Bunnie Xo Won't Apologize for Telling Her Truth Before the Split

Sometimes the hardest part of moving forward isn’t actually the healing—it’s deciding whether to talk about the wound in the first place. That’s the position Bunnie Xo found herself in when she released Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic in February, a memoir that dug directly into one of the most painful chapters of her nearly decade-long marriage to Jelly Roll. Just months later, he filed for divorce on May 18, leaving many to wonder: did airing the affair doom the relationship, or was the divorce already written in the stars?

Bunnie isn’t backing down from her decision to document Jelly Roll’s infidelity—the moment he moved back to Nashville without telling her and reconnected with an ex behind her back. Instead, she’s reframing how people should understand that chapter. In an exclusive conversation with Us Weekly before the book’s release, she was clear: the affair wasn’t their whole story, even though it was a defining pivot point.“Betrayal is always hard to get over. I don’t think anybody can just snap out of it,”she explained.“It is a process. You’re literally grieving and you’re heartbroken, but you’re still in love with this person.”

What’s striking is how Bunnie connects the infidelity to something deeper—a failure of emotional literacy rather than pure malice. Both she and Jelly Roll, 41, came from households where love wasn’t modeled properly, and that gap showed up in their marriage. She didn’t want readers to stop at the scandal; she wanted them to sit with the complexity.“It completely changed who we are as humans and how we looked at love. We didn’t know how to love each other properly,”she said. In other words, the affair became their teacher, even if it broke them in the process.

There’s another reason Bunnie stayed and fought: his daughter, Bailee, whom Jelly Roll has full custody of.“She’s literally mine. I may not have birthed her, but that’s my child,”Bunnie shared. She wasn’t staying“for the children”in the traditional sense—she was explicit about rejecting that tired logic—but Bailee’s presence in her life made the work feel like it mattered. For nearly a decade, they did that work. They rebuilt. Jelly Roll himself acknowledged in an October 2025 podcast appearance that repairing their connection made them“stronger than we could have ever been,”even as he admitted the affair was“one of the worst moments of my adulthood.”

And then, despite it all, they split anyway. That’s the real story hidden in the memoir controversy. The betrayal didn’t kill the marriage. The years of repair didn’t save it either. Sometimes two people can be genuinely devoted to healing and still reach a point where staying becomes impossible. Bunnie’s willingness to write about that journey—messy, unresolved, raw—is exactly why her memoir matters. She wasn’t writing a revenge narrative or a redemption arc. She was writing the truth of what it looks like to fight for love and lose anyway.