These are some new photos of Ashley Judd promoting her book yesterday in New York. As you can see, Ashley’s makeup is all kinds of wrong. Bad makeup situations and not blending is something I excuse in younger ladies, young women who don’t know the basics of makeup application, and perhaps don’t have the best makeup artists on call. But Ashley Judd is an old hand at this junk, the red carpets, being photographed, etc. Surely she would have noticed the makeup disaster? Surely someone would have told her, right? But I’m guessing everybody there was too afraid to say anything.
CB covered parts of the Ashley Judd story here and here. I’m not going to cover my take on this situation because CB says I’m too negative and I’ll alienate people. I suppose that as a group, we’re not all going to come to an agreement on this, and maybe we should applaud Ashley for making us discuss real issues instead of, like, fashion or who is boning what. Ashley too is bewildered by the controversial reactions to her book. I know this because despite Ashley’s best efforts to remain “abstinent” from the press, she’s has given many, many interviews to promote her book. She tells E! News that the response to the book has “been a little bewildering to me… My poor mother, who’s incredibly witty and so quick with a quip, she’s probably regretting she said ‘We put the fun in dysfunctional.’” She also blames the media: “They put disproportionate emphasis on the fact that we had a family system that didn’t work very well and the kinds of the things that happen in those family systems happen to all of us.”You can read more here.
On a more superficial note, CB and I (and all of you) have been debating about what Ashley has done to her face. Some of you think it’s a full facelift, but CB and I are thinking it’s fillers. In these photos especially, her cheeks looks super-jacked.
Ashley Judd was on the Today Show this morning promoting her new memoir, All That is Bitter and Sweet. We covered some advance details yesterday, as told by The National Enquirer. According to the Enquirer, Ashley writes that she was groped by a stranger as a child, raped as a teen, and came up with “recovered memories” in therapy that she had been molested by a family member during childhood and had suppressed it. Now I get that she would be upset that the press is taking the most horrific parts of her past and sensationalizing them out of the context of her life story. Still, she came across as very haughty right off the bat. She redeemed herself a little toward the end though.
Let me just first separate my opinion of Ashley as a person from the fact that she’s revealing the terrible things she went through. I respect that she’s sharing her experiences and trying to lift the stigma from sexual abuse. That must take a lot of courage. That doesn’t mean I find her in any way likable though. After seeing that interview, I’m inclined to believe all the diva stories I’ve heard about her.
Here’s what she said to start, and it made my mouth hang open. Like, how arrogant can she be? She was on the Today Show promoting her book and claiming at the same time that she wasn’t doing press for it. She didn’t even add “except for this interview.” She also used a lot of big words that sounded like nonsense. She’s like the white female version of those prison dudes on In Living Color. She immediately launched into this diatribe which didn’t make much sense at first. I got it after a while but it was so pretentious.
I made a decision actually to be completely abstinent from all press about the book, because I’m really powerless of what the media does with it. And I started writing diaries in order to commemorate the sacred narratives with which I was being entrusted when I began visiting brothels and slums and forcibly displaced person’s camps and I wanted to share with the world the stories that, however improbably, were being entrusted to me. And then I also needed to write to process because I was being so staggered by the realities with which the majority of the people with whom we share our fragile planet live. And I didn’t know where to put it, like I didn’t have place in my brain or in my heart so I started putting it on the page.
Then I also wanted to talk about the effective and very inexpensive grassroots solutions that I was seeing. So all of a sudden 13 countries later and 650 pages of diaries there was a book in there, but I was really encouraged by people I trust to include some of my own story, because why I love this work really baffled people, so eventually I put it in there.
Then like a minute and a half later Meredith Viera finally got a word in edgewise to ask Ashley about some of the revelations in her book. Meredith asked her why she included the difficult parts of her childhood.
Ashley said that she had a good relationship with her parents now and that “the kinds of things that happened to me are very typical and standard and indicative of a family system that doesn’t work very well.” She said she recovered in 2006 through the help of therapy (her therapy was AA recovery based) but it was like she was lecturing Meredith. She was so haughty about it. She used a bunch of very pat AA explanations, like she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and she was “powerless over my childhood,” her life was “unmanageable.” Her issue was being in an alcoholic family, not being an alcoholic specifically, but whatever. I’m sorry she went through all this, but there’s no excuse for being so insufferable.
Toward the end Ashley started crying when she talked about her charity work. It was like she thought she was just this amazing person who was changing so many lives. “I happen to really love the God of my understanding… I was taking a walk and having a talk with God going ‘This is absolutely amazing that I, who very much played the lost child in this family system, would have the opportunity to travel all over the world and sit with and hold and love and encourage people who are pretty lost. And our global family system is absolutely remarkable. While the conditions in which I was raised were very different, I identify…. That’s what matters.”
Good for Ashley for doing charity work. It just seemed like she was patting herself on the back the whole time. At the end she answered a question about being molested as a child, and her answer was surprisingly to-the-point and very well put. I like what she said here but it doesn’t erase all the crap she spouted up until this point.
“It’s not that I repressed, it’s that I didn’t know… I was groomed. They put their shame on me. I’ve given those SOBs back their shame.”
If that’s the takeaway from this interview and her book then she’s doing a very good thing. It’s been a long time, if ever, since I’ve seen an interview with someone so pretentious though.
A few of you commented on our Reese Witherspoon People Magazine story that you were interested in hearing about Ashley Judd’s upcoming memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet, which is included as an inset item on the cover. We heard some advance details in this week’s National Enquirer, and I initially gave it a pass as I hate reporting on sexual abuse. Plus I don’t particularly care for Ashley after some of the things I’ve heard about her. (Read the comments on that linked story.) According to the Enquirer, Ashley writes that she was abused as a child by an older stranger and that no one believed her, that she was raped as a teen, and that she was a victim of sexual abuse from an unnamed relative but didn’t remember it until the memories came up when she was in therapy. It all sounds pretty harrowing.
While her ambitious mother Naomi and sister Wynonna traveled across America trying to make it big as country singers, Ashley says she went to 13 different schools between the ages of 5 and 18, growing up feeling unloved and unwanted.
Her mother and father Mihcael Ciminella, divorced when Ashley was 4, and Ashley admitted that as early as 7 she began suffering from depression.
The first of many sexual assaults that Ashley endured occurred when she was still a little girl living in Kentucky, where Naomi had moved the family following her divorce.
Ashley recalls in graphic detail being pulled into a dark, empty store by an older man who offered her a quarter to play a pinball machine.
She remembers vividly how he grabbed and groped her and stuck his tongue in her mouth. She was able to fight him off – but afterwards when she tried to tell adults what had happened, she was devastated when no one believed her!
Later, when Ashley moved back to Tennessee with her mother, the 42 year-old actress writes that Naomi’s volatile relationships with men were profoundly disturbing to her.
Ashley said that as a child she was exposed to inappropriate sexuality, loud sex in the next room, and witnessed her mother in epic fights with men, including one during which Naomi pulled a gun.
Ashley recalled playing with that weapon at a young age, loading bullets into the chamber, giving it a spin, cocking the trigger and holding it to her temple!…
When she was still in high school, the teen won a modeling competition with the prize of a two month contract in Japan. What appeared to be the break of a lifetime turned into a nightmare.
During the modeling gig, she endured the unwanted advances of one of the bosses and a male model tried to force her to perform oral sex. One day the young model accepted a ride from a Frenchman who raped her in his car…
In the book, Ashley explains that when her older sister Wynonna went into rehab for compulsive overeating in 2006, Ashley realized that she needed counseling as well for her own issues. In an effort to finally get help, she checked into Shades of Hope rehab center in Buffalo Gap, Texas.
During her 42 day stay, Ashley wrote that her treatment revealed suppressed memories of childhood incest she suffered at the hands of a relative. She does not name the family member in the book.
[From The National Enquirer, print edition, April 11, 2011]
That’s just awful. I’m not a firm believer in suppressed memories. From what I understand it is a real phenomenon though and there have been repressed memories that have been verified as true from details given by victims. There’s controversy over the topic due to the fact that some memory “retrieval” has been prompted or planted by therapists and has led to false accusations.
Getting back to Ashley Judd, that’s really terrible all those things happened to her and maybe she hopes to help other victims. I question why she’s coming out with a memoir though. The last thing I saw her in was Tooth Fairy and that was the only movie she had out last year. Her career has pretty much stalled in the past few years, and if those diva stories are accurate we may know why.
I came across some of these hilariously bitchy (and true!) quotes from Jason Patric, 44, in the latest issue of OK! Magazine. (The one with the Bachelor split on the cover. Let me know if any of you care enough to have us report on that at some point.) Theses quotes are in an interview from over a week ago, but they’re new to me and are so good I just couldn’t pass them up. Patric, who you might remember from Lost Boys, is working on Broadway now and he really dished to NY Magazine’s Vulture blog. He ripped on how manufactured Lady Gaga is, called Ashley Judd a “lazy and arrogant actress” and talked about his relationship with Julia Roberts after she broke up with his buddy Kiefer Sutherland and the tabloids. There were a ton of good quotes in there, and he even brought up the Brangelina crap.
On how he supposedly decided against being a big star
I chose not to become a movie star for movie star’s sake at a time when there weren’t a lot of movie stars and that opportunity was presented to me. After the success of something like Lost Boys with Kiefer, I didn’t choose to keep making those movies. I mean, I made Rush when I was 24 years old. Shocks me when I look back it. I mean, 24 … kids are still in high school these days. Before I did Narc, I hadn’t worked in three years. I just didn’t find things I wanted to do. I had just produced Your Friends and Neighbors, which was exhausting and good, and I didn’t find anything worth working on for three years. That’s suicide in this business because you have to remain in the forefront of people’s minds and certainly onscreen, but I didn’t care about that. Early, the movies I was interested in, people’s work is what propelled their career. That has changed vastly, immeasurably. It started to change when I started and now it absolutely makes no sense of difference whatsoever. Doesn’t matter if you have talent. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done before and, frankly, the people with a lot of talent don’t give a shit if they make crappy movies for money because it’s actually more respected than their better movies.
On working with Ashley Judd on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
I said I wasn’t coming back to Broadway unless I had more input and creative control. Look, you get to do Tennessee Williams on Broadway every twenty years of your life. And I loved playing the role and I loved the majority of my cast, but I had issues with the producers, I had issues with the director. I loved saying the words and working with most of the people every night. I didn’t like my leading lady. Ashley is just a lazy and arrogant actress. Let’s just leave it at that.
On Lady Gaga
This Lady Gaga is absolutely preposterous. This is, what? You take a shit in a Cuisinart and put some pasties and get Auto-Tuned and look who I am. Well nothing, you’ve been marketed, that’s all. If I was a musician maybe I’d get angry about it, but it’s just like, what? Again, just turn the page.
On his friendship with Kiefer Sutherland
I had not seen him in over twenty years, and about a year ago he called me and we had some drinks because he wanted to talk … he had just finished a show and he said I want to do some good stuff, I want to do some different stuff, good stuff that pushes me. He just wanted to talk to me because he said you always make unique choices. That made me laugh. And he wanted to talk about theater. We had a night talking, drinks, and I said yeah, well, if something comes up I’ll let you know, and eight months later I was like, You know what? Kiefer might be good in this thing. This year it will be like 25 years; we haven’t worked together in 25 years.
On the tabloids Q: What about your mutual tabloid fame. You dated Julia Roberts right after he did, just after she was supposed to marry him, and then you two took off for Ireland.
All that stuff is made up, if you even go back there to all the archives you’re never gonna see any comment by me. It’s not like today, where Jennifer Aniston says this happens and Angelina says that and people give quotes. I don’t give quotes about anything. And everything that happened was all fake and bullshit and let them give quotes about whatever they want. Obviously people are gonna ask. They had a relationship that ended and I was with her for a little while and it ended. They’ve both been subsequently married several times and I think they’re fine. But we never had any issue, even back then.
Q: Do you guys ever goof about it now?
Oh yeah, we look at it is as a goof because we know all the bullshit of the tabloids and how all this is created and people Do. Not. Care. About it. The truth is, I don’t know these editors of these magazine, so they honestly think we care about Brangelina? We don’t. Not just me, nobody cares. No. Body. Cares.
People care about Brangelina, just not the people in his circle in New York city. Patric said that he’s still single and might settle down at some point, but that he never really wanted to because he was so focused on his career. At least that’s how I interpreted his comments. He talks so much smack that it’s hard to know exactly what he means. Some commenters on this story are noting that he sounds bitter as hell, and I get that too. Maybe he’s always been like this though, which would explain why his career never quite took off. That would also explain why he’s trying to portray it as some sort of noble personal choice that makes him superior to the actors who “sold out” and are living the easy life. I’ll say something nice – It must be a bitch to deal with all the phonies and leaches in Hollywood, even for people who aren’t curmudgeons and try and be team players.
Jason Patric is shown on 3/6/11 and 1/18/11. Credit: WENN.com
Ashley Judd is one of those relatively low-key stars that I enjoy. She seems to have settled into a relatively quiet life in Tennessee with her husband, race car driver Dario Franchitti. And Ashley’s got goals bigger than the occasional film role. She was just accepted into a master’s program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, aimed at “mid-career professionals.”
Congrats to Ashley Judd, who somehow manages to be an Angelina Jolie-style without making a scene of it, Angelina Jolie-style. The actress has enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) program. The MC/MPA is designed to “increase the knowledge and skills of well established, high-performing professionals, who seek to enhance their public service careers or to move from the private sector to a leadership position in either the public or non-profit sectors.”
Former program graduates include Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Ashley Judd may not be elected valedictorian, but her classmates will definitely vote her “Easiest Name to Pronounce.”
I wonder what she’s planning on doing with this degree? According to Wikipedia, Ashley has a long history of being involved with charitable causes. They noted that she’s the “Global Ambassador for YouthAIDS, an education and prevention program of the international NGO Population Services International (PSI), promoting AIDS prevention and treatment.” Perhaps Ashley wants to take on a bigger role in the non-profit sector. It’s definitely an unusual route for an actress to take, and I’m excited to learn what her ultimate goal is.
Here’s Ashley attending the wedding ceremony of Salma Hayek and Francois Henry Pinault in Venice on April 25th. Images thanks to INF Photo.
Severe warning on this video: Wolves are shown dead and being killed. Do not watch it if you are sensitive to seeing animals being killed.
Ashley Judd stars in a new video for the Defenders Action Fund, in which she speaks out against the brutal practice of “aerial killing” advocated by Alaskan governor and former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Aerial killing is a practice in which private citizens are issued permits to shoot wolves and even bears from planes and helicopters, with the justification that they’re controlling the predator wolf population and helping save the elk, moose, and caribou that wolves feed on. Animal rights advocates say that the elk, moose and caribou numbers are underestimated and that it is cruel and unnecessary to kill wild animals like this.
Judd’s video is understandably sensational. This story in Salon is a little more measured account of the controversy over aerial killing:
The controversy over Palin’s promotion of predator control goes beyond animal rights activists recoiling at the thought of picking off wolves from airplanes. A raft of scientists has argued that Palin has provided little evidence that the current program of systematically killing wolves, estimated at a population of 7,000 to 11,000, will result in more moose for hunters. State estimates of moose populations have come under scrutiny. Some wildlife biologists say predator control advocates don’t even understand what wolves eat.
it is not hard to find Alaskans who say Palin’s enthusiasm for predator control fits a broader narrative of how she edits science to suit her personal views. She endorses the teaching of creationism in public schools and has questioned whether humans are responsible for global warming.
In 2007, she approved $400,000 to educate the public about the ecological success of shooting wolves and bears from the air. Some of the money went to create a pamphlet distributed in local newspapers, three weeks before the public was to vote on an initiative that would have curtailed aerial killing of wolves by private citizens. “The timing of the state’s propaganda on wolf control was terrible,” wrote the Anchorage Daily News on its editorial page.
“Across the board, Sarah Palin puts on a masquerade, claiming she is using sound management and science,” says Nick Jans, an Alaskan writer who co-sponsored the initiative. “In reality she uses ideology and ignores science when it is in her way.” The initiative was defeated last month.
Gordon Haber is a wildlife scientist who has studied wolves in Alaska for 43 years. “On wildlife-related issues, whether it is polar bears or predator controls, she has shown no inclination to be objective,” he says of Palin. “I cannot find credible scientific data to support their arguments,” he adds about the state’s rationale for gunning down wolves. “In most cases, there is evidence to the contrary.”
Last year, 172 scientists signed a letter to Palin, expressing concern about the lack of science behind the state’s wolf-killing operation. According to the scientists, state officials set population objectives for moose and caribou based on “unattainable, unsustainable historically high populations.” As a result, the “inadequately designed predator control programs” threatened the long-term health of both the ungulate and wolf populations. The scientists concluded with a plea to Palin to consider the conservation of wolves and bears “on an equal basis with the goal of producing more ungulates for hunters.”
Apparently Palin wasn’t fazed. Earlier this year she introduced state legislation that would further divorce the predator-control program from science. The legislation would transfer authority over the program from the state Department of Fish and Game to Alaska’s Board of Game, whose members are appointed by, well, Palin. Even some hunters were astounded by her power play.
The legislation would give Palin’s board “more leeway without any scientific input to do whatever the hell they basically wanted,” Mark Richards, co-chair of Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, wrote in an e-mail. The legislation is currently stalled in the Alaska state Senate.
The Defenders Action Fund has launched EyeOnPalin.com, a website to focus on Palin’s voting record and what they call her “extreme anti-conservation agenda.” Now that Palin is out of the spotlight, they want to continue to highlight the way she’s hurting Alaska’s wildlife with her policies.
I have always wondered what happens when you are filming a movie in a hospital and you get sick. Thanks to Ashley Judd’s sudden bout of appendicitis, I now know what happens.
The actress was shooting new movie Helen in Vancouver, Canada when an acute attack of the illness led to a collapse on set at Ridge Meadows Hospital on 25 November (07).
Judd was immediately admitted to the same medical centre and underwent emergency surgery to remove her diseased appendix.
A source tells the National Enquirer, “Luckily, the cast and crew were filming at a real hospital, so when paramedics arrived, they simply put Ashley on a stretcher and wheeled her into an operating room nearby.” While Judd recovers, production on Helen has been halted.
But when you film at a real hospital, what happens to the real patients? I guess they just get moved out of the way into other wards.
Ashley is the latest celebrity to release an el cheapo clothing range, for U.S. department store Goody’s.
Ashley says: “At first, I wasn’t interested. In my view there is already enough stuff in the world, but when they told me it would raise funds for schools, I changed my mind. “Our schools are in dire need. With my eco-friendly, moderately priced clothes, Goody’s will give away a half a million dollars to schools in need. And that’s just the first year.”
Isn’t Ashley Judd almost the least likely candidate to design a clothing line? Her only real connection to fashion is that yes, she wears clothes. I’d hardly call her a style icon in the same vein as Sarah Jessica Parker or Kate Moss. Just about anyone can put out a range of clothes now, so I’m getting hopeful maybe I could put out my own range. Probably not unless I sew it myself.
Picture note by Celebitchy: Ashley Judd is shown with Padma Lakshi at the YouthAIDS Gala: Faces of India benefit on 11/2/07, thanks to WENN. Her face looks really pinched to me.
In this month’s issue of Glamour, Ashley Judd did her duty as a B-list celebrity and revealed potentially embarrassing details about her personal life. She said that she underwent in-patient treatment for depression after succumbing to pressure from employees at the facility that was treating her sister, country star Winona Judd, for a food addiction:
Ashley Judd says she spent 47 days in a Texas treatment facility for depression and other emotional problems, in an interview in Glamour magazine.
“I needed help,” the 38-year-old actress tells the magazine in its August issue. “I was in so much pain.”
Judd, the daughter of country music star Naomi Judd, says she entered the Shades of Hope Treatment Center in Buffalo Gap in February for “codependence in my relationships; depression, blaming, raging, numbing, denying and minimizing my feelings.”
“But because my addictions were behavioral, not chemical, I wouldn’t have known to seek treatment. At Shades of Hope, my behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.”
Judd says she was visiting her sister, singer Wynonna Judd, who was being treated for food addictions.
“When (the counselors) approached me about treatment, they said, `No one ever does an intervention on people like you. You look too good; you’re too smart and together. But you (and Wynonna) come from the same family so you come from the same wound.’ No one had ever validated my pain before. It was so profound,” she says.
It sounds like Judd was sold a bill of goods. Listen to how she explains “therapy:”
“My behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.”
This sounds like an oversimplified way to view one’s issues. There are lots of different schools of thought and accompanying therapies that can be effective, but treating everything like an addiction doesn’t seem like a very constructive way to work through one’s emotional issues.
If it worked for Judd that’s great though, and she deserves credit for being open and honest about what she went through.
Here is Ashley Judd at a Cartier party in early June with Salma Hayek, and at the Indianapolis 500 celebration in late May with her husband, Scottish racecar driver Dario Franchitti. Judd, 38, has been married to Franchitti, 33, since 1999. The couple divides their time between Tennessee and Scotland.
Elizabeth Hurley, Ashley Judd, breast cancer survivor Anastacia, and Elton John and his partner David Furnish were among the attendees at “The Very Hot Pink Party” in New York last night. Proceeds went to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Elton John and Tony Bennett performed.
Elton John has done a lot of charity work recently. He cleaned out his closets to donate more than 10,000 items with the proceeds to benefit his Aids foundation.
Here are the photos from the benefit. Ashley Judd is shown with her husband of five years, Italian racecar driver Dario Francitti. Elton John’s partner David Furnish escorted Elizabeth Hurley to the event.
Update: pictures from the ribbon cutting on Elton John’s closet.
