NASHVILLE – Before Bunnie DeFord wrote “Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic,” she was known primarily as Jelly Roll’s wife. Months after the memoir reached the New York Times Bestseller list and attracted a Hollywood acquisition, she is navigating a divorce that settled quietly in July and building something that belongs entirely to her.
The memoir, published February 17, 2026, is Bunnie DeFord’s account of her own life, written in the same unapologetic register that has defined the Dumb Blonde podcast she has hosted since 2019. It covers the turbulence of her upbringing, the emotional architecture of a life lived outside conventional frameworks, and the relationship with Jason DeFord, the musician who records under the name Jelly Roll, that became one of country music’s most scrutinised partnerships. By its third week on the New York Times Bestseller list, the book had moved into a category of its own.
Alisa Andrea DeFord, known publicly as Bunnie XO, built her podcast brand around the deliberate reclamation of an identity that begins, as the memoir’s title suggests, with everything stripped away. The Dumb Blonde name is a studied inversion: a woman who built a media company and a bestselling book out of the materials of a life she did not always control. The podcast, distributed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and her YouTube channel, now reaches an audience that followed her separately from and independently of Jelly Roll’s rise in country music.
101 Studios, the media company behind “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” acquired the rights to adapt “Stripped Down” for the screen, announcing the project as part of a deal with Universal Pictures. The same production house that built two of cable television’s defining franchises has committed to a film based on Bunnie DeFord’s life, and to the question of what that life looks like when rendered as a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
That question is now more complicated than it was when the rights changed hands. Jelly Roll filed for divorce on May 18, 2026, in Williamson County, Tennessee, listing May 9 as the date of separation. Bunnie DeFord later described the split on the Dumb Blonde podcast as the consequence of more than a year of deteriorating communication, a breakdown that arrived on Mother’s Day. The divorce was finalized on July 17.
Court documents show the settlement divided an aircraft, vehicles, several properties, and intellectual property rights accumulated across a decade of shared professional and personal lives. Bunnie DeFord received the home the couple had been constructing together, a property she had publicly described as a long-held ambition, along with a confidential one-time payment. Neither party will receive alimony, and both are bound by an agreement not to make disparaging public statements about the other.
The podcast episode in which Bunnie DeFord addressed the divorce directly was pulled after a brief period online. Her explanation was partial: the conversation had not landed the way she intended. For an audience that follows the Dumb Blonde Podcast precisely because of its candor on difficult subjects, the retraction attracted as much attention as the episode itself.
What has not been retracted is the Dumb Blonde Productions enterprise. The company now encompasses a podcast catalog, a live-streaming presence on Kick, and a brand that exists independently of Jelly Roll’s. The Bunnie XO identity was built in parallel with, not as an extension of, her former husband’s celebrity. As Fox News noted in coverage of their partnership, both have spoken openly about a marriage in which their separate careers were always a deliberate feature rather than an afterthought.
The 101 Studios film has announced no director, no cast, and no production timeline. Whether the screenplay will extend beyond the memoir’s coverage, and therefore include the divorce, remains unknown. That gap between what the book covered and what the year has since included is either the material for a final act or the premise for a sequel.
More of Bunnie DeFord’s career arc is documented in her Bunnie XO profile on Eastern Herald. The Emmy Awards are approaching, with 101 Studios’ prestige television record well established; our Emmy Awards 2026 preview covers the landscape into which any 101 Studios project now enters. What the company does with Bunnie DeFord’s story in that environment is, for now, the largest unanswered question her year has produced.
