Wynonna Judd has always been open about her tumultuous relationship with her late mother, Naomi Judd — and one source of discord was the truth about Wynonna’s biological father.
In the new Lifetime docuseries The Judd Family: Truth Be Told, Wynonna, 60, recalled spending the first three decades of her life believing that her father was Naomi’s first husband, Michael Ciminella. Naomi married Ciminella at age 17 after getting pregnant with Wynonna, but she didn’t tell her daughter he wasn’t her biological father until Wynonna was 30.
“I knew that Michael didn’t like me and Mom didn’t really love him,” Wynonna recalled in episode 4 of the docuseries, which premiered Sunday, May 11. “Mom told me, ‘I was 16 and I was a virgin, I was home alone and [Wynonna’s biological father] came over and took advantage of me.’”
Eventually, however, she told her daughter the real story: that she loved the man, Charlie Jordan, but their relationship didn’t work out.
“There was all this pressure and everybody kinda freaked out, and he went off to join the Army,” Wynonna explained. “Look, I understand it, but I was really angry with her about it. I was so devastated that I thought there was a part of me that’s missing. The glass is half empty. Learning about my birth father, I feel more like him than I do my mother in certain areas. And I think Mom was terrified of that half of me because she couldn’t control it. She couldn’t bring it in and train it. That’s why Mom was very hard on me.”
Jordan died in 2000 at age 56, and Wynonna never met him. When he died, his trailer was filled with posters of The Judds.
“My understanding is that Charlie knew about me and that he always felt like he couldn’t do anything about it,” she recalled. “I guess he didn’t feel he was worthy or whatever, like, ‘Wynonna’s got this life and I can’t just show up in it.’ And for a while, I wasn’t ready to go meet him. What if he’s a jerk? What if we don’t make a connection? What if, what if, what if? Fear, fear, fear. But when I finally decided to, it was too late.”
She noted that she didn’t go to Jordan’s funeral because she felt it would be “too much” for his family.
While Wynonna and her mother faced plenty of ups and downs, she made it clear earlier in the docuseries that she still has love for her. (Naomi died by suicide in April 2022 at age 76.)
“[People are] looking for what’s the truth, what’s the real relationship between the Judds,” she explained. “What they don’t understand is I’ve loved her more than I love myself, but Mother was both in love with me and terrified of me because I represented what she didn’t know and couldn’t control.”
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