Jelly Roll says he was homeless when he met his wife so who was really digging for gold, (Photo by Getty Images)
Jelly Roll has heard the jokes about his wife being a gold digger plenty of times. Instead of getting annoyed, he says it actually makes him laugh every time.
“I love it when they call her a gold digger,” the “Save Me” hitmaker told Taste of Country Nights in a recent interview, admitting that “She hates it.”
For him the reason is simple. The timeline of their relationship makes the whole accusation pretty ridiculous. “It just flames her up,” he continued. “But it just tickles me absolutely pink because when I met her, I was homeless living out of a 1996 conversion van, so if anyone was digging for gold it was I, Popeye.”
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Back then the country star was far from the chart topping performer fans know today. He says he was bouncing between couches just trying to get by. He quipped, “I was couch surfing and made it to the bedroom, ya know?” The 41 year old singer married Bunnie Xo in 2016 and their relationship has survived more than a few tough chapters along the way.
Earlier this year Jelly Roll landed in the hospital after breaking his collarbone in an ATV accident. He kept the incident quiet for months before finally revealing it, though the scare clearly shook his wife. “This happened in January, worst phone call to ever get,” Bunnie Xo, 46, captioned an Instagram upload of the Grammy winner lying in a hospital bed in a neck brace. “But we got thru it thank goodness & he’s healed completely.”
Health scares were only one part of the couple’s complicated history. In her memoir “Stripped Down Unfiltered and Unapologetic,” released last month, Bunnie opened up about the emotional toll of Jelly Roll’s past cheating. She writes that she fell into a deep depression after a major argument led him to leave their Nashville home with his daughter Bailee. Suspicious about what might be happening, she later showed up at one of his concerts unannounced.
Despite his denials, she eventually learned the truth.
According to her memoir, “he had his ex-fling waiting for him in a hotel down the street.” The confirmation hit hard. Bunnie writes that a close friend later confirmed everything.
“She’d confirmed all the suspicions and fears I’d felt for the past ten months,” Bunnie writes, explaining that she planned to leave Nashville and return to Las Vegas.
Read More: Jelly Roll Opens Up About Cheating on His Wife Bunnie Xo
“That night I contemplated taking my life,” she further writes. “The pain was so intense that I genuinely just wanted to end it all.” Eventually she decided to walk away from the situation instead. Later, she writes, she “took a deep breath. Tomorrow is a new day. Time to get the f–k out of here.”
What hurt the most, she says, was Jelly Roll “emotionally cheating” and even getting the other woman a house. Still, she chose to forgive him. “It would take years for me to put the affair aside,” she writes in the memoir. “It would take years to actually feel like this man loved me—that I wasn’t disposable.”
Jelly Roll has acknowledged the mistake publicly as well. During an October episode of the “Human School” podcast, the singer admitted that the affair was “one of the worst moments of my adulthood.” But he believes the difficult work afterward changed their relationship for the better.
However, he said, “The repair has been special. And we’re stronger than we could have ever been.”
