By Michaela Gordoni
CHRISLEY KNOWS BEST stars Julie and Todd Chrisley went through an ordeal in their marriage when they served separate sentences for tax evasion and fraud charges.
In a recent episode of their podcast, Julie clarified to the audience that their marriage is in a good place. She also said the same on her daughter’s podcast, responding to divorce rumors.
“Let me set the record straight,” Julie said on July 8. “We are not getting divorced.”
“Todd and I didn’t speak for 28 months, and I was lucky and so blessed to be able to see my children and they were able to visit and we were able to talk, but that wasn’t the case for Todd and I,” she explained in a recent interview with Fox News digital. “We had an email that’s very antiquated, and we got messages every two, three days. So it was almost impossible to even keep a conversation going.”
“For me, I never felt, and this is the weirdest way of saying this, but I was never in my mind away from her,” Todd said of being separated from Julie, who he’s been married to for nearly 30 years. “She stayed in my mind all day long and all night. I thought about her every waking second.”
Todd said his memories helped him push through his sentence.
“I used to say in my emails, I thank God for my mind, for my memory and for all the memories that we’ve created because I was around men who were being diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s, things like that. And I used to say, ‘God, thank you for my mind.’ And I survived on my memories that Julie and I have made for 30 years.”
The Chrisleys were convicted in 2022 of federal bank fraud and tax evasion. They maintained their innocence and were sentenced to 12 (Todd) and seven years (Julie) in prison. They served time from January 2023 to May 2025, when President Trump granted them a pardon.
“I survived all my times of seeing my children laugh and when they were crying and me telling them ‘It’s going to be OK’…And then all of a sudden we’ve moved on to something much bigger,” Todd said. “So for me, it was not an option of is this marriage going to last? It was, how do we pick up and start rebuilding from where we are right now?”
“It’s a terrible thing, but it’s a great thing, because your parents are going to be free and clean, and I hope we can do it by tomorrow. Is that OK? We’ll try getting it done tomorrow,” Trump told the Chrisleys’ children, Savannah and Chase, ahead of their parents’ release in May.
This took Todd by surprise, as he never expected to receive a pardon.
“Listen, I’ve said again on our [‘Chrisley Confessions 2.0’] podcast that I’ve had so many Joseph moments to happen in my life from the time this whole thing started,” he said. “And so you go to bed on May the 27th, and you know that on the 28th you’re going to get up and do the same thing over and over and over again. That’s not the way my life happened.”
“My Joseph moment was getting up that morning and then that afternoon being told, you’ve been pardoned, we’ve got to get you out of here,” he continued. “That’s how quickly your life can change.”
“When I spoke with President Trump via FaceTime, his first thing was, ‘Well, wow, you look great.’ And I was like, ‘Well, thank you.’ But he was very kind and very gracious.”
Now that the two are back in reality, they say real life is actually harder than prison life.
“It is so horrific, the conditions that you’re there for, but that’s from a physical standpoint,” Todd explained. “But from an emotional and psychological standpoint, it is harder dealing with day to day.”
Their new special, THE CHRISLEYS: BACK TO REALITY, premiered on Lifetime on Sept. 1 and 2. Two remaining episodes will air on Sept. 9 and 16, respectively.
Read Next: ‘My Joseph Moment’: Todd Chrisley Shares the Moment Everything Changed in Prison
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