Country star Jelly Roll filed for divorce from his wife Bunnie Xo on May 18 in Williamson County, Tennessee, citing irreconcilable differences, according to court records reviewed by Fox News Digital. The filing listed the couple's date of separation as May 9.
The split comes just months after the pair appeared together at the 68th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, where Jelly Roll won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Country Album and publicly thanked his wife from the stage. It also follows a February interview in which Bunnie Xo told Fox News Digital the couple had committed to facing life's hardships "together."
The divorce ends a marriage that began in August 2016 with a Las Vegas ceremony, after the two met the year before. They renewed their vows in 2023 at the same chapel. Now, nine years later, the paperwork tells a different story.
The timeline is hard to miss. On February 1, 2026, Jelly Roll, 41, and Bunnie Xo, 46, walked the red carpet at the Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena. He won. He gave her a shoutout on stage.
AP News reported that during his acceptance speech, the singer, whose legal name is Jason DeFord, thanked his wife Alisa DeFord directly:
"I would have never changed my life without you. I would have ended up dead or in jail."
By May 9, they were separated. By May 18, the divorce complaint was filed in Franklin, Tennessee, as Breitbart confirmed. Fox News Digital reached out to representatives for Jelly Roll for comment; no response has been reported.
Bunnie Xo, podcast host, memoirist, and stepmother to Jelly Roll's daughter Bailee and son Noah, had spoken at length about the couple's turbulent early years. In her memoir, "Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic," she described infidelity, explosive arguments, and a relationship that nearly collapsed more than once.
She told Fox News Digital in February that the marriage had never been conventional:
"I think a lot of people need to realize that coming into this marriage, we weren't a traditional bride and groom. I was a working girl, and he was an ex-drug dealer, a gangster-turned-struggling artist. There's a different set of rules on the street than there are in what I'd call traditional marriages. If you've never lived that lifestyle, you're not going to understand. But of course, cheating is wrong across the board, it doesn't matter."
In the same interview, she described the moment she learned about Jelly Roll's infidelity:
"When I found out about it, I was devastated. I was hurt because I didn't think he would be the one person to do that. I thought he was different. And at that moment, my heart was broken. But instead of getting mad at him, I asked myself, 'Why do I keep attracting these kinds of men?'"
Bunnie Xo recounted a marriage counseling session that went badly. The couple had hired a husband-and-wife counseling team, hoping for balanced guidance.
"We went in there, and this poor couple had no idea what they had stepped into. It was stepping on a grenade. We were just screaming at each other. There was just so much anger, so much hurt, so much pain from both ends. We left that therapy session that day, and I was like, 'This is it. We're never going to be together again.' And I think he felt the same way too."
But they came back. She said the couple eventually chose each other again:
"We were like, 'I want to grow. I don't want to be this person. I choose you. I'm going to become everything that you've ever wanted me to be.' I'm going to be a wife, and he's going to become everything I ever wanted him to be; a husband and a father to the kids."
She described a deliberate decision to break what she called "every generational curse" they had inherited, from her father's infidelity to his troubled past. They renewed their vows in 2023. She said they had committed to healing and growing together.
Bunnie Xo's memoir also addressed Jelly Roll's 2018 album "Waylon & Willie II." She wrote that people had messaged her on social media telling her Jelly Roll was with an ex-fling. In the book, she described going silent on him and disconnecting.
She wrote about the album itself with blunt anger:
"Have you ever listened to those songs? Go give it a listen, and you'll clearly hear a man smack-dab in the middle of an affair, pouring his guilt into lyrics.... To this day, I still hate most of the songs on that album, and I can't listen to it all the way through."
Despite all of it, she said as recently as February that the marriage had survived because neither partner judged the other.
"There's no judgment in this house. I know everything about my husband, and he knows everything about me. No matter how hard it gets, we face things head-on. We call it 'getting into the foxhole.' When it's time, we hunker down and get through life, together."
In her February memoir, as Just The News noted, Bunnie Xo had called Jelly Roll her "soulmate."
The court records, as reported, cite irreconcilable differences and nothing more. No details about property division, spousal support, or custody arrangements have surfaced. No public statement from either party has addressed the filing directly.
Bunnie Xo had told Fox News Digital that she had seen "10 different versions" of her husband over 10 years. She said he had seen "probably four different versions" of her. She framed the relationship as one of constant evolution:
"We learned that marriage is not one-size-fits-all. Each person and each relationship is completely different than the next person's. But you do have to wake up and choose that person even on days that you don't like them."
On May 18, the choice was different.
Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo built a brand around their relationship, its rawness, its redemption arc, its refusal to pretend. She hosted the "Dumb Blonde" podcast. He thanked her from Grammy stages. She wrote a memoir about the worst of it and called it proof they could survive anything.
The divorce filing in a Tennessee courthouse tells a simpler story. Sometimes the foxhole doesn't hold.
