It will be a full-circle moment, indeed. Bunnie Xo and rapper-turned-country star Jelly Roll have an impressive rags to riches story, which Bunnie talks about extensively in her new book, Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, which was released yesterday.
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 said transitioning to that kind of work 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.”
But she was arrested for the last time when she was 26-years-old, at a Las Vegas casino. She will host a show in her hometown of Las Vegas later this year, and she has invited the cop that arrested her to share the stage and talk about the experience with her, which she called “a full 180” moment:
“I actually just talked to the officer that arrested me. He’s gonna come out in my show in Vegas, and I’m so excited about it, because what a full 180 to come out and be the testimony that you were the last man that arrested me for prostitution. Now you get to come out to my show, and I get to talk about how you changed my life.”
And she also told the story of how it happened, saying she was trying to gamble with him, and he eventually told her he was ready to go upstairs, baiting her into offering a price or going up with him so he could arrest her.
She says in that moment, she went against everything she would normally do in that process in terms of making sure it’s not an undercover cop, and she gave him quote and he pulled out his badge right away:
“So we were trying to gamble with them, and he’s like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go upstairs.’ And I never… I went against everything that I normally would do, and he was like, ‘Can you quote me a price right now?’ And I was like, ‘$700.’ Because you just tell them that to get them up to the room, and then you talk them up in price. And as soon as I said that, he pulled his badge on me, and was like, ‘You’re under arrest.'”
She explained that she had to be in their for 12 hours before she could post bail and leave:
“Oh my gosh, it was… Oh yeah, you go to jail, and you’re in the holding tank. I don’t think you can get out for like 12 hours. So you’re in there.”
While I’m sure it was a horrible day and a harsh reality check, it ended up being a transformative experience and clearly she’s come out the other end much better for it:
