During an appearance on the Healing with David Kessler podcast, which posted a new episode on Tuesday, July 26. Ashley Judd, who is now 54 years old, recalled attempting to find her rapist after the 1999 incident.
The actress explained that they ended up in rocking chairs sitting by a creek together. The man surfaced very easily amidst the search and added that she is beyond interested in hearing the story the man has carried through the years and they had a restorative-justice conversation about that.
She referred to the 1999 incident as crazy-making as she knew it better and that she was very clear and her boundaries were intact. She said that she was already an empowered and adult feminist woman.
She noted that she didn't need the man to make amends in order for her to move forward as she had the opportunity to do her trauma work, her grief work, and healing work to have such shifts in her consciousness and to bond in the female coalition spaces with other survivors. She referred to her process as independent from the previous asymmetry of power, per World News Era.
Opened up in the past about being a three-time rape survivor
The confrontation could happen under the circumstances was unforeseen and yet she had a restorative-justice process with the person who gave her traumatic experience out of how replete her soul is today.
According to the actress, her approach to dealing with her grief was solely and strictly her own. She wanted to only share the story as there are many ways of healing from such grief and it is important to remind the listener that she didn't need anything from him and made his amends and expressed his guilt as healing from grief is an inside job.
The Emmy Award Nominee revealed during a speech at George Washington University in March 2013 about being a three-time rape survived and said that through recovery she was able to regain herself but admitted that she lose innocence and added that one loses safety, she lost a sense of trust.
She said at the Women in the World Summit in New York that she was thankful she was able to access safe and legal abortion as she and the rapist who is a Kentuckian both reside in Tennessee, have paternity rights in Kentucky and Tennessee, and said that she would've had to co-parent with her rapist, per People.
Both victim and survivor of sexual assault
In 2015, the activist wrote an emotional essay regarding having a better place in her life.
"I am a survivor of sexual assault, rape, and incest. I am greatly blessed that in 2006, other thriving survivors introduced me to recovery. I seized it. My own willingness, partnered with a simple kit of tools, has empowered me to take the essential odyssey from undefended and vulnerable victim to empowered survivor," she wrote for Mic.com at the time.
Today, nine years into my recovery, I can go farther and say my 'story' is not 'my story.' It is something a Higher Power (spirituality, for me, has been vital in this healing) uses to allow me the grace and privilege of helping others who are still hurting, and perhaps to offer a piece of education, awareness, and action to our world," she added
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 5 women in the U.S. is raped or sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, usually by someone they know and trust, per Help Guide.
