Breeanna Hare
CNN
(CNN) — Country singer Jason Aldean and his wife, Jessica, are officially splitting up.
Aldean filed for divorce on April 26 in Tennessee, the same day that reports circulated suggesting that the two were separating. A rep for Aldean could only confirm at the time that the couple’s been “having problems.”
In 2012, Aldean’s marriage once again made headlines when he was spotted getting close with “American Idol” contestant Brittany Kerr at a bar.
Both Kerr and Aldean apologized, with the 36-year-old musician saying that “the truth” was that he “screwed up … had too much to drink, let the party get out of hand and acted inappropriately at a bar. I left alone, caught the bus to our next show and that’s the end of the story. I ultimately ended up embarrassing my family and myself.”
Aldean and his wife have two daughters together, and on Monday, Aldean said in a statement that the divorce “is a really tough time for my entire family.”
He and Jessica “have been together since we were teenagers,” he went on. “We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs over the years as we grew up together as a couple. She will always be important to me because she is the mother of my children, and I know that we will both always make our daughters our No. 1 priority.”
In his statement, Aldean asked that the public not be so quick to make assumptions, and allow the family to have some privacy.
“I’ve learned that everyone always rushes to judgement when they hear news like this. That’s really hard because no one knows anything about our relationship but us,” the singer said. “I understand that because of my job, I have to go through a lot of this in the public eye, but for my girls’ sake I really wish people would give us some level of privacy and at the very least be respectful of them.”
— CNN’s Denise Quan contributed to this report.