Ashley Judd met with the man who had raped her in 1999 to talk about “restorative justice.”
During the Tuesday episode of the “Healing With David Kessler” podcast, the 54-year-old actress talked about the meeting. She said that they “ended up in rocking chairs by a creek together.”
The woman from Los Angeles said that she “didn’t need anything” from her attacker, but she was “very interested” in hearing his story.
Judd said that the man’s “deep regret and efforts to make things right” were “just gravy” since she had already “done trauma work” on her own.
“I wanted to tell that story because there are many ways to get over grief, and I thought it was important to let people know,” she said.
Judd has talked in public before about the fact that she has been raped three times. “All That Is Bitter & Sweet,” her memoir from 2011, was the first time she told her story.
In 2015, the actress from “Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood” thanked her therapist for helping her “finally speak” about the assaults.
“Nine years into my recovery, I can go further and say that my “story” is not “my story,” she wrote at the time in an essay for Mic.com.
“It is something that a Higher Power (spirituality has been very important in my healing) uses to give me the grace and privilege of helping others who are still hurting and maybe to offer a piece of education, awareness, and action to our world,” Judd said.
The former “Missing” star told Katie Couric four years later that she got pregnant because of one of her rapes. She was “thankful” to have a “safe and legal abortion” at the time.
“The rapist, like me, is from Kentucky, but he lives in Tennessee, so he has paternity rights in both Kentucky and Tennessee,” Judd said at the 2019 Women in the World panel.
“I would have had to share parenting with someone who had raped a child.”
Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline if you or someone you know needs help.
