Bunnie Xo Thought Jelly Roll Was a 'Jerk' When They First Met in 2015: 'He Was So Rude'

Bunnie Xo did not have a great first impression of her now-husband Jelly Roll.

During the Wednesday, February 18, episode of TODAY With Jenna & Sheinelle, the podcast host, 46, revealed she did not like the singer when she first met him at one of his concerts in Las Vegas, Nev., in August 2015.

“I thought he was a jerk. He was so rude, and I was like, ‘I love this,’” she joked. “I was like, ‘This is a challenge. I love this.’ A lot of you guys don’t know this because he seems so sweet. He’s like a teddy bear with teeth, is what I call him. J is very alpha. He’s very confident, and he doesn’t care who’s in the room. He’s going to move how he wants to move. Back then, it was a different version of Jelly too.”

Behind the musician’s tough exterior, Bunnie saw a softer side of him.

“He also had the saddest eyes in the room, so I wanted to fix them,” she expressed. “I was just like, ‘Oh, a project? Yes. Let’s do this.’”

The duo met at Las Vegas Country Saloon in 2015, when he was performing with the Moonshine Bandits.

“There was barely anybody there, and I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’” Bunnie remembered thinking to herself. “And then I saw him on stage and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s so special.’ The minute he talks to you, you are in his orbit. He just consumes you, and I just loved that about him.”

The author explained her decision to continue taking clients as an escort even after her August 2016 wedding to the Grammy winner, 41.

“My biggest thing…I never would let anybody take my independence. It didn’t matter who you were. I was going to choose how I made money over your feelings,” she recalled. “That was a terrible way to look at things, but that was my hyper-independence from my childhood that I had been through…even though J wasn’t who he is now, people were still labeling us, me as a gold digger. We didn’t have any gold to dig back then.”

Bunnie worked hard to make a name for herself independent of her husband’s fame.

“I still made it a point to not just be Jelly Roll’s wife…to work beside him and build with him. I didn’t want to just completely depend on him, because what would happen if the shoe dropped?” she questioned. “I always wanted to have my own thing, and that’s why I continued to work.”

Jelly Roll “respected” his wife’s choice and didn’t give her any pushback, despite its unconventionality.

“He loved me through it all and was like, ‘I’m not going to try to change you,’” Bunnie shared. “But the night we got married, he did look me in my eyes, and he said, ‘You’re not going to have to do this forever.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s cute.’ And he really meant it.”