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Actor Ashley Judd is calling for apolitical spaces—particularly at college basketball games—after a Trump supporter approached her while she watched her team last week.
“I want to be very clear that I believe something like basketball is a neutral space—actually, it’s not neutral. It is unifying,” Judd wrote on Facebook on Sunday, March 11. “It was a positive place—a time and space in which we come together for a common purpose and with a common love: college basketball and the chance to root for our team, and to be a part of the wacky, unpredictable culture of March Madness.”
Judd was in Nashville, Tennessee, watching the Kentucky Wildcats play in the semi-finals, according to Fox News, when, as she wrote on Facebook, an older man came up to her and asked for her picture. He snapped it quickly after asking, before she could offer for him to be in the frame with her, then told her he was from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the setting of a 2014 film starring Judd.
Though she tried to tell him about her love for the town, she wrote she felt something off about the encounter, and that’s when he told her, “We like Trump.” In her post, Judd recounted that it appeared the man’s plan was to take a photo of her, then treat her with rudeness, aggression, and disrespect.
She recounted the ways she could have responded to him—by telling him he voted with the Klu Klux Klan, or by reminding him that President Trump won the presidency while simultaneously losing the popular vote by the widest margin in history—but instead of acting on those impulses, she asked her uncle beside her for a hug.
Judd concluded her post by asking her followers what other apolitical spaces they go to in order to stop talking politics—a privilege that many wish they could experience but few have the ability to actually do.
“I feel very sad that this happened, and frankly scared. We absolutely need apolitical spaces in this country where we come together for something that is beyond who voted for whom and the platforms, beliefs, and agendas of respective candidates,” Judd wrote.
Read her entire Facebook post below:
https://www.facebook.com/AshleyJuddOfficial/posts/1215526315231570
H/T Fox News