After someone allegedly kidnapped country music star Tammy Wynette at gunpoint in the late ’70s, she said the incident changed her life and how she lived it. She shared a violent, terrifying tale of the ordeal publicly, which drew suspicious eyes from some.
Despite facing the public with fresh bruises on her face, some people didn’t believe Wynette’s abduction story, suggesting she made it up for one reason or another. As many people wouldn’t, she didn’t appreciate that from those so-called “cranks,” revealing their doubts about her tale left her heartbroken.
Tammy Wynette claimed she was abducted in Nashville in 1978
In a still-unsolved crime, Wynette claimed a gunman took her from a parking lot and forced her to drive far out of the city of Nashville, Tennessee, in October 1978. This was in the years after her divorce from George Jones, whose name came up in discussions about the crime.
“I wake up and think, why didn’t I just ram the car into an empty car in the parking lot? I think of a hundred things I could’ve done,” Wynette told The Washington Post. “But then again, I think, well, I’m alive.”
She added, “If I’d done that, he might’ve shot me. They’d have caught him, but still — I’d be dead.”
According to Wynette, the incident changed her life, as she explained, “I love my freedom. It’s out of my character to have someone with me all the time every time I make a move, every time I go shopping or to pick up food.”
She said it wasn’t “a very good feeling to know there has to be somebody with you.”
“Yet on the other hand, since it happened,” she noted, “I find myself looking at people and looking at cars and thinking, you know, ‘Is that the one?'”
Tammy Wynette said ‘cranks’ who disbelieved her kidnapping tale ‘broke her heart’
Though the scenario Wynette described would be traumatizing enough, she was also impacted by what people said about it. She read stories that accused her of making it all up, and she said they were heartbreaking.
“Two-thirds of the people were wonderful,” the “Stand by Your Man” singer said (The Washington Post). “The other third, I would have to say, were the cranks who said it was all done for [a] publicity stunt, which broke my heart, or that it was done to hide an affair I was having.”
She added, “That was all in People magazine, which killed me.”
Tammy Wynette’s daughters revealed she might have concocted her kidnapping story
Among those who claimed Wynette’s story about a masked gunman kidnapping and assaulting her was untrue were her daughters. But they said she concocted it to cover up abuse at the hands of her fifth husband.
“She did admit to my sister that when all that stuff came out about her being kidnapped in 1978 that she and Richey had had a fight, and he had beaten her,” Georgette Jones wrote in her memoir, The Three of Us: Growing Up With Tammy and George per Country Living.
Jones also shared her understanding of why her mother went along with the plan and stayed in the marriage, noting, “He threatened to destroy her life and write a tell-all book, so she decided to stay with him.”
How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
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