Copyright hellomagazine
Jelly Roll is calling out a big, huge mistake. Earlier this week, the "I Am Not Okay" singer was in Australia performing a string of concerts, part of the last stops from his latest tour. While in Sydney, he appears to have wanted to celebrate with a bit of a shopping spree, but ended up calling out the Louis Vuitton store for treating him "like a criminal." Following the unfortunate "Pretty Woman" incident, Jelly took to his Instagram Stories to call it out, saying in a video, with the luxury store behind him: "Hey man, the Louis Vuitton in Sydney legitimately just treated us like we were finna come in and rob that place." He appears to have at least taken the moment in stride, and made his comment with a laugh. "I have never been looked at more like a crim —" he went on, before noting: "Listen, the last time I was looked at like a criminal this bad, I was an actual criminal this bad," referring to his legitimate criminal past, before he was famous, which he has publicly spoken about with candor. The rapper, whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord, was born in Antioch, Tennessee in 1984. During a 2024 interview with CBS News in which he visited his old jail cell at the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility in Nashville, he admitted he never pictured himself as a singer despite his love for music, and shared: "I knew my father booked bets. I knew my mother struggled with drugs. So, to me, this was just what you did," referring to when he worked as a drug dealer. Still, he worked on his music even then, and further recalled: "I'm just like, 'Yo, here's a sack of weed. Here's a gram of coke. Here's a mixtape.' Know what I'm saying? 'I rap, too!' It was like my business card. Even my drug dealing, to me, was always a means to music." Jelly Roll first went to jail when he was 14, and spent the next almost ten years in and out of facilities — he's said he's been arrested around 40 times — for charges relating to drug possession, drug dealing, shoplifting, and aggravated robbery. "There was a time in my life where I truly thought this was it," he said during his CBS News interview. When he was 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult after he was part of a robbery with a gun over weed. "I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime," he told Billboard, adding: "This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did." He was sentenced to eight years in prison and seven years of probation, and though he only served just over a year for the charge, the felony conviction has had long-lasting consequences. Because of Tennessee's zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, the charge is still on his record, therefore he cannot vote, and until not too long ago, he couldn't get a passport and travel internationally. He told Billboard it also got in the way of him being able to buy a home he wanted in a gated community with its own private golf course. "Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at," he said. "My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago."
