Todd Chrisley quips he wanted to return to PRISON after seeing wife Julie's post-jail hairdo
The reality TV stars served more than two years behind bars for tax evasion, fraud and conspiracy before receiving a full presidential pardon from Donald Trump in May 2025.
In the first photos taken of Julie following her release, the matriarch, 52, shocked as she was seen sporting brown and gray locks instead of her usual coiffed blonde 'do.
Days later, she returned to her signature style.
Julie has since reflected on the paparazzi shots of her with her natural tresses and described the pictures as 'horrible' - while her husband, Todd, joked that he considered going back behind bars when he saw her new look.
'The way I flip that is, look at me now,' she said in the latest episode of the Chrisley Confessions 2.0 podcast.
'People think I look even better because that horrible picture was out there to begin with.'
Husband Todd, 56, who has been married to Julie for a near three decades, responded: 'Listen, I will say, you set the bar low. You had to go nowhere but up.'
'That wasn't very nice,' she responded.
Digging himself a hole, Todd continued: 'I'm just trying to be honest. I'm not gonna lie, I first saw you, when I got out of that car, I started thinking about going back [to prison].
'But then I thought, let me embrace this.'
Todd then went on to reveal that he had never seen Julie with her natural hair before.
'I mean it was a rough moment,' he added. 'It was a rough moment because I'd never seen you dark in my life.'
Julie was forced to succumb to her brown locks during her stint behind bars at Kentucky's Federal Medical Center as she did not have regular access to a salon.
'When I went to prison, my hair was blonde but it had a lot of lowlights... before I self-surrendered,' she shared.
'Then, we actually had a girl that was there at the prison when I got there... she worked in the salon and she was really good and she did highlights for me.
'When I tell you they looked so good, it looked like I'd been to a salon on the outside.'
The Chrisleys were found guilty in 2022 in Atlanta on the fraud and tax charges.
Until May, they still had years left on their sentences: Julie was expected to be released in 2028, and Todd in 2032.
Trump personally called the couple's daughter, Savannah, from the Oval Office to inform her of his bombshell pardon.
'It's a great thing because your parents are going to be free and clean,' he said on the call.
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One can certainly see what made The Salt Path successful: a compelling piece of storytelling in its own right, it tapped into deeply held anxieties about the sudden loss of home and health, and countered them with a portrait of resilience against the odds. It is the accusation that Winn misrepresented her husband's illness, and that the books allowed, if not encouraged, readers to believe that the couple's walks and wild camping had led to an improvement in his condition, that has provoked the most vehement negative reactions. That strength of feeling is telling. 'What I'm interested in,' says Rachel Hewitt, author of In Her Nature, 'is that use of physical illness as morally unambiguous. It's a shield, isn't it?' She argues that the full story – whatever the truth of it – would have made a more interesting narrative. But it is easier to market the more crafted tale, which is 'actually very simple: a walk from illness to recovery, a walk from homelessness to finding a new concept of home. You know, all those things are quite simple, and there's clearly something within publishing houses or within readers that really responds to that.' Writing about illness is an intensely personal and immensely delicate undertaking, both in terms of the challenges it holds for the writer and the impact it can have on the reader. Susan Sontag famously outlined the dangers in Illness As Metaphor; Hilary Mantel counselled that 'illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false.' 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Her debut book, Land Beneath the Waves, has been published recently, and she explains how she initially resisted the idea of writing about her family history and her own chronic illness in relation to nature, deterred partly by an awareness of the limitations of memory, and partly by a belief that her story was too 'ordinary'. 'I think perhaps even some of the books that are billed as healing narratives are more complex than that. It's just that this becomes sort of a trope that's talked about. And I think it simplifies things, and sets a precedent that other books are expected to follow, which is not helpful to [having] a diversity of voices within memoir, particularly within nature memoir, because the greater diversity of voices we have, the more people's individual experiences are validated and spoken to.' Through all these conversations, there's a clear insistence that we need to see 'nature' not as a resource, but as a multifaceted and interdependent series of contexts and environments. 'Let's be honest, it's full of death, isn't it?' says James Rebanks, whose accounts of his life as a farmer in The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral have recently been joined by The Place of Tides, a memoir about time spent with a wild duck farmer on a Norwegian island. As he points out, nature is 'full of death and disease and failure and decline. It isn't all butterflies, sunshine and healing, is it? In my last book, I was trying to make it more complicated: nature can be lonely. Nature can be too quiet. It can be too isolated. It can lead to you not being in the right place. And nature itself is broken, so it can make you depressed. It's falling apart around you. I find it more interesting when it's less about personal redemption and more of a mirror on the big things that I care about: the politics, the economics, what's actually really happening in the world.' Rebanks, who loves Tolstoy and the American writer Wendell Berry and thinks of himself in the tradition of the agrarian radical, is an engaging presence, both off and on the page and, like the best writers on nature, is alive to the frequent contradictions in portraying it in either fiction or nonfiction. Helen Macdonald, too, whose prize-winning H Is for Hawk has been made into a film with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson, is acutely aware of the expectations we bring to the genre. 'Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,' Macdonald says, 'which, of course, is bullshit. That's not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.' Macdonald highlights a literary-critical tradition that is useful in understanding both the success of The Salt Path and the reaction to its alleged departures from fact. 'Tramp' or 'vagabonding' literature, which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, was by its nature highly individualistic and accepted to contain fabrications; it encompassed writing by those who were marginalised from society, and those, like George Orwell, who put themselves in that position in order to analyse societal structures. It's a world away from contemporary memoir and the idea that nature can be instrumental in making us feel better. So is the genre now facing an existential crisis? Is there still room in the market for stories of journeys into the wilderness, complete with a healing narrative? For Jessica Lee, author of books for both adults and children and the founder of The Willowherb Review, which ran from 2018 to 2022 and aimed to provide a platform for writers of colour, the issues raised by The Salt Path furore present us with an opportunity to explore innovative ways of writing about nature. 'If we're talking about wanting to write about the natural world,' Lee says, 'we can't get rid of ourselves. We can't write ourselves out of the narratives; we're the ones telling the story. But what we can do is allow the world to inform the shape that we take.' That means resisting the idea of linear progression, or redemptive arcs, in favour of the cyclical and the messy. 'The personal, with us at the centre, can be the door that opens the story. But then we really need to be very proactively seeking to undo that the second we've opened that door.' Meanwhile, the fallout from such microscopic attention to a huge bestseller offers us a window into the realities of nature publishing, where experimentation and complexity persist, but often do so without the resources afforded to more commercially appealing narratives. A salutary lesson, perhaps, but not one likely to deter the most adventurous and committed of those attempting to survey our threatened environment and to capture both its wonders and its fragility.
