Wynonna Judd says her mother Naomi talked about suicide nonstop before the country star’s 2022 death, describing a private collapse that left the family helpless and drained.
Page Six reports that Wynonna, now 62, made the remarks on a recent appearance on Anderson Cooper’s podcast, revisiting the final stretch of her mother’s life with plain, painful detail.
Naomi Judd died in 2022 at age 76 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her Tennessee home. She died one day before she and Wynonna were set to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Wynonna said the talk of suicide was not rare or sudden. It was constant.
Wynonna told Cooper her mother raised the subject again and again, including with a grandson who works as a deputy.
She described the pattern in direct terms:
"She talked about it a lot, even to her grandson who’s a deputy, about jumping off a bridge."
Wynonna said the conversations wore her down. She tried to push back with the life her mother still had in front of her.
"And she talked about it so much with me. I don’t know who else, besides [Wynonna’s sister] Ashley [Judd], but she talked about it a lot. And I think I got to the point where, ‘No, no. You’re not gonna do that. You have too much to live for.'"
The calls kept coming. Naomi would reach out and say she did not want to stay. Wynonna would drive over and spend the night.
"And she’d call me and say, ‘I don’t want to be here anymore.’ And I’d go over and spend the night with her. And it was awful. It was really awful. She was really struggling in the end."
Wynonna admitted she could not even place the first time her mother brought it up. The distress just became part of the landscape at home.
"I just remember thinking, ‘What is she doing? I don’t understand,’" she said.
Years earlier, Naomi herself had described the split between the stage version of her life and the one she lived off it. In a 2016 interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, she talked about severe depression that began around 2010, stays in a psychiatric ward, and a history of sexual abuse that started when she was three.
She told Roberts the audience saw rhinestones and glitter and assumed that was the whole person.
"They think, because they see me in rhinestones, you know, with glitter in my hair, that really is who I am. I’m sort of a fantasy ’cause I want to provide that for them. But then I would come home and not leave the house for three weeks and not get outta my pajamas, not practice normal hygiene. It was really bad."
She also said she and her daughter had been to therapy together, and that from the day she knew the child existed it had felt like the two of them against the world.
A toxicology report later obtained by Page Six found several drugs in Naomi’s system when she died, including medications used to treat insomnia and seizures.
Wynonna’s account adds the family-level cost. The Hall of Fame moment never arrived. The daughter who answered the late-night calls was left replaying years of warnings that never fully broke the spiral.
Country stardom sold an image of grit and shine. The woman behind it said she did not want to be here anymore, and the people closest to her could not talk her out of it.
Awards, spotlights, and packed houses do not fix a mind in free fall, and families still carry what the applause never touched.
