Jelly Roll Opens Up About Earning Back the Right to See His Daughter After Spending Time in Jail

Fatherhood hasn’t always been an easy journey for Jelly Roll, especially at the start. That’s because the country star was incarcerated when he first welcomed his now-16-year-old daughter, Bailee, with whom he had to fight hard for a relationship once he was released.

In an interview with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the trio’s Smartless podcast episode posted Monday (March 3), Jelly opened up about the “very slow” process of building a bond with Bailee after he got out of jail, back when his daughter was only about 2 years old. “Her mother, at the time … rightfully so [because I was] a f–king criminal, wouldn’t let me see her,” recalled the “Save Me” singer.

“So I had to go to court,” he continued. “I had to get supervised visits through the courtroom … I just had to keep going to the court every six months and going, ‘Look, I’m continuing to prove I’m changing.’ Music, being famous, wasn’t even a thought then. I just wanted to be a good dad.”

Jelly — who is also dad to an eight-year-old son named Noah — now shares full custody of Bailee with his wife, podcaster Bunnie XO. “She’s got one of the highest GPAs at her high school,” he boasted of his firstborn on the podcast. “She’s a dual enrollment kid and is a junior going to college.”

The CMA Award winner ultimately served over a year with seven months of probation for an aggravated robbery he committed when he was 16. Years later, when he was 23, he was incarcerated again for drug dealing. It was during the latter time served that Jelly learned from a guard of his daughter’s birth, something he called “the most honest accountability and self-reflection moment of my life” on the podcast.

Jelly previously opened up about the epiphany in a 2023 interview with Billboard. “I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different,” he said at the time. “I have to figure this out right now.”

The interview comes about five months after the release of Jelly’s album Beautifully Broken, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The star is currently on a headlining tour in support of the album, after which he’ll embark on a joint stadium trek with Post Malone in April.

Listen to Jelly’s full Smartless interview below.