A rumor that circulated online in mid-September 2025 claimed country music artist Jelly Roll donated money to build homeless shelters in his hometown of Antioch, Tennessee.
According to the rumor, Jelly Roll "donated his entire $5 million in recent tour bonuses and sponsorship earnings" to construct the facilities, creating "150 housing units and 300 shelter beds."
Snopes readers emailed to ask whether the rumor was true due to its growing popularity on social media.
For example, on Sept. 17, 2025, a Facebook user posted (archived) about the rumor, receiving over 97,000 reactions. The post displayed a collage of photos that included Jelly Roll purportedly speaking into a microphone and alleged images of the homeless shelters in question.
The post alleged Jelly Roll spoke at a news conference and said: "I've seen too many people back home fighting to survive cold nights without a roof over their heads, and I promised myself that if I ever had the chance, I'd step up … No one should have to sleep outside in that kind of cold."
(Bringer of Rain Facebook page)
Many other Facebook users (archived, archived, archived, archived) shared the same claim, with commenters celebrating the apparent act of kindness. Some of those posts featured links leading to blogs expanding on the tale, such as one advertisement-filled story on a non-reputable website, ifeg.info.
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no credible news media outlets reporting about Jelly Roll's alleged donation. Prominent news outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true, particularly in light of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade's comments about euthanizing the homeless that dominated headlines around the same time as the Jelly Roll claim.
Rather, the alleged story about Jelly Roll donating $5 million to build homeless shelters in Tennessee amounted to fiction. The person or people who authored the story fabricated the entire tale as one of hundreds of inspirational tales that depicted celebrities and athletes performing inspiring acts of kindness. They likely aimed to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts.
Further, there is no evidence that Jelly Roll ever said the quote described in the claim, nor that there was any such news conference held to begin with.
The image of the musician used in spreading the rumor on social media was taken from his appearance at a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Jan. 11, 2024, discussing solutions to the ongoing opioid epidemic. Photos from the hearing are available to view on Getty Images.
Further, running a selection of text from the ifeg.info story through artificial intelligence (AI) detection platform ZeroGTP returned a 100% chance that the text was "most likely generated by AI," further suggesting the story's fabrication, though it should be noted that such detection platforms are not always reliable in their analysis.
(ZeroGPT)
The story about Jelly Roll donating $5 million to build homeless shelters in Tennessee very much resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as "stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental."
However, the false post was likely able to fool so many social media users due to Jelly Roll's history with activism related to overcoming homelessness and addiction, having dealt with both himself.
For example, in February 2025, entertainment tabloid RadarOnline reported Jelly Roll planned on "turning thousands of acres into a farm to help keep at-risk kids from wrecking their lives." In March 2025, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation reported about the musician gifting a new car to an addiction outreach worker.
In addition, Jelly Roll offers addiction counseling and suicide-prevention resources on his official website along with promoting nonprofit organizations surrounding related causes. We've reached out to Jelly Roll's management for comment on the viral rumor and will update this article if we receive a response.
For further reading, we've previously investigated claims that Jelly Roll invested $20 million for a dog rescue, and that he donated $50 million to Texas flood victims.