Jessica Rose Lee is an American equestrian and the founder of Saddle Club, a California clothing brand that raises money for horse rescues. She is married to Tom Welling, the actor who played Clark Kent on Smallville, and for most of the past decade she kept her own work well clear of his fame.
That balance held until January 2025. Hours after Welling posted a birthday tribute to her on Instagram, four photos and a caption calling her the person who made their dreams come true, police in Yreka, California arrested him for driving under the influence. The arrest fell on her 38th birthday. Lee said nothing publicly, which surprised no one familiar with her.
| Born | January 26, 1987, in San Luis Obispo, California |
| Raised | Mount Shasta, in far Northern California |
| Education | San Diego State University |
| Work | Founder of the Saddle Club apparel brand; equestrian |
| Family | Married to Tom Welling since 2019; sons Thomson Wylde and Rocklin Von |
She is not Jessica Lee Rose, the actress from the lonelygirl15 series; the names are nearly identical, the women are not the same. The one Welling married came to public attention through horses rather than Hollywood.
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Her career with horses came first
Lee grew up in Mount Shasta and started riding young, after she talked her parents into a pony at nine. The horses stuck. She kept riding through college at San Diego State University and into a first career in luxury fashion marketing. For a long stretch the two lives stayed separate. She worked as an assistant rider for grand prix show jumpers at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center and ran events at racetracks on the side.
The two lives came together in 2015, at a horse rescue.
The rescue horse behind Saddle Club
That year, Lee began volunteering at Red Bucket Equine Rescue in Southern California, a nonprofit that takes in horses headed for slaughter and nurses them back to health. One of them was a thoroughbred mare called Delilah, saved from a group of about thirty horses abandoned after a breeding operation collapsed. She had arrived badly neglected.
The trainers told Lee the mare had not been ridden in over a month. She got on anyway.
“We bonded from the first day she tried to buck me off,” Lee told Horse & Style Magazine.
She rode Delilah every week until the horse settled and moved well again. Delilah later appeared as an extra in the 2015 film Emma’s Chance, which was shot at the rescue, and found a permanent home the following year.
The experience turned into a business. Lee started Saddle Club as a riding program, then built it into a clothing line that gives 20 percent of its proceeds to registered horse rescues, among them Red Bucket and Humanity for Horses, a sanctuary in Mount Shasta, where she grew up. “The evolution of Saddle Club has been completely organic,” she said.
Her relationship with Tom Welling
Lee and Welling got together in 2014, while his divorce from the model Jamie White was still moving through the courts. White had filed in 2013, after the couple separated, and the divorce was finalized in 2015. The two of them kept the relationship quiet from the start and have never said publicly how or where they met.
Building a family with Tom Welling
The couple got engaged in early 2018. Lee shared the news on Instagram that February, writing, “To my perfect fiancรฉ, I love you to infinity and beyond.” Welling made it public that April. Their first son, Thomson Wylde, was born on January 5, 2019, weighing 8 pounds 8 ounces.
They married later that year, on November 30, at Sunstone Vineyards & Winery in Santa Ynez, California, in a ceremony with a cowboy theme, and Lee added her husband’s name to hers on Instagram soon after. Their second son, Rocklin Von, arrived in June 2021, a pregnancy Welling had accidentally revealed months earlier on Michael Rosenbaum’s podcast.
One detail from before all of this says more about her than the wedding album. In a 2017 interview, when she was known only in equestrian circles, Lee said she hoped to own a ranch one day, somewhere quiet in California. She and Welling now live on one in the northern part of the state, where she keeps horses and the boys are growing up around them.
How Tom Welling’s DUI case ended
Welling’s 2025 arrest was a misdemeanor, and the case moved quickly. Police in Yreka booked him just after 2 a.m. with a blood alcohol reading at or above the state limit of 0.08 percent, then released him about five hours later. His arraignment was set for March. According to court records reviewed by Us Weekly, the charge was later dismissed, and on May 19, 2025, Welling pleaded no contest to a lesser count. The court ordered:
- A $619 fine
- $150 in restitution
- A DUI program
- One year of probation
Welling never addressed the arrest in public. His wife did not either.
The DUI is what drew most people to her name, even though she had the least to do with it. The brand she built around a rescued thoroughbred keeps running, and a share of every sale still goes to the rescues. The headlines moved on. The work she started a decade ago did not.
