Ashley Judd is opening up about meeting with her rapist in order to have a “restorative-justice conversation” years later.
On Tuesday’s episode of the Healing with David Kessler podcast, the 54-year-old actress said she was raped in 1999 and, years later, “tried to find” her rapist — who “surfaced very easily” during her search.
“To make a long story short, we ended up in rocking chairs sitting by a creek together,” she said. “And I said, ‘I’m very interested in hearing the story you’ve carried all these years.’ And we had a restorative-justice conversation about that.”
“I wanted to share that story because there are many ways of healing from grief, and it’s important to remind listeners that I didn’t need anything from him and it was just gravy that he made his amends and expressed his deep remorse, because healing from grief is an inside job,” Judd added.
During the interview, Kessler explained that people “may not realize” that grief also applies to the fallout of being raped or assaulted: “You lose innocence.”
Agreeing, Judd added, “One loses safety. I lost a sense of trust,” but through recovery she has “regained myself.”
Judd called the 1999 incident “crazy-making” because she “knew better,” explaining, “I was very clear, my boundaries were intact. I was already an empowered, adult feminist woman.”
“And that this could happen under these circumstances was unconscionable, unforeseen, and yet I have had a restorative-justice process with this person out of how replete my soul is today,” she added.
Despite the conversation with her rapist, the Double Jeopardy actress noted that she “didn’t need his cooperation,” “for him to make amends” or “for him to do anything differently in order for me to have a process that was independent from that previous asymmetry of power.”
“Because I had the opportunity to do my trauma work, to do my grief work, to do my healing work, to have all these shifts in my own consciousness and to bond in these female coalition spaces with other survivors,” Ashley Judd explained.
