Spying, Public Disses, and Snubs: It's All Relative for the Judds

As the Judds once sang, "Love Can Build a Bridge."

What they didn't say in that sweet song, but that singers Wynonna and Naomi Judd, as well as Naomi's younger daughter and Wynonna's half-sister Ashley, know all too well is that love can also build dysfunctional families.

In the latest Judd family drama, Ashley, 45, accused Wynonna, 49, of spying on her. ABC News reported that Ashley went to the Franklin Police Department after the device was discovered in her silver Mini Cooper last month. The actress said she suspected it had to do with "an ongoing custody dispute" between the two and the unnamed driver of the car, Wynonna's 17-year-old daughter Grace, according to multiple reports.

The story isn't surprising, though, when you think about the Judd's history of family drama. Way back in 1995, former manager Ken Stilts told People that Wynonna and Naomi were "at each other's throats every minute of the day" during the time they were one of country music's biggest acts of the '80s.

"They performed many times with sunglasses so you couldn't see they had been crying," Stilts said. And that's just two of them!
 
Here are three more of the Judd's most dysfunctional family moments:



1. The "bitter" truth comes out.
Ashley revealed in her 2012 memoir, "All That Is Bitter and Sweet," that she had been sexually abused as a child and, even worse, that no one believed her when she tried to tell them. In addition, she was often left alone as her mom and sister were on the road. (Her parents divorced when she was still a toddler.) "There was too much trauma, abandonment, addiction and shame," the "Double Jeopardy" star wrote. "My mother, while she was transforming herself into the country legend Naomi Judd, created an origin myth for the Judds that did not match my reality. She and my sister have been quoted as saying that our family put the 'fun' in dysfunction. I wondered: Who, exactly, was having all the fun? What was I missing?" (Wynonna and Naomi confessed the very next week that they, too, had suffered sexual abuse as children.)

2. They diss each other in public.
This has happened more than once. In January, when there was talk that Ashley might run for Congress, her mother told Piers Morgan that, "She is not as smart as she acts." Ouch! Winona once told the ladies on "The View" that she often called Ashley "The Third Judd" — you know, like the wheel! Isn't that sweet sisterly love?! At least Ashley's surely had the chance to tell her sister and mother about her frustrations in therapy, since they've spoken about going as a family and as individuals.

3. Wynonna doesn't invite them to her wedding … next door!
When you look at their family dynamic, it's not all that unexpected that Wynonna wouldn't invite her sister and mother to her low-key June 2012 nuptials to third husband Cactus Moser, especially since she limited to the guest list to their children. But when you consider the fact that they all live on the same family farm in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee, it's a little weird. "Mom [lives] at 11 o'clock, Ashley is like at 1 o'clock, and I'm at 6 o'clock," Wynonna explained to Us Weekly at the time. And, she added, that she was "not even sure" they knew the wedding was happening!

Come to think of it, it's probably good that Naomi and Ashley weren't there. Who knows what kind of drama might have happened?!