Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for CMT
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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.
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy“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…
Jelly Roll/Instagram
How Bunnie Xo Met Future Husband Jelly Roll
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.'”
Jelly Roll/InstagramBunnie Xo Details Her First Night With Jelly Roll
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.”
Bunnie Xo/InstagramHow Jelly Roll Responded When Bunnie Xo Told Him She Was a Call Girl
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.”
