-Fi technology as well as redesigned the shape of the wings of planes. She took us behind the scenes with the women who once lived at the Playboy mansion and their difficult and heartbreaking stories. Alexandra Dean spent almost a year as the travel companion of Paris Hilton, while filming that documentary and now she takes us inside the Judd Family, the late Naomi, actress Ashely and singer / songwriter Wynonna. We would like to tell you this is a fairytale with an appropriate ending, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, because this is a very tragic story, but hopefully one that begins the long road to healing for those involved.

Alexandra Dean begins, “It (the documentary) was put together by Propagate Production Company and they made a deal with the estate. Then I went out to both daughters, Wynonna and Ashley. I asked them if they wanted to participate. Ashley wanted to participate, but she wanted to meet me and talk to me. We had a long conversation, before we decided to go forward. With Wynonna it took a while and she came onboard about halfway through the filming.”

Without revealing too much to our readers, we will let Alexandra Dean, continue to share as much as she is able, “Because of the pain that all of them had been through, I think that weighs heavily upon you when you are doing a story like that. It certainly did for me. It was also very beautiful, so that lifted it for me. All three of them tried to reach out in their own ways. I know that the way they treated each other and in particular the way Naomi treated her daughters, upsets a lot of people. I also think that her attempts to make up for it are very beautiful and that struggle to me is so human. I really felt for her and I felt for everybody. I think it would have been harder if I didn’t feel for them so much.”

Naomi, the mother experienced a childhood of abuse, of many kinds and was locked out her house, when still a teenager. We wondered if she ever developed the emotional skills necessary to be a mother to her own daughters.

“I think Naomi was very, very traumatized as a little girl. We learn through the documentary that she was sexually abused at the age of three. I think that does really terrible things to the psyche of a human and particularly when it comes to raising the next generation of little girls. Every part of their childhood was firing off this trauma response in Naomi. I think we can pretend to be experts in that kind of trauma response now, because we have all seen documentaries about it, but I think when you see it up close it is very hard to understand. I often notice when trauma is around, people are very judgmental. People don’t understand that response. If  a human is responding in a way that is weird or offensive to you, we always have to ask what is going on with that person. They didn’t have a typical childhood or a typical background. You have to unlock the reasons why they seem to be doing things that are offensive to you. It is often trauma and we don’t understand that still.”

Although, this is a story about the unbelievable music careers of Wynonna and Naomi, it is also much more than that for it is a story about generational PTSD.

(Quietly Alexandra Dean nods her head yes and says) “That’s why I did it. We don’t typically get (documentaries) about generational trauma. We don’t get trauma, but we really don’t get generational trauma, which is when that trauma is passed on and amplified over generations. That is something I thought was really interesting to delve into and to try and translate for our audience. If people are coming across it, they can recognize it and not be as judgemental and be more compassionate to people stuck in this cycle.

I went into the film and delved into Naomi’s life enough to realize that. I needed to do my research as much as I could to understand that. I started to understand what had happened to her and looked into her parents. I (began) to understand this generational trauma. This is an aspect of trauma that we really don’t know. That made it very important to me to do the documentary.”

One gets the sense while watching The Judd Family: Truth Be Told that Naomi Judd never stopped trying to prove to her mother that she was good enough.

“She never stopped trying to prove that to her mother. One of the great tragedies of this story is to learn how (frequently) Naomi bashed her head against that wall, from really the moment that door was locked when she got pregnant in high school. Her mother never opened that door again and Naomi bashed her head against it for the rest of her life. It is exquisitely painful to realize that.

In her book her mom asks to meet celebrities on the road and going to have her photograph taken with them and then ignoring Naomi after. She felt she deserved a lot from Naomi to compensate for what she “had been through with Naomi,” Alexandra Dean uses air quotes to add emphasis to the hypocrisy of Naomi’s mother’s attitude towards her.

As the documentary chronicles Naomi developed this what some might describe charitably as a mythical world about the Judd family life and others may more accurately describe as a fictious world, punctuated by outright lies. She saw it as a way to fashion a story that would appeal to the fans of Country music and play to the empathy of people in general, and it seems as their careers grew, so did the untruths. We wondered if perhaps there may have come a point in her life, when Naomi started to believe the fictious world that she had fabricated or at least wanted to believe the stories were true.

“All of the above. I think if a person gets into a pattern of lying about their lives for whatever reason and I do think you are right about Naomi and with her job, she was trying to package her and Wynonna in a way that would be irresistible and she did that. She was (also) of course dealing with this enormous trauma (hands spread wide to emphasize how great it was), so when she starts lying about her life and maybe sweetening it and making it a little more palatable for people and maybe sanitizing it, of course she starts to fall for that lie too.

I was talking to Bessel van Der Kolk, who wrote one of the most famous books about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, about children with trauma specifically. How children have this unbelievable ability to create new worlds and then just enter into them to escape trauma. As a result, I think adults who had trauma as children have a more permeable sense for fantasy narrative, both for the good and the bad,” she says.

As for how she approaches a documentary like this she says, “I have done six documentaries like this now and through talking to all of these people and many of them women and many of them in trauma I have developed a philosophy if you like (big smile on her face) and I know I am not always successful with it. I do tell people before we begin, my philosophy, so they can tell who they are dealing with. The philosophy is I think this kind of storytelling is immensely therapeutic, but only if you do it, as I visualize it, as crossing a bridge with me.  We have got to go through the whole of the story.  The person that I am talking to has to feel like they have gotten to the other side and gotten back to solid ground, because we are crossing treacherous territory. If I feel like I have left them somewhere treacherous and even if we are going to pick it up again a few days later I (sometimes) find they are having nightmares. It is because we have (experienced) this terrifying groundswell and that watery mess that so many people are trying to push down to survive. We haven’t gotten to a new narrative spot that feels solid to them.

Over the years I have had to tell my teams, the sound person, the camera people, look this isn’t  like traditional documentary filmmaking where we are going to just nail a few questions and then we are going to go (she claps her hands for emphasis). This is a little more involved than that and I tell them they need to take care of themselves. If they need to take a step outside and get fresh air, and take care of themselves that I have chosen them and I trust them. I am in this relationship with the person in the chair and we are going to get back to that solid ground, no matter what. That is more important to me in than the documentary at that moment.

I learned that, because I would be in these moments of great tension with this human being in front of me and I thought if I drop this egg, they are going to smash onto the floor with it. My crew would be saying you need to do this and I need to do that without breaking the egg. It took me a while to realize of course I have to tell them this whole narrative, before we begin. This is not like anything they have been through before. I have great friends on the set who help me to figure out exactly what to say. That was really figured out as a team and I don’t want to take credit for that alone.”

When subject matter gets dark or heartbreaking or tragic, we wondered out loud how Alexandra Dean takes care of Alexandra.

“What is lucky about this job is if the subject gets over the bridge to the solid ground, that is therapy for me. It helps me feel great about the whole process. It is really difficult to carry around the weight of these subjects and their psychological traumas. Sometimes I get irritable according to my husband (she smiles) and I can feel very heavy. If I feel we have gotten to the other side that lifts. I feel like I can make something of the narrative that ultimately will help them and it lifts even more. Getting therapy for me, is doing my job right.

As for whether or not the documentary provided and closure for Ashley, Wynonna and Larry Strickland, Naomi Judd’s husband, Alexandra Dean says, “I think it mostly provided closure for Ashley. Ashley really went through the process with me and she committed to as many days as necessary to do the interviews. I went back to Cambridge twice I believe and I also interviewed her outside Nashville. That’s what it takes to feel closure. You have to really commit to it. Larry committed to it and went through the process, but he was in such grief again that I don’t know if he has come as far as I wish he had. I would like to keep talking to Larry. I think there is more to go. With Wynonna I feel like she probably has a couple of more documentaries in her, before this whole thing is processed. You could feel Ashley shifting as we went. Part of Larry’s character and he probably feels that way about everything in life (is a sense of regret or remorse). He does question the past and he definitely does feel that way about his marriage.”

Were there things that surprised you as you were making this documentary?

“So much surprised me about this documentary. I was very surprised with how much I fell in love with Berea, Kentucky (the small town where the Judds lived for a short while) and the musical traditions there. It is so rich. I grew up in the U.K., so I am constantly being surprised by the United States and pockets of history and culture. I grew up in North London, Hampstead. I have always felt a kinship with Canadians, because of this mixture of being British and American.

It was wonderful to discover this world of music and pottery, textiles and everything that has come out of Berea. It is wonderful and then to see how that fed the Judds when they didn’t have a penny to their names. I just loved that and it is very inspiring to me. I think we are a money worshipping society and we don’t realize that really what we need is community and culture. That is what they found and it fed their souls. Ashley became an actress there and Wynonna and Naomi became a duo that would become the biggest duo of all-time in Country Music there, but without a penny to their names,” she says.

This is a story about how Naomi and Wynonna Judd changed the music scene in Country music and for women in music in many ways. It is about how despite a painful and at times horrific childhood and teenage years became a tremendous actress. One cannot help but think that exploring these lives and their stories would do anything other than impact the director Alexandra Dean.

“What I took away from making this series was the idea of grace. Ashley really displays grace in this story. She feels profoundly abandoned by her mother in her whole life and in an extreme way. From the age of fourteen she is left alone. She has huge anger towards her mother and anyone would, as a result. Yet, as her mother is in decline at the end of her life, Ashley is the one who is able to reach out and say I have forgiven you mom and I am sorry for any anger that I have felt towards you. Her mother crawls to her in that time and in grief is able to apologize to her for everything she has done. They are able to forge this beautiful relationship, where Ashley is more of a mother figure and Naomi is the child. We don’t really celebrate things like that and we say a child should never have to be a mother and a mother should never act like a child. That is not the reality of the world (she gestures with her hands) the world is messy, people are traumatized, people are wounded, hurt and scarred. Naomi was in that category and the best she could do was to be Ashley’s child, helplessly and to ask for forgiveness.

Ashley through the depth of her personality, was able to draw this strength from her motherless past and to give the mothering that her mother needed. That extended all the way to this difficult death that Naomi chose for herself. I was floored by the grace of the that, the grace of the forgiveness, the grace of the deliverance. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard about. The last part of the series is me just letting Ashley speak and doing almost nothing.

I really appreciate my mother in a whole new way (she laughs). My mother and I have never been closer. I think it has changed the way I mother my own sons a little bit. It made me think about it differently. Ashley taught me so much about forgiveness and that grace that I spoke about earlier. Trying to bring that into my relationship with the boys has just been great,” says Alexandra Dean.

Maybe this is a good place to stop. Alexandra Dean has a gift for telling the stories of women that need to be heard, but you do not need me to tell you that, if you have watched any of her previous documentaries. I am not a person who believes that our destinies, our future is predetermined, but I do believe the choices we make and the paths we choose determine our destiny and perhaps this is Alexandra Dean’s destiny.

Not to make any less of Wynonna Judd’s or Larry Strickland’s contributions to this series, but Ashley Judd has appeared in some outstanding films, but perhaps telling her story has made this the most important one she has appeared in yet.

One final word here, an editorial comment, if you are a woman and you decide to watch The Judd Family: Truth Be Told and if you have been a victim or sexual violence or abuse whether emotional or physical or you have come from a less than ideal family, we would suggest that you watch it with a close friend. Return to Our Front Page

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This interview by Joe Montague  published June 11th, 2025 is protected by copyright © and is the property of Riveting Riffs Magazine All Rights Reserved.  All photos and artwork are the the property of  Alexandra Dean unless otherwise noted and all  are protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved. This interview may not be reproduced in print or on the internet or through any other means without the written permission of Riveting Riffs Magazine.