’IT HAPPENED’

Country Icon’s Widower Reveals He Was Shot at for Cheating

“That’s all I can say. That’s all I’m gonna say. It happened.”

Naomi Judd’s widower, Larry Strickland, confirmed that the late country music icon once opened fire on him for being unfaithful. Strickland, 79, made the admission in the The Judd Family: Truth Be Told docuseries airing Sunday, People reported. Judd said she and Strickland, who met in 1979 and married in 1989, were “wildly, madly, passionately in love” during a voiceover of her 1993 memoir, Love Can Build a Bridge. Yet Strickland’s infidelity presented challenges. Judd recalled that a woman had called their Nashville home and left a message saying how much “she loved and missed” Strickland. The moment was dramatized in the 1995 Love Can Build a Bridge TV movie, in which an angry Kathleen York as Judd tears up their photos and shoots at Bruce Greenwood as Strickland. Rewatching the scene during the docuseries, Strickland said, “Well, it really happened. That’s all I can say. That’s all I’m gonna say. It happened.” Judd, a five-time Grammy Award-winner with her daughter Wynonna, died of suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 30, 2022. The New York Post reported that she left a suicide note on a yellow Post-It note rebuking her daughter Wynonna. It read, “Do not let Wy come to my funeral. She’s mentally ill.”