Four months ago, Bunnie XO released a memoir about fighting for her marriage. Tonight, TMZ is reporting that marriage is over.
According to court records obtained by TMZ, Jelly Roll filed for divorce from Bunnie XO in May in Tennessee. Sources told the outlet the split was a mutual decision and a private family matter.
That’s the official line. The timeline tells a different story.
The Memoir That Told the Whole Story
In February 2026, Bunnie released her memoir “Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic,” where she told Us Weekly she tried “to be as real as possible with the situation” and even “might have toned it down.”
The book held nothing back. Bunnie went into detail about discovering that Jelly Roll had a 10-month affair around 2018, just two years into their marriage. “When I found out about it, I was devastated,” she told Fox News Digital. “I was hurt because I didn’t think he would be the one person to do that. I thought he was different.”
On the “Human School” podcast in October 2025, Jelly Roll called the affair “one of the worst moments of my adulthood” and said he was “glad it happened” only because he was “proud” of where they ended up.
Apparently, they ended up with a divorce filing four months later.
And the affair wasn’t even the roughest part of their story. TMZ reported that one week before their August 2016 wedding, Jelly Roll welcomed a son with another woman. Bunnie married him anyway. “Love isn’t always pretty,” she told Us Weekly.
That might be the understatement of the decade.
For You
The couple tried to rebuild. In August 2023, they renewed their vows at the same Las Vegas chapel where they first eloped, with Bunnie posting on Instagram, “Luckiest girl alive. Tonite was such a dream.” They were stepping out together at the Grammys as recently as February, looking like a couple that had weathered the worst of it.
In that same memoir, Bunnie wrote about their IVF plans and finding a surrogate to carry twins. “Now that we’re finally stable financially and somewhat emotionally after all the healing we’ve done over this decade together, we’re talking about the future, including growing our family,” she wrote. The plan was to use her eggs and his sperm. Bunnie had captioned a TikTok in 2024, “God willing, Baby DeFord 2026.”
Baby DeFord 2026 is not happening. What’s happening instead is a divorce filing in a Tennessee courthouse.
There’s no word yet on what this means for the IVF plans, the surrogate, or Bunnie’s relationship with Jelly Roll’s two children from previous relationships, Bailee Ann, 17, and Noah Buddy, 9. Bunnie has been their stepmom for nearly a decade and has spoken openly about how raising Bailee “changed my mind” about wanting kids of her own.
If you’ve been following this story from the beginning, none of the individual pieces are shocking. The affair, the splits, the public reconciliations, the pattern of blowing it up and putting it back together. Bunnie herself has been open about the fact that they split multiple times over the years. What makes this one feel different is the timing. You don’t publish a 300-page book about saving your marriage, talk about bringing twins into the world, and show up at the Grammys holding hands if you think the end is four months away.
Something shifted between February and May. And whatever it was, neither one of them is talking about it publicly.
Country music has watched Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO root for each other through sobriety, career explosions, and a level of honesty that most couples in this industry would never put on display. Whatever happens next, that decade together meant something, and reducing it to a TMZ headline doesn’t do it justice.
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