Bunnie Xo Shares Jelly Roll's Daughter Bailee Ann Is "Mad" Amid Split
Bunnie Xo has empathy for how her and Jelly Roll's split is affecting their teenager.
After the "Bottle and Mary Jane" singer—who is dad to kids Bailee Ann, 18, and Noah, 9, from prior relationships—filed for divorce May 18 after first separating from Bunnie on May 9, Bailee turned heads when she unfollowed her stepmom on social media. However, Bunnie gave insight into the emotional reaction of her child who "freshly just turned 18."
"The only woman she has had consistently in her life, she feels, is being taken from her and it's a weird transition that we're going to have to navigate," Bunnie explained on a June 18 episode of her Dumb Blonde podcast. "Of course she's mad at me because I was always the f--king disciplining parent in the relationship because he's f--king fun dad all the time."
Bunnie (real name Alisa DeFord)—who has raised Bailee since entering Jelly Roll's life nearly a decade ago—continued by relaying the high school graduate's feelings toward her father (real name Jason DeFord) concerning the breakup.
"She's mad at her dad because of what he did. And hello, she f--king deserves to feel that way," Bunnie emphasized. "So, she's going to have emotions. She's going to unfollow me on f--king Instagram, and then she's going to text me back the next day and tell me to follow her back. That's just how it is right now."
And Bunnie felt her daughter's response to the surprising news was understandable.
"This is what we're dealing with right now, and I don't care. That's my baby," Bunnie reiterated. "I love her. If she wants to be mad at me for f--king two years, I'll deal with it. But when she's ready to come back, I will always be here for her."
While Bunnie was hesitant to speak for Bailee, who she noted was "articulate" and "knows exactly what she wants," the 46-year-old felt it was important to give the teen a voice amid heavy media attention surrounding their family due to the breakup.
"Her big thing is, and I get this, is we need more empathy in this world and people need to stop treating us the way that they're treating us because we are human," Bunnie said. "She's like, 'I get that we're public figures, but at the same, stop expecting so much from us because you don't deserve it.'"
And it's no surprise Bunnie is proudly defending her daughter, given how close the duo has been over the years.
"She's so independent and so headstrong and so tenacious," Bunnie effused on Today in February. "When I [first] saw her I was like, 'This is me.' And she deserves the chance that I didn't get."
"She's going to college, and she's a 4.0 grade average student. She's just such a good kid. And I'm like, 'You know what? We did that,'" Bunnie said. "I know that I didn't birth her, but that's my child."
For a closer look at Bunnie and Jelly Roll's life building a family, keep reading...
Technically, Bunnie Xo was in a relationship on that fateful night in August 2015 when she crossed paths with soon-to-be country music sensation Jelly Roll as he opened for the Moonshine Bandits at the Las Vegas Country Saloon.
But, he cracked right through her heart of stone. As she recounted in her memoir Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, "I was—dare I say—mesmerized?"
Admittedly, she continued, "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."
While she can't recall details of his performance, she did fill her phone with videos of the musician. "I wanted to study him— the way he moved and the way he talked," she explained. "I was never a sucker for a Southern drawl until that night. I do remember thinking to myself, 'This boy is going to be a star one day.'"
After months of texting, chats ("He’d call and I’d have one of my boy toys lying in bed naked next to me. I’d get up to take the call in the other room") and thinking about "that sweet, Southern boy’s smile," Bunnie was thrilled when Jelly Roll told her he had a video shoot in Las Vegas.
"J wasn’t my type—I love tough guys, or goth, emo boys in eyeliner," Bunnie explained. "I wasn’t his type either. So why the hell was my soul telling me there he is the minute we met? I couldn’t explain it."
But after a night spent at a honky-tonk bar, "Our chemistry was insane," she added, "we couldn’t keep our hands off each other."
Back at her Vegas penthouse, she stripped naked, sat on his lap and began undressing him, Bunnie shared, "and that man absolutely would not bang me."
Instead, he inquired about her five-year plan. "Frustrated but intrigued, I unstraddled him and lay next to him, wrapping my arm around him," Bunnie wrote. "I started to tell him about all the dreams I had."
As she detailed her hopes of having a talk show and a family, he discussed his career in music and plans to get custody of now-teenage daughter Bailee.
"For hours, we lay there together, dreaming out a future and how we could be part of it for each other," Bunnie wrote. "We didn’t hold back anything. It was the most honest conversation I’d ever had."
Though Bunnie noted "J was different from anyone I'd ever met," the "Son of a Sinner" artist still felt familiar. "Of course, never to stray far from my type, he was a tattooed felon and ex–drug dealer," she acknowledged. "But this one was trying to get his life together and take a different path—kinda like me."
But first, she wanted to be honest about her journey thus far. When he asked what she did for work during their first night together, "I was honest with him," Bunnie detailed. "'I'm a call girl,' I told him that night in my bedroom, 'and I make a lot of f--king money. There are levels in this business, and I guess you’d consider me 'high class.'"
And Jelly certainly did.
"He wasn't scared or put off in any way," she shared. "'I respect it,' he said. 'You’re a f--kin’ hustler, and I ain’t got a problem with it.' From day one, he never once made me feel bad for what I had to do to survive.'"
And so when she joined him on tour, she updated the site she used to attract clients with details on the cities she'd be visiting. Noted Bunnie, "Before the plane landed, I was fully booked."
With Jelly unbothered by her line of work, she recounted, "It was the first relationship where my boyfriend didn’t want to change me—and I didn’t want to change him either."
What happened in Vegas very much didn't stay there, when the couple decided to wed on a whim in August 2016. When Jelly proposed backstage at a performance, "Deep down, I was scared as f--k," Bunnie admitted. Though their relationship was different than any others, she wasn't sure she could trust herself to make such a big leap.
"But of course, I live for spontaneity," she acknowledged. "And it was exciting as hell, and I loved the passion. Would it end in disaster? Absolutely—but at least we could say it was a fun moment."
And they certainly made the most of it, blasting Jagged Edge's "Let's Get Married" and Bruno Mars' "Gorilla" en route to the courthouse. Noted Bunnie, "We were so high on life— and other things."
A "coked up bride," as she put it, in a shredded black dress, she woked up the next day "meaner than a rattlesnake" questioning if they'd made a mistake.
What ensued was one of their first fights, a disagreement that ended with a heavy conversation overlooking the Grand Canyon as Jelly Roll explained he wouldn't have married her if he wasn't serious.
"With one sentence, J had calmed every fear rattling around inside of me," Bunnie detailed. "For my whole life, nothing had been particularly serious— even marriages could be undone without too much trouble. No one was thinking about forever with me. But J saw me differently. He saw the long game."
Seven years later they returned to that Vegas chapel to renew their vows.
Yeah, she's got a thing for the wild ones. "Before me, J was a player," Bunnie acknowledged. "He had multiple women who he was with for multiple years at the same time."
That includes the mother of his son Noah, born a week before his dad's Vegas vows.
"They were together before him and me—off and on for about ten years to be exact," Bunnie detailed of Jelly Roll's romance. "Their relationship was super toxic, but they decided to coparent their son as best they could. She was already eight or nine months pregnant when J and I decided to be together."
Admittedly, her relationship with her husband's ex "was rough in the beginning," noted Bunnie, but, "today I absolutely adore her and the woman and mother she is. And I’m so thankful to have someone in our equation who knows J just as well as I do."
As for Bailee, just 7 years old when Bunnie first met her, she arguably saved the Dumb Blonde podcaster from herself.
Months into their marriage, detailed Bunnie, she and Jelly Roll were close to getting full custody of Bailee "from her birth mom, who was deep into drugs."
But with Bunnie starting each day with what she called her cocktail "of half a Lortab, a quarter of a Xanax, and a diet pill," she knew it was time to make a change.
"I wanted no part in adding to this kid’s already traumatic life," she explained. "At the very least, getting sober would keep me from inflicting more of that kind of trauma on her."
So, with Bailee in mind, "I went cold turkey," Bunnie wrote. "I was done with pills and cocaine, but it would be a while before I let go of the alcohol."
Though Bunnie decided she was 'gon ride with Jelly Roll all the way to his Tennessee home, leaving Las Vegas was tough.
Homesick and struggling with "full-time mom-ing" given her rough relationship with her own stepmom, "I was daydreaming and romanticizing about my old life back in Vegas," Bunnie acknowledged. "My life had been flipped upside down in a matter of months—and it was chock-full of responsibility and monotony—the two things I had managed to avoid completely since I left home at fourteen. Cracks were forming in our marriage."
Among the chasms: Girls from Jelly Roll's past who, said Bunnie, "decided to make my life miserable as the new girl in town."
Arguing with Jelly Roll more than ever, Bunnie woke up a few days after Bailee's tonsil surgery and packed her bags. "Today I know that to my core, I’ll never abandon my family," stressed Bunnie. "But that day, I did. I could make up a million excuses for why I left, but it just boils down to fear. I was scared out of my damn mind."
It didn't take long for Bunnie to regret her decision and soon she was renting a huge five-bedroom Sin City home for them all to share. "It was my way of apologizing for abandoning Bailee and him," she explained. "It was my way of saying I’m in this for good now. Actions, not words."
But soon it was Jelly Roll having second thoughts. "All of a sudden J decided to pull the plug," Bunnie detailed. "I never saw it coming."
Just five months into their new Las Vegas life, Jelly Roll announced he and Bailee would be moving back to Nashville. "When I asked him why, he gave me every excuse except for the real one: He was talking to his ex behind my back," Bunnie shared. "Not a baby mama, but this young girl he was seeing briefly before he and I hooked up. I’d felt it but couldn’t prove it. But I’d also felt his pain. The wounds that were deep inside him, left to fester, unhealed, and I could see how neither of us had really learned how to love."
Though she felt his offer for her to join them in Tennessee was half-hearted, she accepted, explaining, "I wasn’t going to abandon our little family ever again."
"I thought my openness and willingness to have third parties would save me from all the other cheating I’d experienced in my life," Bunnie shared of inviting other women into their bed. Theirs wasn't an open relationship, she stressed, "But if a girl wanted to come home with us, we more than likely wouldn’t turn her down."
And should Bunnie want to hop into another man's bed, "J has always told me that I can sleep with other men if I want to," wrote Bunnie. Though at first she felt hurt "like he didn’t really love me if he wasn’t possessive and jealous," she eventually began to see his side.
"We both live by the motto that we aren’t each other’s possessions," she noted, "and consider our relationship to be free, not open."
But all that free will came with a caveat: "Don’t f--king lie to me," stressed Bunnie, "or ever let me be the last to know something."
And she was certain there was something going on with Jelly Roll and his former paramour. "For a year, this girl tormented me online," she detailed. "She would quote his song lyrics, she would post pictures wearing his merch, she would take cheap shots at me in her captions because she knew I was onto her. I just couldn’t prove it."
When she brought the posts up to Jelly Roll, said Bunnie, "he would gaslight the s--t out of me and make me feel crazy for doubting him."
An attempt at couples' therapy went awry and "the fighting and suspicion went on for ten months," wrote Bunnie, "until s--t finally hit the proverbial fan and splattered all over the place."
Soon after, she returned from a trip to discover her husband had fully moved out of their Nashville home. And a chat with his best friend's wife confirmed her worst suspicions.
"That night I contemplated taking my life," Bunnie revealed. "The pain was so intense that I genuinely just wanted to end it all."
Instead, she hit the road, discovering on her drive back to Vegas that Jelly Roll had announced their split on Instagram, despite promising to wait several months.
"After all the confusion, all the arguments, all the heartbreak—that was the last straw for me with J," Bunnie wrote. "I vowed never to speak to him again."
But, of course, the two are in it 'til the wheels fall off. And so she listened when he made up a story "about a drug dealer’s daughter he met at a bar," noted Bunnie. "And I believed him."
Until a random number began blowing up his phone.
"It hit me," Bunnie shared. "It was her. The ex-fling was still in the damn picture, even if he’d sworn up and down that they were done."
Her trust in Jelly Roll demolished, she reached out to his affair partner for the full story.
"She told me about how he got a house for them to live in and he wanted her to stay at home and take care of Bailee," Bunnie detailed of what she learned about the 10-month romance. "And out of everything, that’s what made me sick. It wasn’t about him f--king this broad—it was about emotionally cheating and then wanting her to play mommy to a little girl I’d fallen in love with."
Though she eventually forgave Jelly Roll, "When a man puts you through something like that, you never stop loving them, you just love them differently," Bunnie explained. "Your heart is more guarded. Less trusting. Cracked."
As such, "I’m not going to pretend that we just went back to normal," Bunnie stressed. Some of the fights that ensued got ugly, with Bunnie copping to punching Jelly Roll in the back when he said he didn't regret what he'd done.
"It would take years for me to put the affair aside," she wrote. "It would take years to actually feel like this man loved me— that I wasn’t disposable."
Now nearly seven years into the pair's fertility journey, the pieces are starting to come together.
"I learned then that my Fallopian tubes were blocked and I would need surgery and that still wouldn’t guarantee I’d be able to carry a baby," Bunnie explained. "But with how much IVF has advanced over the years, and with the help of the most unselfish woman willing to carry twins for us, we’ll be able to make our baby dreams come true."
Their plan is to use her eggs and his sperm and try for twins.
"Some people frown upon our decision to bring babies into this world at our age, and I could give a f--k," wrote Bunnie." We’re going to raise these babies in love and give them everything we were never given. I can’t wait to see a piece of me and him running around outside of our bodies."
eonline
