Bunnie XO has spent the whole divorce insisting she and Jelly Roll are fine, friends, and family forever. Now she’s telling the other half: what staying fine actually cost her.
The Tennessee podcaster, 46, opened up in a new interview about the physical price of ending her decade-long marriage, revealing the Bunnie XO divorce story fans never saw: she lost 20 pounds while struggling to eat through the worst of it, and at times needed IVs to stay upright. Her refusal to fake her way through any of it is, as ever, the whole point. “I don’t want people to think like I’m just out here acting like nothing doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Yeah, it hurt.“
The disclosure lands with her framing attached: she wants the next chapter of her life to show what recovery actually looks like, in public, on her terms, and she stressed that a divorce ripples far beyond the two people signing the papers. That has been her doctrine all along, even when it cost her. After laying out the entire breakup on her Dumb Blonde podcast in June, she deleted the episode weeks later, explaining: “I realized I just don’t want one of the hardest moments of my life to become a permanent headline.” Speaking now, again, is her choice, and the difference matters: the June telling was about what broke, and this one is about what heals. She has kept acknowledging the split in her posts all summer, on her own clock and in her own voice.
The other half of this divorce has said his piece too, from a stage. “Me and my wife are best friends. We will always be best friends,” Jelly Roll, 41, told a June concert crowd. “Nobody cheated on nobody. She just did a whole podcast about it. You can go watch it. Every word of it is the truth.” Then the thank-you that made the genre cry: “Bunnie, I love you, baby. Thank you for those 10 years. They were incredible. Thank you for the next 10 years of friendship and 20 beyond that.“
The pair married in 2016, spent nearly a decade building an empire of music, podcasting, and mutual mythology, and still plan to raise a baby together, the arc she herself branded in June: “we have been the most unconventional couple that you guys have ever encountered.” Nothing about the toll changes that plan; it just tells the truth about what the road felt like.
The Bunnie XO Divorce Hurt, and She Wants You to Watch Her Heal
Her people met the telling exactly where she aimed it. “You go Bunnie. Let your light shine,” read one reply under the interview, while another looked forward instead of back: “I can’t wait to see your new life. You are an amazing person and so gorgeous!” And one viewer delivered a whole loving vocabulary lesson about the irony of a brilliant businesswoman calling her show Dumb Blonde, landing on the line that named the thread: “We are here to support one another!“
The woman who tattooed a breakup anthem on her arm and said nothing is done saying nothing, and the message of this telling is the opposite of pity: watch what comes next. The strength is coming back. So is she.
