It’s a blessing that she’s even still alive. 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.
It’s off to a hot start, and she shared a very emotional video about what that means to her and why she set out to write a book in the first place:
In an excerpt shared by People, Bunnie shared a very personal story from a tattoo-gone-bad, which occurred while she was under the influence of crystal meth in particular. She had become friends with a fellow stripper named Grace, and they would do GHB, cocaine, ecstasy and meth together.
It was during a “drug-induced manic episode” that she decided to get two stars tattooed on her wrists, and she was “in some random dude’s garage” getting them done, and he had the first one complete in five minutes.
She had used meth with this guy right before the session, and she writes about loving the pain of the needles, so much so that she asked him to “go deeper” with the needle:
“He moved on to the next one, and for some reason, the pain felt good. I wanted more.”
It’s the kind of thing that would only happen if you’re on those kinds of drugs, and I think it’s obvious what a bad spot she was in. Bunnie said he “dug into” her skin “for hours,” and he eventually hit her wrist bone (I had a hard time reading that part):
“It went so deep that he hit my wrist bone, and I started bleeding so much he finally had to stop.”
Not long after, her wrist started swelling, and she was in a lot of pain, obviously. But, she was on so many drugs that she didn’t properly give her body time to heal, and as aforementioned they had stuck that needle down way too far:
“I was on enough drugs that my body didn’t have a chance in hell of healing itself normally, and the fact that I’d had ink drilled into my bloodstream didn’t help.”
She stayed in bed for two days, and eventually, her friend Grace came by to check in on her. By that time, Bunnie’s entire arm was infected, and everything was incredibly swollen:
“My entire arm was infected. My wrist was the size of my biceps, and my fingers were swollen like balloons. The whole room smelled like death.”
Grace told Bunnie she needed to go to a doctor, and even though she didn’t have health insurance, they found someone to help her at a hospital outside of her hometown of Las Vegas. It was about an hour away, and once she got there, the doctor told Bunnie she was likely going to lose her hand. It honestly sounds lucky if that was the worst that happened after everything she’s said about this story up to this point…
They started an antibiotic drip, and ultimately you know that Bunnie was able to keep her hand, though the doctor was obviously incredibly concerned about the drugs in her system. He told her was “going to kill” herself if she kept living like that and doing all those drugs, and he also told her had she shown up even ten minutes later, they would have had to amputate her hand.
That whole experience shook Bunnie to her core, as you can imagine, and she said it put the “fear of God” in her and she never touched meth again after that:
“He sent me home with antibiotics and the fear of God. I was done with meth. I would never touch it again.”
It’s hard to even imagine how that’s a real story, but she’s really lived an incredible life.
In another interview with Howard Stern, Bunnie spoke about the final time she got arrested for prostitution, which was another moment that changed her life forever. She was gambling with some guy, and he eventually told her he was ready to go upstairs, baiting her into offering a price or going up to a hotel room 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.”
She has been through so much, and clearly has a fascinating story that is resonating very deeply with so many people, and I’m sure it will continue to as she shares more of her testimony with the world.
