Since meeting in 2015, and marrying a year later, the couple have been extremely candid about the highs and lows of their marriage
After 10 years of marriage, Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo are getting divorced.
The two have been practically inextricable over the past decade as Jelly Roll (real name Jason DeFord) became one of the biggest country stars on the planet, and Bunnie (Alyssa DeFord) became a popular podcaster. Throughout this time, Jelly and Bunnie exhibited a remarkable candor while talking about themselves and each other, whether discussing the ups and downs of their relationship, the nitty-gritty details of their sex lives, or their complicated pasts.
Jelly Roll often credited Bunnie with changing the course of his life, including at the Grammys earlier this year while accepting the award for Best Contemporary Country Album. “I want to thank my beautiful wife,” he said during his speech. “I would have never changed my life without you. I would have ended up dead or in jail. I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for you and Jesus. I thank you for that.”
Bunnie, for her part, told People earlier this year, “When you are with somebody for a long time, you are going to have to love them at their lowest. And I truly believe that true love is not about so much as accepting things that you shouldn’t, but I do think that everybody deserves a second chance. Loving somebody at their lowest is one of the most beautiful things you can do, especially if they bloom and they blossom like my husband has.”
Details about the couple’s divorce — and the reasons behind it — remain unclear (and reps for both did not immediately return requests for comment). Based on their past openness, one can potentially assume the full story will spill out soon, but until then here’s a look back at Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo’s relationship.
Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo met in 2015 at a concert in Las Vegas, when Jelly was opening for the country rap duo Moonshine Bandits. In her memoir, Stripped Down, Bunnie recalled being “mesmerized” after Jelly introduced himself, adding, “This man was not my type. But shaking his hand felt like every star in the sky collided. My soul recognized his. It was as if I’d been looking for him my entire life.”
At the time, Jelly Roll was an aspiring musician with a bunch of mixtapes, collaborative projects, and one proper studio album to his name. He also had a checkered past, having spent time in prison during his early twenties on drug and robbery charges. Those experiences had inspired him to pursue music, but he’d yet to secure his big break.
As for Bunnie, she endured a difficult, destabilizing, and abusive childhood. As an adult, she worked as a stripper, before becoming a high-end escort. She frequently described sex work as “my way of taking my power back” after being sexually abused and raped when she was younger.
Bunnie’s career in sex work didn’t phase Jelly Roll, either — in fact, he barely understood what it meant to be a high-end escort. “When I met her, I was living out of a ’96 van and I was doing $100 a night shows,” Jelly Roll said in a 2022 interview with Bert Kreischer, adding: “I was dead broke, and she just kind of took to me. She was really making money in the sex work industry, like real money. I didn’t know that existed.”
Not long after they met, Jelly Roll invited Bunnie to join him on tour. She described it in her memoir as “the most intense yet awesome way to begin a relationship,” though she also had some concerns as she was just getting out of a difficult second marriage. “I needed to be single and do things on my own,” she wrote. “I needed to fall in love with myself and heal. But along came that sweet-talking country boy and I swooned.”
In 2016, at another show in Las Vegas that Jelly Roll was playing, he asked her to marry him. His exact words were reportedly, “Will your fine ass marry my white trash ass tonight in Las Vegas?” They tied the knot at a Sin City chapel soon after the proposal.
Jelly Roll often credited Bunnie with being a crucial anchor in his life. As she continued her career in sex work, Bunnie helped Jelly Roll finance musical projects like 2017’s Addiction Kills, and secure custody of his daughter from another marriage. Tearing up in a 2023 interview, Jelly Roll recalled how Bunnie also helped him get a condo so that his daughter could have a place to live and go to a good school.
“I’ll never forget, Bunnie looked at me and, man it makes me emotional, she said, ‘No matter what happens with us, I’m gonna help you get this little girl,’” Jelly recalled. “And I was like, man, what character… Because dude, I’m broke. I can’t afford the lawyer, I can’t afford anything. What am I gonna do, put the kid in a van? And Bunnie’s like, ‘I’ll help you.’”
But there were other challenges, too. In her memoir, Bunnie detailed a tumultuous period as she and Jelly Roll bounced between Las Vegas and Nashville and tried to get a handle on their relationship and personal demons. Bunnie was trying to kick cocaine and pills, too, and cited the custody battle over Jelly Roll’s daughter, Bailee, as one of the reasons she wanted to get sober.
Bunnie also wrote that she and Jelly Roll fought a lot during this time, and he once cheated on her with an ex. The couple briefly split in 2018, but counseling finally helped bring some stability to their relationship.
“My husband and I dug deep into the generational toxic traits we’d grown up with,” she wrote. “And we talked so many times about how we don’t want to just do what we were taught. Now, we were in this together. It finally felt so good to have my best friend back and be on this journey to be better humans. When I think back on it, we just made a vow to change. And we did. No matter how hard it got. No matter what the other person said in therapy, we were finally both fully committed to working on ourselves together and separately.”
In 2025, Jelly Roll called his infidelity “one of the worst moments” of his life. He continued: “I did a lot of work to repair that relationship, you know what I mean? The repair has been special. And we’re stronger than we could have ever been. I wish our story would have went in a way that it never had an affair, but — and I’m in no way glad it happened — but man, I’m proud of who we are today.”
In 2020, Jelly Roll’s music career finally started to take off. Over the next few years, hits like “Save Me,” “Son of a Sinner,” and “Need a Favor” turned him into the one of the biggest country stars in the world. In November 2022, the couple made their red carpet debut at the CMA Awards. A few months later, in April 2023, Jelly Roll scored his first professional awards, winning three prizes at the CMT Music Awards.
“A man that was told no every corner he turned only to hit ‘em with that Nashville shuck & come out on top every time,” Bunnie wrote in a celebratory Instagram post. “I always tell you you have a horseshoe stuck up your ass, but that isn’t it baby. This is sheer will to spread light, to move mountains, to touch broken souls with your voice, to break generational traumas & set examples for the future.”
At the same time, Bunnie Xo was carving out a new career path of her own. In 2019, she launched a podcast, Dumb Blonde, at her kitchen table, which she partly funded through sex work and a new OnlyFans account. By 2022, the podcast was such a success that she was able to quit sex work and shut down her OnlyFans.
In 2023, Jelly Roll shared a “Bunnie appreciation post” on Instagram, writing, “I watch what this woman has overcame and her passion and determination to be something better has inspired me from the moment I met her. She saved me in one of the darkest times of my life. She has been nothing but supportive.” And of her podcasting success, Jelly Roll stressed that Bunnie had done it all on her own: “She didn’t want to be just ‘Jelly Roll’s wife’ she wanted to build her own empire to empower women and share her story in hopes that it could motivate others to believe that they could change their lives and be happy.”
Speaking with The New York Times in 2023, Jelly Roll recalled the conversations he and Bunnie would have about the day she’d get to quit sex work. “Well, we had the conversation early, when we were dreamers laying in bed together and I was really broke and she was pretty broke,” he said. “That was our dream. To see it come to fruition has been unbelievable. It’s a modern American fairy tale. It’s this kind of white trash-y one, but it’s poetic and beautiful in this [fucked] up way.”
In 2023, seven years after their wedding in Vegas, Jelly Roll and Bunnie returned to the same chapel to renew their vows. “7 years ago my wife and stumbled into a little chapel in Las Vegas,” Jelly Roll wrote on Instagram. “7 years later we walked into that same little chapel and renewed our vows … my only regret on the night we got married was I never got to see her in a dress…. We made that right. I may have never gave my wife the wedding she truly deserved but I plan on giving her the life she deserves for the rest of it. I love you more anything mama bear. You are my anchor.”
Bunnie added in her own post: “Before we stumbled in that chapel, you grabbed my hands & looked me straight in the eyes & said, ‘Bunnie, our lives won’t always be like this. You won’t have to do what you do for much longer, we’re going to figure this out. I promise you.’ I had no idea what the world had in store for us, but I didn’t care as long as I had you by my side to conquer it.”
By all accounts, Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo’s relationship seemed as strong and secure as ever in the years leading up to their divorce. Jelly Roll’s continued to turn out hits, while Dumb Blonde remained a very popular podcast. Jelly Roll also got his old drug and robbery convictions pardoned in Tennessee, and lost several hundred pounds. (“He was beautiful before, but now I catch myself drooling looking at him; he looks so good!” Bunnie told People earlier this year.)
The couple were also working to expand their family. As they raised Jelly’s two kids from other relationships, Bailee and Noah, they revealed in 2024 that they were trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization. However, it does not appear that the couple’s efforts were successful. In August 2025, Bunnie said on her podcast that she’d “been on IVF meds for fucking six months and going through heartbreak and fucking so much shit.” Earlier this year, she called IVF “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through.”
Though the news just broke on Monday, June 15, Jelly Roll reportedly filed for divorce from Bunnie in May in a Williamson County, Tennessee, court. According to court docs, Jelly Roll cited “irreconcilable differences,” saying he and Bunnie were “unable to live together successfully as Husband and Wife.”
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