Several moths ago Ashley Judd shared on social media a remarkable moment in her recovery from a 2021 hiking injury in the Democratic Republic of Congo that left her hospitalized for nine days with life-threatening hemorrhaging, five breaks to her right leg and a paralyzed foot at severe risk of amputation. In a series of photos posted on Instagram in August 2023, the 55-year-old was hiking once again, this time in Switzerland. In the caption, she expressed deep gratitude for her health and to those responsible for rescuing her and racing to get her emergency medical care.
Photos By Larry Lewis
“It was a catastrophic accident,” recalls Judd. “With a lot of expert intervention in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I was medevacked from the Congo, and hard work on my part, my leg is healed.” Judd credits the “guts” of trauma orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Phil Kregor — who made the decision to debride her nerve, a procedure that removes dead tissue from older wounds having difficulties healing, an unorthodox move in cases of Judd’s type of injuries — along with several other top surgeons and a leading neurologist — for saving both her foot and her life.
Judd’s rehabilitation since has meant slowly easing back into physical activity. “The magic wand is a lot of walking, some swimming, a little bit of yoga,” she explains. She uses a stationary bike and spends time with her partner, who is Swiss, enjoying the Alps. “And I’m a great lover of American national parks. The Smokies are my home park. So I love being in the woods there.” This remarkable recovery not only highlights Judd’s physical fortitude but also serves as a powerful metaphor for her journey of personal resilience and emotional healing, themes that have profoundly shaped her life and mission.
Judd, the daughter of late country star Naomi Judd and half-sister of singer Wynonna, was born in California, but spent most of her childhood and college years in Kentucky and Tennessee. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting while working as a hostess. After a few television appearances, including a recurring part on NBC’s “Sisters,” Judd landed her first starring role in the independent film “Ruby in Paradise,” which went on to win the Sundance Film Festival and garner rave reviews and excited buzz for Judd. Before long, she was starring in blockbusters like “Heat,” “Kiss the Girls,” “A Time to Kill” and “Double Jeopardy.” In 2005 she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in “De-Lovely,” opposite Kevin Kline.
Judd was also one of the first celebrities to use their platform to openly address mental health, years before there was language or a national discourse about it. She spent 47 days in a treatment center for depression and other emotional issues in 2006 and candidly shared about the experience after. “I needed help,” Judd told Glamour magazine. “I was in so much pain.”
By publicly addressing her own struggle, Judd helped destigmatize the conversation around mental health and push forward its acceptance as a universal medical condition that affects all of us. Says Judd, “We all have it, we all go through periods of calm and peace and stability and feeling grounded and we all have times of distress and confusion. It’s such an organic and integral part of the human experience.”
Judd remains a dedicated advocate of mental health and will be the keynote speaker at the, Ruth & Norman Rales Jewish Family Services (JFS) Reflections of Hope Luncheon 2024 on Feb. 13 at Boca West Country Club, sponsored by The Boca Raton Observer. “I very much appreciate what they’re doing and their singleness of purpose,” Judd says of Reflections of Hope. “Our mental health is important throughout our life span. Our needs may look a little different but the fundamentals in terms of our need for connection, belonging, safety and purpose stay the same. I hope that those are some of the things we can share with each other as well as underscore that help is always available. Another real message that’s important to me to carry is [that] there’s support for family members who are in a relationship with someone who may have a mental illness.”
Judd’s mother died by suicide in April 2022 after a long mental health battle, just one day before she was due to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “When we’re talking about mental illness, it’s very important to be clear and to make the distinction between our loved one and the disease,” Judd told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in a poignant interview a month later. Wynonna and stepfather Larry Strickland (who the women call "Pop") deputized Judd to speak with Sawyer. “It is very real and it lies, it’s savage. Our mother couldn’t hang on until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by her peers. That was 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 that the disease told her was so convincing.” Following the tragedy, Judd re-enrolled herself in trauma therapy as part of the healing process.
Today, Judd continues to lead a life of service. Her humanitarian work includes advocating for global gender equality, the prevention of sexual violence and the reproductive health of girls and women. She was one of several high-profile women to come forward with accusations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, who was found guilty of multiple counts of sex crimes in New York and Los Angeles. Early on, Judd lent her voice to the #MeToo movement and was a founding member of Times Up, an organization created to fight sexual harassment in the workplace and promote gender equity. Recently, she visited Turkey in her role as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund months after a devastating earthquake displaced thousands of Turkish and Syrian refugees.
And of course, she still’s a dynamic performer. She played herself in the 2022 film “She Said,” a drama about The New York Times’ investigation of Weinstein. This past March she shot “Lazareth,” a thriller directed by Alec Tibaldi. “It was such a great experience,” she says. “We filmed on a nature preserve in Oregon. It’s an independent and an ensemble with a really unique story. It was great fun. It reminded me a lot of shooting ‘Ruby in Paradise.’”
“What I enjoy is the emotional richness and texture of a character and accessing my interior emotional life. The movies in which I’ve had the opportunity to do that with a lot of freedom stand out to me as performances that were gratifying to give.”
In addition to continued nurturing of her physical and mental health, Judd keeps a mostly vegetable-based meal plan, she says, “first for social and climate reasons as well as for nutrition.” Which isn’t to say she deprives herself pleasure. “I’m also one to go for the peach pie and four-layer chocolate pie. There’s a lot of pie in there.”
As 2024 begins, Judd looks back at both the sorrow and the joy of the past few years with an appreciation of the present. “Always be grateful for what one has. Whatever that looks like at different stages.”
