Actress Ashley Judd, 44, was standing in a meeting room at the PlainsCapital Bank headquarters, talking to 100 people about childhood abuse and healing Tuesday evening. Judd, whose sister Wynonna and mother Naomi are both country-music stars, recalled realizing in her late 30s that having been neglected as a child—and raped as a teenager—had taken a toll she couldn’t shake.
“I was one of the highest-paid women in Hollywood, but I didn’t know it. Something inside me was off,” Judd told the hushed crowd. “I just felt crazy, because child abuse is crazy-making. I was also sick and tired of being sick and tired. Then I realized … there is help.”
Judd was at the PlainsCapital building in connection with her Wednesday appearance as keynote speaker for the sixth annual Appetite for Advocacy Luncheon, benefiting the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center. The mission of the center, a collaborative effort of public and private agencies, is to improve the lives of abused children.
PlainsCapital’s Ronnie Berg—co-chair of the luncheon along with Carla Cline—was hosting the Tuesday party for Judd, who’d toured the DCAC facility earlier in the day and was pleased with what she’d found. During her brief remarks she recounted some of her own journey from childhood grief to healing in praising the center: “There are a lot of levers that can be pushed to help children get help,” she said. At DCAC, she added, “all those buttons can be pushed in one place.”
If Berg was the perfect host Tuesday evening, he seemed to be everywhere the next day at the DCAC luncheon in the Sheraton Dallas Hotel. Pausing between greeting guests at the pre-lunch reception, the bank exec said 1,100 were expected for the event, up from 1,000 last year. While last year’s luncheon had raised $275,000, he added, this year’s goal was $400,000, and he felt confident it would be reached with the help of underwriting chair Mary Blake Meadows and Mary Black, the raffle chair.
Across the room, meantime, guests like Tanya Roberts, Dee and D’Andra Simmons and Cheryl Hall were chatting and comparing notes. Retired lawyer Don Templin was with his wife, U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldana, who’d brought some of the prosecutors from her office who work with DCAC. Ruth Altshuler was looking forward to the April 25 opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, though she was uncertain whether Papa George H.W. Bush would be well enough to attend.
Following a welcome by emcee Scott Murray, DCAC president and CEO Lynn M. Davis told the luncheon crowd that his group had served more than 2,400 people last year. Then Reade Quinton, M.D., was given the Lt. Bill Walsh Award, Jim Pasant received the Ruth Sharp Altshuler Award, and the time came to hear the keynote talk by Judd.
Picking up on themes she’d outlined at PlainsCapital the night before, the actress called herself a “lost child” who was left to live entirely on her own in the 10th and 11th grades, and was raped twice at age 15. The reason she’s alive and healing now, she said, was because of the “angels” in her life, including her grandparents and a trusted neighbor woman. She also underwent treatment for her unresolved childhood grief at the Shades of Hope Treatment Center, near Abilene, in 2006. After having been “so choked on my own pain and ashamed of my own shame,” she said, Shades of Hope “gave me a safe place to fall apart.”
In the end, Ashley said, DCAC too offers an “inspirational, soulful place” for abuse victims that is “absolutely a national model.” A familiar cry of abused children everywhere, the actress concluded, is their plaintive plea: Where is everybody? “Today it’s so good to stand in this room” and realize that you’re right here, Ashley said passionately. “You’re suiting up—and showing up—for children who are being hurt.”