Four lost embryos. Three failed transfers. A set of twins that never made it. And a divorce filed in Tennessee just weeks ago.
On her Dumb Blonde podcast Thursday, June 18, Bunnie Xo, born Alisa Carter, laid out the full, painful arc of her and Jelly Roll’s fertility journey for the first time, and landed on a conclusion that surprised even her most devoted listeners: the two are still planning to have a child together.
“I’ve never talked about this, but Jay and I have lost four embryos,” Bunnie told her audience, as reported after their IVF losses went public.
“We’ve had three transfers, but we lost the two twins that we were gonna try to have, and then we lost the other two. And anybody that’s going through that and has to deal with these miscarriages, it’s gut-wrenching.”
A Marriage Ends, But A Family Plan Does Not
Jelly Roll filed for divorce in Tennessee in May, a story TMZ first reported publicly. The podcast episode marked Bunnie’s first public comments on the split, and she used the platform to push back hard on infidelity rumors, insisting there is no bad blood between them.
She also addressed the obvious question head-on: yes, two people ending a nearly decade-long marriage can still choose to build a family together. According to TMZ, she acknowledged the arrangement may look unconventional from the outside, but said it is a path both she and Jelly Roll fully support.
Jelly Roll, for his part, broke his own silence on the divorce while speaking to a crowd at a concert, though he offered few specifics beyond acknowledging the split publicly for the first time.
What IVF Actually Cost Them
Bunnie’s podcast disclosure was less a celebrity announcement and more a raw accounting of what the past year and a half had taken from her. At 46, she described fighting to produce enough eggs to conceive, a process made harder by the physical demands of hormone treatments on her body.
As Rolling Stone reported, she also revealed that Jelly Roll’s low sperm count required him to undergo his own course of hormones and medication, side effects she said turned him into “a freaking nightmare to be around” during that period.
The cumulative weight of those setbacks hollowed her out. “My hat goes off to any woman, family, couple who is going through IVF,” she said. “That is one of the loneliest, darkest journeys you will be on.” She added that for the past year and a half she became “a shell of the person I was” because of the demands of the fertility treatments, and that the process “wrecked” her “emotionally, spiritually, physically.”
That kind of sustained physical and emotional pressure is something fertility specialists frequently cite as a major stressor on relationships, particularly for women over 40 navigating egg retrieval and transfer cycles.
While fans watched Jelly Roll’s rise from Nashville underdog to arena headliner, the couple was quietly navigating an emotionally draining fertility journey that played out almost entirely in private. Bunnie’s candor gives language to an experience many couples endure largely in silence.
A Decade Together, And What Came Before
Bunnie and Jelly Roll married at a Las Vegas chapel in 2016, after he proposed to her during a show in the city.
Over the years that followed, she became a central figure in his rise, helping finance early musical projects and supporting his effort to secure custody of his daughter from a previous relationship.
Seven years after their wedding, the couple returned to the same Las Vegas chapel to renew their vows, with Jelly Roll writing on Instagram at the time that his only regret from their wedding night was never seeing her in a dress, and that he planned to give her the life she deserved for the rest of it.
That history makes the current moment more complicated, not less. Two people who built something real over nearly ten years, who renewed their commitment publicly, and who then spent a year and a half trying to have a child together, are now navigating a legal separation while keeping the most intimate part of their shared future intact.
Why This Story Matters For Families
Bunnie Xo’s willingness to speak openly about IVF loss is a service to every family quietly going through the same thing.
Fertility treatment is physically brutal, financially draining, and emotionally isolating, and the grief of embryo loss rarely gets the public acknowledgment it deserves.
As US Magazine noted, the couple may have called it quits on their marriage, but their commitment to building a family has not followed. Whatever you think of the co-parenting arrangement she and Jelly Roll are pursuing, the conversation she started on Thursday is one more families need to be having openly.
The central tension in Bunnie’s disclosures is clear. The four lost embryos and the physical devastation of IVF are not background detail to the divorce story; they are the story.
The split, painful as it is, did not erase the shared goal that drove so much of the past year and a half. If anything, Bunnie’s account suggests the two are trying to protect that goal even as everything else changes around it.
