It’s not exactly the ideal job path, but Bunnie Xo never shies away from the harsh reality of her past. She and rapper-turned-country star Jelly Roll have an impressive rags to riches story, which will fully be revealed in Bunnie’s new book, Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, which was released today.
Bunnie was working as a high-end escort in her hometown of Las Vegas when she met Jelly in 2015 while backstage at one of his concerts at the Las Vegas Country Saloon. They married in a spontaneous Las Vegas ceremony in 2016, and have been together ever since. Though they’ve both been honest about the highs and lows of their relationship, they’ve accomplished a lot, and have come from very humble beginnings to reach the top of the ladder in terms of fame and success. Bunnie has been very open about her past, particularly on her very popular Dumb Blonde podcast, and while she’s never shied away from that part of her past, and in an interview on The Howard Stern Show today, she talked about switching careers, if you will, going from being a stripper to an escort.
She has said before that she made tens of thousands of dollars, and often more than that, being a high-end escort, so I think their lowballing it with the $5,000 number they speak about, but you’ll get the point…
Stern pressed her on the “big leap” it was to go through that change, and Bunnie admitted that it was a huge mental block, but once she did it for the first time, she was essentially hooked:
“When you’ve been stripping for a couple years, you don’t want to work eight hours in the club, you’d rather go make $5,000 in 20 minutes than have to bust your a** all night for that. So making that jump was really hard for me, because I had a ton of religious trauma.
I grew up Southern Pentecostal, so even thinking about doing that was so hard for me. But I think, you know, when you fall deeper into your addiction, and you get a lot more desensitized to your surroundings, it makes it a little but easier. And then of course, once you jump off that clip, you’re like, ‘Oh, okay. I did it. So I can do it again, and I can do it again.’ You’re just… you’re in survival mode, so you’re not thinking about the abuse that you’re putting your body through.”
He pointed out the obvious:
“The money is insane.”
And Bunnie agreed, saying very truthfully that it is in fact the “root of all evil,” and unfortunately, many women in Vegas get sucked into the sex industry and never get out, so she’s careful when she talks about it because she never wants a young girl to think it’s anything they should be pursuing in life. She has a lot of “trauma” from it, and she admitted that she lied to herself for many years about what she was actually doing… she told herself she was taking “power back” that was tragically and horrifically taken from her “as a child,” and she got stuck in survival mode.
Bunnie says she’s lucky that she got out of it, though, because most women sadly aren’t so fortunate:
“Absolutely. I mean, money is the root of all evil, so a lot of girls in Vegas, that’s the road that we take. And I really try not to glamorize it, my story is completely different than some girls who have been in sex work. I had, you know, crazy things happen to me when I was in sex work, but for the most part, I told myself that I was doing it to take my power back from all the power that was taken from me as a child. And in reality, that’s not what I was doing, I was just living, again, in survival mode and feeding my addiction.
But also, not walking a path that I would ever want a little girl listening to my story, or reading my book, to walk. I want them to learn from me, like, it worked out for me because I was so tenacious, but a lot of girls don’t… it’s a dead end road. A lot of girls don’t get out like I did.”
I can’t imagine it’s easy to talk about something like this, but I think it’s important for people to hear from someone firsthand who knows the darkness of it to talk about what she went through, and Bunnie is incredibly at doing just that.
You can watch that part of the interview here:
@howardsternshow Bunnie Xo on Making the Shift From Stripper to Sex Worker (2026) #bunniexo #sternshow #howardstern #howardsternshow ♬ original sound – The Howard Stern Show
