JB Mauney Ex Wife: The Untold Story of His Marriage, Family, and Life Beyond Rodeo
Quick Bio
| Detail | Info |
| Full Name | James Burton Mauney |
| Born | January 9, 1987, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Professional bull rider (retired), PBR team coach |
| Known For | Two-time PBR World Champion (2013, 2015); first rider to earn $7 million in career prize money |
| Nickname | The Dragon Slayer |
| Ex-Wife | Lexie Wiggly (married 2012, divorced 2015) |
| Current Wife | Samantha Lyne (married 2017) |
| Children | Bella Mauney (born 2011), Jagger Briggs Mauney (born January 23, 2019) |
| Retired | 2023, following a neck fracture sustained in Lewiston, Idaho |
| Estimated Net Worth | $6–10 million |
Who JB Mauney Is and Why His Story Is Worth Telling
There is a version of this story you already know if you have spent even five minutes around professional bull riding. The fearless cowboy from North Carolina. Two world titles. A reputation for climbing on bulls that would make most other elite riders quietly pass. A career built not just on talent but on a specific, rare quality: the ability to get hurt badly, recover, and come back more dangerous than before.
But that story is incomplete without the people who lived alongside it.
JB Mauney’s personal life — including his first marriage to Lexie Wiggly, their daughter Bella, the divorce, and what came after — is the human architecture that supported one of the most decorated careers in the history of bull riding. And understanding it gives you a fuller picture of a man who spent the better part of two decades getting on the back of the most dangerous animals in professional sport.
This is the story of JB Mauney. And of the woman he married first, who has been almost entirely overlooked in the process of telling it.
The Boy from North Carolina
On January 9, 1987, James Burton Mauney was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. That detail surprises people. Charlotte is a city known for banking and NASCAR, not for rodeo cowboys and bull riding. But geography does not determine destiny, and JB proved that early.
He grew up in what you might call a working-class household with strong rural ties and an early pull toward anything involving livestock and grit. He was riding bulls before most teenagers had settled on what they wanted to do with their lives. The Southern Rodeo Association’s junior circuit saw him competing as a young man, and the results were clear quickly: this kid was different.
What made him different was not just natural balance or physical strength, though he had both. It was an attitude toward risk that sits outside the normal range of human response. Most people, when faced with an animal that weighs a literal ton and has been specifically bred for unpredictability and aggression, choose not to get on its back. JB Mauney’s brain apparently never received that particular memo.
His early years were shaped by relentless practice, travel across the region for junior competitions, and the gradual accumulation of the specific skills and instincts that bull riding demands. By the time he turned professional, he was not a raw talent hoping to find form. He was a developed rider with a clear idea of who he was and what he was capable of.
Building a Career: From Rookie to Champion
JB entered the Professional Bull Riders circuit in 2005, competing in the championship bull riding organisation’s world finals before transitioning into the PBR’s top-tier Built Ford Tough Series. In 2006, he was competing full-time at the PBR’s elite level. In 2007, he won Rookie of the Year — a recognition that formalised what the bull riding world was already seeing in the stands and in the standings.
The years between 2007 and 2013 were a long, grinding, injury-marked rise through the top echelons of the sport. He was consistently in the conversation for the world title. He was consistently getting hurt. And he was consistently getting back on.
One of the measures of how seriously the industry regarded him during this period was the company he kept in head-to-head moments. He faced Bushwacker — widely regarded as the most dominant bull in the history of the PBR, a creature that had bucked off nearly every elite rider who ever drew him — on multiple occasions. In August 2013, he became one of the extraordinarily rare riders to cover Bushwacker successfully. That single ride became one of the iconic moments in the sport’s history.
The 2013 season ended with JB Mauney standing at the top of the world. His first PBR World Championship was not a surprise to anyone who had watched him closely — but it was still a genuine moment of arrival. He had been climbing toward that summit for the better part of a decade, and he had finally stepped onto it.
He won again in 2015. Back to back world titles are not a given for anyone in this sport. The fact that he did it at all — across a career already pocked with injuries and recoveries — said something significant about the level of talent and determination he carried.
In November 2016, he made history of a different kind. He became the first rider in PBR history to cross the $7 million mark in career prize money. The sport’s seven million dollar man. In a sport where earnings are hard-won, event by event, ride by ride, that number represented not just talent but durability.
Lexie Wiggly: The First Marriage
Lexie Wiggly came into JB Mauney’s life through the social world that surrounds professional rodeo. They met through mutual connections in North Carolina, where both had ties, and their relationship began against the backdrop of a sport that makes ordinary dating logistics genuinely complicated. JB was on the road constantly — bull riding at the PBR’s elite level means a schedule of events across the country, most weekends, most of the year.
Lexie is an American woman who has, by all accounts, preferred to keep her life private both before and especially after her relationship with JB became public knowledge. She is identified in various sources as an esthetician, with a professional focus on beauty and skincare. She is also described as having a barrel racing connection — the women’s rodeo discipline that forms a significant part of the broader rodeo community — which would have placed her comfortably in the world JB inhabited professionally.
On April 2, 2011, Bella Mauney, their daughter, was born. A baby before a wedding is not unusual in professional rodeo circles, and the two formalised their relationship the following year. They married in May 2012 in North Carolina, bringing together two people who were both shaped by the South and by the specific culture of the rodeo world.
The years of that marriage were years in which JB was simultaneously at the height of his competitive career. He won his first world title in 2013, the year after their wedding. The travel demands that define life at the PBR’s top level are not easy to build a family around. Long absences, weekends away, the unpredictable rhythms of a professional season — these are pressures that sit on top of every other challenge a marriage faces.
What Lexie brought to those years was quiet steadiness. She didn’t use the relationship to promote herself or get media attention. She appeared occasionally in the coverage of JB’s career, present at events, visible as a partner but not a public figure in her own right. That balance — being part of a high-profile sporting world without becoming defined by it — takes a specific kind of groundedness.
The marriage lasted three years. In 2015, JB and Lexie divorced. No public explanation was offered by either of them, and neither has spoken in detail about the reasons. What is known from the record is that the split was handled privately and that both parents maintained a cooperative approach to raising Bella, who was around four years old at the time.
Lexie After the Divorce: A Life Rebuilt Quietly
Lexie virtually vanished from the public eye once the marriage ended. This was clearly a deliberate choice, not a forced disappearance. She stopped appearing in media coverage. No interviews. There is no verified public social media presence. No statements about the relationship or the divorce.
What has emerged through public records and the general trail that a life leaves is this: Lexie built a new professional identity focused on her esthetician work, with a particular specialism in eyelash extensions. This is skilled, tactile work that requires training, precision, and a steady client relationship — a world that sits entirely apart from the arena and the road.
One source also indicates that Lexie later remarried, with her name now sometimes appearing as Lexie Wigley Puttkamer — the surname suggesting a new partnership that she has kept out of public view with the same care she applied to her exit from the JB Mauney chapter of her life.
Her daughter Bella, born in 2011, remained a constant in her life through all of it. Co-parenting after a public divorce requires a functioning relationship with the other parent, and by all available accounts Lexie and JB managed that without public drama or acrimony. Bella grew up with access to both parents, spending time in the ranch world her father inhabited while also being raised by a mother who had built something independent and stable.
Lexie Wiggly’s story is, in many ways, the story of a woman who made a quiet choice. She temporarily appeared as a well-known athlete’s wife. Then she chose not to be. And without using it as a performance or a statement, she centered her life around that decision. That is very admirable in some way.
JB’s Injuries: The Body Count of a Career
Understanding JB Mauney fully means understanding what his body absorbed over roughly eighteen years of professional bull riding.
The injury list is long and sometimes frightening to read. A career in this sport produces a level of physical wear that most professional athletes never approach. Broken bones come and go with a frequency that would end most careers in any other discipline. JB broke things, had surgeries, recovered, and came back — repeatedly.
In 2015, the year of his second world championship, he suffered a compound fracture in his left leg that would have permanently ended most careers. He returned within months. In 2017, a significant arm injury required surgery involving a screw and thirteen anchors in the joint. He came back from that too.
The career-ending moment came on September 6, 2023, in Lewiston, Idaho. A bull called Arctic Assassin threw him, and he landed on his head. He broke his neck. Four days later, JB Mauney announced his retirement from professional bull riding.
There is an extraordinary postscript to that moment. In early 2024, JB Mauney purchased Arctic Assassin — the bull that broke his neck and ended his career. The animal, now retired from competition, was moved to JB’s ranch in Stephenville, Texas, where the two of them live out their retirements in the same space. JB himself described it with the kind of measured cowboy perspective you would expect from him: everything happens for a reason.
That detail tells you almost everything you need to know about how JB Mauney processes the world.
Samantha Lyne: The Second Chapter
After his divorce from Lexie, JB met Samantha Lyne through the rodeo world that had always been the context of his life. Samantha brought her own significant credentials to the relationship. She is a professional barrel racer — a discipline that requires exceptional horsemanship and nerve — and she qualified for the 2014 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, the Super Bowl equivalent of professional rodeo competition.
Her family background placed her squarely inside the elite tier of American rodeo. Her father is Phil Lyne, a legendary figure in the history of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association — a man who won the all-around cowboy world championship twice in the early 1970s and is remembered as one of the most versatile competitors the sport has ever produced. Phil Lyne passed away in August 2026 at the age of 79.
JB and Samantha married on January 3, 2017. Their son, Jagger Briggs Mauney, was born on January 23, 2019. The Mauney household in Stephenville, Texas, now includes JB, Samantha, Jagger — who has apparently already been spotted riding calves on the family ranch at around five years old, suggesting the next generation may be entering the family trade — and Bella, who moves between her parents’ worlds.
Samantha’s presence in JB’s public life is warmer and more visible than Lexie’s was, in part because Samantha has her own rodeo identity and is part of the same professional culture. She maintains an active Instagram presence and is comfortable being visible as part of the Mauney family story.
Money and Net Worth: An Honest Look
JB Mauney is one of the wealthiest athletes ever to come out of professional bull riding, and the arithmetic behind that is relatively clear.
He was the first rider to pass $7 million in career prize money from the PBR alone. By the time of his retirement, his total career earnings across the PBR, PRCA, and other circuits had pushed into territory that most estimates now place between $7.4 million and $8 million in prize money alone.
Prize money in professional rodeo and bull riding is taxed and spent like income anywhere else, but JB was also active in brand partnerships with major sponsors — Monster Energy being one of the most visible — that would have supplemented his competitive earnings significantly across his career.
Estimates of his overall net worth range from around $6 million on the conservative end to $10 million on the higher end, depending on how much weight you put on estimated endorsement income versus verified prize money. The most commonly cited figure sits around $8 million, which aligns broadly with his documented earnings and lifestyle.
He owns a ranch in Stephenville, Texas — working ranchland that doubles as family home and, apparently, the retirement residence of Arctic Assassin. Ranch property in that part of Texas represents meaningful asset value.
For context: Lexie Wiggly’s financial situation after the divorce is entirely private. No divorce settlement terms were ever made public. She has rebuilt independently, through her professional work as an esthetician, and whatever arrangements were made regarding support or asset division remain between the two of them.
Life Now: The Ranch, the Coaching, and the Kids
JB Mauney’s post-riding life has not been the kind of quiet withdrawal you might expect from someone who spent two decades absorbing punishment in arenas. He has remained active in the sport.
In 2024, he took on the role of head coach of the Oklahoma Wildcatters, one of the newer franchises in the PBR Team Series — a team-based format that the PBR launched to create a different competitive structure around the sport. Coaching allowed him to stay close to bull riding without putting his repaired body back in the arena.
He lives in Stephenville, Texas, with Samantha and their children. Bella, his daughter from his first marriage, has grown into her teenage years. Jagger, his son with Samantha, is a small child already being raised on ranch land with horses and the specific rhythms of a working rodeo family.
The purchase of Arctic Assassin — the bull that ended his career — and that animal’s current life on his ranch is the detail that captures something essential about how JB Mauney moves through the world. He does not carry bitterness about the things that went wrong. He absorbs them, makes peace with them, and sometimes literally brings them home.
Final Words
JB Mauney’s story is, at its core, a story about what people are willing to endure in pursuit of something they love. He got on bulls that no one else wanted to ride. He broke bones and came back. He won world titles, lost marriages, built a new family, and eventually had his career ended by a single moment in Idaho.
What Lexie Wiggly represents in that story is a period of his life that was both professionally triumphant and personally complicated — years when the demands of being at the absolute top of a grueling sport made ordinary relationship rhythms nearly impossible. She brought steadiness to a chaotic chapter, gave him a daughter who remains a fixture of his life, and then stepped away from public view with more grace and dignity than most people in her position manage.
Both of them came out the other side of their divorce having chosen different paths to the same destination: a life that felt genuinely their own.
For JB, that means a ranch in Texas, a second marriage to a woman who understands the rodeo world from the inside, a son already eyeing the family business, and a retired bull grazing in his field.
For Lexie, it means privacy, professional independence, a daughter she raised through all of it, and a new name that signals a new chapter.
Two people. One marriage. Eight years apart now. And both of them, apparently, doing fine.
FAQs
1. Who is JB Mauney’s ex-wife?
JB Mauney’s ex-wife is Lexie Wiggly, sometimes also referenced as Lexie Wigley. She is an American esthetician who met JB through mutual connections in North Carolina. They married in May 2012 and divorced in 2015. She has largely avoided public life since the end of their marriage.
2. When did JB Mauney and Lexie Wiggly get married?
They married in May 2012 in North Carolina, the year after their daughter Bella was born.
3. Why did JB Mauney and Lexie Wiggly divorce?
Neither JB nor Lexie has publicly addressed the reasons for their divorce. The split was finalised in 2015, and both kept the details entirely private. Some sources speculate that the constant travel demands of JB’s bull riding career placed significant strain on their marriage, but this has never been confirmed by either party.
4. Do JB Mauney and Lexie Wiggly have children together?
Yes. Their daughter, Bella Mauney, was born on April 2, 2011, before their marriage. Bella has grown up with co-parenting arrangements between her parents and is part of the extended Mauney family, which now includes JB’s second wife Samantha and half-brother Jagger.
5. Where is Lexie Wiggly now?
Lexie has chosen a very private life since her divorce. She is believed to work as an esthetician, with a specialisation in eyelash extensions. Some sources indicate she has remarried and now uses the name Lexie Wigley Puttkamer, though details of her current life remain entirely private.
6. Who is JB Mauney married to now?
JB Mauney married Samantha Lyne on January 3, 2017. Samantha is a professional barrel racer and 2014 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo qualifier. She is the daughter of Phil Lyne, a two-time all-around cowboy world champion. The couple lives in Stephenville, Texas.
7. How many children does JB Mauney have?
JB has two children. His daughter Bella was born in April 2011, from his relationship and subsequent marriage to Lexie Wiggly. His son, Jagger Briggs Mauney, was born on January 23, 2019, with his current wife Samantha Lyne.
8. How many times did JB Mauney win the PBR World Championship?
JB Mauney won the PBR World Championship twice — in 2013 and again in 2015. He also became the first rider in PBR history to surpass $7 million in career prize money, achieving that milestone in November 2016.
9. What ended JB Mauney’s career?
On September 6, 2023, JB Mauney was thrown by a bull called Arctic Assassin at an event in Lewiston, Idaho. He landed on his head and sustained a neck fracture. Four days after the incident, he announced his retirement from professional bull riding.
10. Did JB Mauney really buy the bull that ended his career?
Yes. In early 2024, JB Mauney purchased Arctic Assassin — the retired bull responsible for his career-ending neck injury. The animal now lives on JB’s ranch in Stephenville, Texas. JB described the move as consistent with his view that everything happens for a reason.
11. What is JB Mauney’s net worth?
Estimates of JB Mauney’s net worth range from around $6 million to $10 million. His documented career prize money from the PBR alone surpassed $7.4 million. Additional income from brand sponsorships and endorsements, including a long-standing relationship with Monster Energy, supplements that figure. He also owns ranch property in Texas.
12. What is JB Mauney doing after retirement?
Since retiring from competitive bull riding in 2023, JB has remained active in the sport as a coach. In 2024 and into the current season, he serves as head coach of the Oklahoma Wildcatters in the PBR Team Series. He lives on his ranch in Stephenville, Texas, with his wife Samantha, their son Jagger, and daughter Bella.
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