Bunnie Xo married her husband Jelly Roll in 2016, but before she found her soulmate in the rapper-turned-country-star, the social media personality lived a wild life. In her new memoir, Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, out Tuesday, she details all of it in an unflinching and candid voice: drug abuse, a past abortion, and the romances, flings, and hookups that now lie behind her. In this exclusive excerpt, she recalls one of them, a toxic, pill-fueled relationship with an aspiring rap artist named Paul.
I’ve always said that in order to get over one boy, get under another. So, always practicing what I preach, there was someone in the background of all that toxic noise of my first marriage to Eric and the adventures in the Escalade. Toward the end of our marriage, a dude named Paulie was lingering innocently — almost — in my MySpace messages.
The thing with Kdub had come and gone. I was completely checked out of my relationship with Eric. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So, one night I messaged Paulie and told him to meet Eric and me at a rooftop bar. I had to see if he was as cute in person as he was online. What better way to scope out my next sancho than with my current sancho?
This tattooed, blue-eyed, blond-haired, beautiful cutie walked in and my heart just about stopped. Even more appealing was that something about him needed saving. He was a boy-damsel in distress, and I could be a knight in glittery heels.
Paulie was a womanizer with a hell of a backstory. He’d been a child model and a child actor in Hollywood, and he came from this massive, mobster-type Italian family. He was a walking red flag, and red was my favorite color.
I was holding hands with Eric, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Paulie. When he walked by us, I whispered, “I want to make out with you” in his ear, my hand still wrapped around Eric’s.
I finally kicked Eric to the curb after the car accident incident — the dude wouldn’t even come get me from a crime scene. Let’s meet up, Paulie’s message said. I was fucking ready. I pulled up in my crop top, miniskirt, sky-high stilettos, and the Shelby Roush Stage 3 a sugar daddy bought me. By then, I knew exactly what I wanted. We partied all night doing God knows what, but I sure as hell know how the night ended. Paulie walked me out to my car like such a sweet, sophisticated gentleman. And I draped my body across the hood of my car and looked up at him through my butterfly-wing lashes.
“Fuck me,” I said. His eyes widened, and it took him a minute to get his act together. But he managed to kiss me, right there on the hood of my Mustang. It was sexy as hell, making out on that car. I wrapped my legs around him, and his hands were everywhere.
“Wanna race?” I whispered in his ear.
“Hell yeah, I’ll race you,” he said, smirking.
“Follow me home.” I slid into the driver’s seat and he got behind the wheel of his Charger. We sped through Vegas and I kept pushing on that gas pedal — 80, then 100, then 120 down the freeway. He kept trying to outpace me, and he must have been thinking there was no way in hell I’d keep pushing the speed. Wrong. I pressed down on my stiletto and put the pedal to the metal.
We made it back to my house in one piece — thank you, ancestors — but Paulie’s eyes were just about bugged out of his head.
“You’re fucking insane. You know that, right?” he said, but he couldn’t keep his grin off his face.
“Oh, I know,” I said, turning the key.
By the morning, he was mine.
Paulie knew I was in the lifestyle from the get-go — there was no hiding that I had clients and sugar daddies paying my bills. And he showed up anyway and stuck around. I gave him the keys to my palace — and from that first night, we were inseparable.
I don’t know how many men’s rap careers I’ve tried to get off the ground, and Paulie wasn’t any different. He really could have been something with the right mix of help, support, and motivation. I was ready to do all three. I wanted to make him a better person — because honestly, Paulie was the first man I really, truly loved. We laughed, cried, and argued, but we were best friends through it all.
True love or not, we were still toxic. We drank ourselves silly. He was on pills. I was on pills, chasing the sweet calm of my Xanax and trying to outrun the panic when they wore off. And we didn’t fight a ton, but when we did, it was bad. He’d get in his feelings and wouldn’t come out of them for days — and then things would blow up. And I was so cold. It was my way or the highway. No meeting in the middle for me.
To this day, Paulie will tell you that whatever he wanted in this life, I would have made it happen. I was always pushing him to be better and to get out of his comfort zone — because the only way that man’s dreams were going to come true was if he fucking grew up. I would have done anything to make him realize his worth. But in a way, maybe that’s my downfall, because I’d never really realized mine. So that’s my gift to people: try to show them what no one ever did for me. The way I saw it then, I did anything to try not to have another failed relationship. I truly just wanted a teammate to build with. I was tired of partying. The late nights. The drugs, even if I wasn’t yet clean. Even if I was so far from being healed enough to shake off the coldness, the need to control everything.
At one point, Paulie got it together enough to get trained and certified to be a bail enforcement agent. It’s a dangerous job, and he’d have to get suited up in a bulletproof vest before he went out on calls. But I knew if I wanted him to stick with it, I’d have to encourage him and engage with the job as much as I could to keep him going. So we came up with the idea to use me as bait when he was after someone who did something particularly horrible, especially to women or little girls.
Once, Paulie was trying to track down a dude who’d jumped bail on some pretty heinous rape charges, and so I made a fake Instagram account and messaged him. Hook, line, and sinker — he wanted to meet up for a date.
I showed up at the bar we’d agreed on — no bulletproof vest or gun for me, just my usual high heels and miniskirt. But before he could get near me, Paulie and his partner jumped out of his truck screaming like psychopaths for the loser to get on the ground. They arrested him, and I went inside and got myself a drink.
From STRIPPED DOWN by Bunnie Xo. Copyright © 2026 by Dumb Blonde Productions LLC. Excerpt provided by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers.
