Bunnie Xo Breaks Silence on Jelly Roll Split: “We’re Still Having a Baby”
Bunnie Xo Opens Up About Jelly Roll Split, IVF Heartbreak and Their Plan to Still Have a Baby
Bunnie Xo, the podcast host and media personality who has spent much of the past decade building a public life alongside country star Jelly Roll, has broken her silence on the end of their marriage in a tearful and deeply personal episode of her Dumb Blonde podcast.
Speaking on the June 18 episode, Bunnie, whose legal name is Alisa DeFord, addressed the split with a mixture of grief, gratitude and blunt honesty. Though she repeatedly referred to Jelly Roll, born Jason Bradley DeFord, as her husband, she made clear that the relationship had reached a painful turning point after years of pressure, silence and emotional distance.
For fans who had followed the couple’s unconventional love story, the episode offered something more complicated than a standard celebrity breakup announcement. It was not a clean public statement crafted by representatives. It was not a polished farewell posted to Instagram. It was a raw conversation from a woman still processing the collapse of a marriage that, by her own account, shaped the person she became.
“I think it’s safe for me to say that I always loved my husband a little bit more than he loved me,” Bunnie said during the episode, her voice breaking as she described what she saw as the emotional imbalance inside the marriage.
The comment was not delivered as an attack. Bunnie seemed careful, even protective, as she spoke about Jelly Roll. Throughout the episode, she emphasized that she did not want her words to be interpreted as a public takedown of the man she still clearly loves. Instead, she described a relationship in which she had long felt responsible for holding everything together.
“I was always protecting him,” she said. “Always making sure he was okay. Always chasing him. I literally was the glue that held us together.”
That image — one person holding the emotional pieces in place while the world watched from the outside — became the emotional center of the episode. Bunnie said the couple had stopped communicating in a meaningful way over the past year and a half, a period that overlapped with rising career demands for both of them.
Jelly Roll’s ascent has been one of the most visible success stories in American music in recent years. His rise from a troubled past to mainstream stardom has made him a symbol of reinvention for millions of fans. Bunnie, meanwhile, has built her own audience through podcasting, social media and a candid public persona rooted in survival, humor and self-reinvention.
But Bunnie suggested that the same public momentum that brought them success also placed enormous strain on their private life. As their careers expanded, their communication narrowed. Their schedules grew more demanding. Their emotional connection, she said, began to fray.
Then, at some point, she stopped chasing.
“When I say I stopped chasing him, I mean I stopped everything,” she said.
It was one of the most revealing moments of the episode. Bunnie did not describe a single dramatic betrayal as the reason the marriage unraveled. Instead, she described something slower and in some ways more painful: a relationship worn down by distance, exhaustion and two people changing under the pressure of their own lives.
The emotional weight of the split was intensified by another private struggle the couple had been carrying for years: their attempt to have a child through IVF.
Bunnie spoke openly about the toll fertility treatments took on both of them. She described the medications, the physical changes, the emotional swings and the heartbreak of repeated embryo loss. She said she became “a shell” of herself as she fought to produce enough eggs to make a baby with her husband, especially at her age.
Her words gave listeners a rare look at the emotional and physical cost of IVF, especially for couples trying to navigate the process under public scrutiny. Fertility treatment is often discussed in hopeful terms — the baby dream, the next step, the miracle waiting at the end. Bunnie’s account lingered instead on the harder parts: the injections, the hormones, the waiting, the loss and the way the process can alter both a body and a marriage.
She also revealed that Jelly Roll faced his own medical challenges during the process, saying he had a low sperm count and had to go on hormones and medication. The treatments, she said, affected his mood and made him difficult to be around.
The picture she painted was of two people both under chemical, emotional and professional strain at the same time. He was at a peak moment in his music career. She was experiencing her own professional rise. Both were going through fertility treatment. Both were dealing with the pressure of wanting a child. Both, by her account, were changing under the weight of it.
“We’re both on hormones,” she said. “He’s at the highlight of his career. My career is literally taking off as we’re doing this, too.”
Then came the losses.
Bunnie said she and Jelly Roll lost four embryos, a statement she delivered with visible pain. “It’s gut-wrenching,” she said.
For many listeners, that part of the episode may have landed far beyond celebrity news. IVF loss is a grief that can be difficult to explain to people who have not lived it. It is mourning a future that had already started to feel real. It is losing a name, a room, a dream, a version of family that existed in the heart before it existed in the world.
Bunnie’s willingness to speak so directly about that grief made the episode feel less like a breakup announcement and more like an account of survival.
And then, in the middle of the heartbreak, she revealed the part of the story that stunned fans most: their plan to continue pursuing parenthood.
“You guys are going to be shocked to hear this,” she said. “But we’re still having a baby.”
It was a striking statement, and one that immediately separated their split from the familiar pattern of celebrity divorces. Bunnie framed the decision as consistent with the kind of couple they have always been — unconventional, complicated and unwilling to follow the expected script.
Their marriage may be ending, but their shared dream of becoming parents, she said, is not.
That revelation raises difficult questions, but Bunnie presented it not as confusion, but as commitment. The couple, she suggested, may no longer be able to function as husband and wife, but they still see themselves as future co-parents. The relationship is changing shape, not disappearing entirely.
She also said Jelly Roll is dating other people, a detail that could have been delivered with bitterness. Instead, Bunnie spoke about him with a surprising level of tenderness. She acknowledged the pain of their new reality while also making clear that she still values him profoundly.
At one point, she began to cry while describing what he meant to her life.
“I really truly feel that had I not got with my husband,” she said, pausing as emotion overtook her, “I would be dead.”
It was the kind of statement that reframed the entire episode. For Bunnie, the marriage was not simply a romance that ended. It was a relationship she believes changed the course of her life. She described Jelly Roll as the catalyst for her becoming the woman she is today, saying that without him, she would not be where she is.
“And I stand on that,” she said.
That loyalty, even in the middle of separation, is part of what made the episode so emotionally complex. Bunnie did not present herself as untouched by the split. She did not pretend to be above the pain. She cried. She paused. She searched for words. But she also refused to reduce the marriage to its ending.
In an era when public breakups often become instant battlegrounds, her tone was notably different. She did not seem interested in humiliating Jelly Roll or turning fans against him. She seemed more interested in telling the truth as she understood it, even when that truth made her vulnerable.
That truth included love, resentment, exhaustion, gratitude and grief all at once.
For years, Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo represented a kind of modern celebrity partnership built outside traditional industry rules. They were open about their flaws, their pasts and the messy road that brought them together. Their fans did not connect with them because they appeared perfect. They connected because they seemed real.
That may be why the split has hit so many followers hard. Their relationship was never sold as a polished Hollywood fantasy. It was built around redemption, loyalty and two people who appeared to understand each other’s darkness. To watch that bond change is, for some fans, to confront the uncomfortable reality that even relationships built on deep love can still break under pressure.
Bunnie’s episode did not offer a simple villain or an easy explanation. Instead, it suggested that sometimes love is not the only thing required to keep a marriage alive. Communication matters. Timing matters. Emotional labor matters. So does the ability to keep choosing each other when life becomes heavy.
By Bunnie’s account, she had spent years choosing, chasing and holding the relationship together. When she stopped, the structure could no longer stand in the same way.
Still, she made clear that the story is not finished.
The marriage may be ending, but the family they imagined may still come into the world. Their partnership may no longer look like it once did, but it appears they are still tied together by love, history and the promise of a child they have fought hard to have.
For Bunnie, that future seems to be both painful and hopeful.
She is grieving a marriage. She is honoring the man who helped change her life. She is facing the reality of a public split while still preparing for one of the most intimate responsibilities two people can share.
That contradiction is what made her podcast confession so powerful. It was not a neat ending. It was not a clean new beginning. It was something messier and more human: two people separating, still connected by love, loss and the possibility of a baby they are not ready to give up on.
And for Bunnie Xo, the message was clear. She may no longer be chasing the marriage in the way she once did. But she is not erasing it, either.
She is carrying the heartbreak, the gratitude and the hope forward — all at once.
