Jelly Roll and Bunny XO settle down: Divorce after about 10 years
Jelly Roll (real name Jason Deford) filed for divorce from his podcaster wife (real name Alisa Deford) on May 18th.
Months before he filed for divorce from his wife, Bunny Zoe, Jelly Roll opened up about infidelity, arguments and a tumultuous honeymoon in his memoir.
The 41-year-old “Son of a Sinner” singer, whose real name is Jason Deford, filed for divorce from his podcaster wife, whose real name is Alisa Deford, on May 18, according to court records reviewed by USA TODAY on Monday, June 15. Divorce papers obtained by USA TODAY Network state that the couple separated on May 9th. The couple had been married for 10 years.
In Strip Down (published February 17 by Day Street Books), Bunny takes readers back to their first meeting at a concert in Las Vegas and their spontaneous courthouse wedding shortly thereafter. What ensues is the couple’s whirlwind relationship, including a custody battle for Jelly Roll’s daughter from his previous marriage, an affair, a sudden move, a grueling stint at a marriage agency, and, ultimately, a reconciliation. Variety magazine reported in March that the producers of “Landman” and “Yellowstone” had acquired the rights to adapt the memoir into a movie.
“If it’s far from perfect now, it was even less perfect then,” she writes.
Bunny Zoe recalls ‘rifts’ early in Jelly Roll’s marriage
Early in their relationship, the couple gained full custody of Jelly Roll’s daughter and moved to Nashville. But as Bunny writes in her memoir, returning to Nashville meant that “the women from J’s past resurfaced.”
“A rift was forming in our marriage,” she wrote, later writing that the couple’s fights became more frequent “as I had to compete for my place among the women of Nashville.” Early attempts at couples therapy were “one of the lowest points in our relationship” and filled with screaming matches. She suspected he was cheating, she wrote, and eventually found out he had been having a 10-month affair with an ex-girlfriend.
At some point, Jelly Roll packed up his and his daughter’s belongings and left without saying goodbye. The couple agreed to separate for three months, during which time Jelly Roll announced their breakup on social media without telling Bunny first.
They reunited around the time his album Waylon & Willie 2 was released, which Bunny says he still can’t listen to because it sounds like “a guy in the middle of an affair pouring his guilt into the lyrics.”
Even after they later moved to a suburb of Nashville together, they still weren’t back to “normal,” she writes. When Jelly Roll said he didn’t regret the affair, the argument “got to the point where I put my hands on him,” Bunny writes.
“It would take years for me to actually feel that this man loved me, that I wasn’t disposable,” she writes.
However, her memoir ended on a better note for the couple, thanking him as her “best friend” and warning that she included the story to show “all the things we’ve been through.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m weak or that he’s a terrible person. It just means we were two people who fell in love but didn’t know how to maintain love in a healthy way,” she wrote. “We went from being two strangers rushing to the altar in 2016 to being the parents of a traumatized 7-year-old in 2017 to being completely sober in 2018. It’s enough to make anyone giddy.”
She also revealed that the couple had started IVF and planned to have twins through a surrogate mother, marking the beginning of what she called the “baby mama era.”
The two have not yet publicly commented on the divorce filing. USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo for comment.
Contributors: Kimi Robinson, USA TODAY, Audrey Gibbs, Nashville, Tennessee
