Just days after news broke that Kody Brown and his second wife, Janelle, are separated, the Sister Wives star and his first wife, Meri Brown, have officially split as well. In a clip for the upcoming Sister Wives: One on One special, Meri says Kody decided to end things.
This will likely come as no surprise to fans of the show, who have witnessed Meri and Kody’s estranged relationship during the last several seasons. While Meri is still part of the show and the Brown family, she and Kody have not had a typical marriage in years.
This means Kody Brown is, technically, no longer practicing plural marriage at the moment. He’s in a monogamous marriage with his fourth (and legal) wife Robyn Brown. He and his third wife, Christine, officially divorced in September 2021. She now lives in Salt Lake City Utah, away from Kody and the rest of the wives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“I don’t really considered myself married to Meri,” Kody says in a teaser clip for the special. “If she wanted to move on and marry another, she wouldn’t get an argument with me.”
Meri tells Sister Wives: One on One host Sukanya Krishnan that she wasn’t consulted in the decision to end the marriage—and called Kody out for his alleged hypocrisy when it comes to the dissolution of his different marriages.
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“It just doesn’t make sense to me that he would be so frustrated with Christine and be like, ‘She just made this decision. We didn’t consult. We didn’t talk.’ … And then he says, ‘No, I don’t consider myself married to Meri,’” Meri said in the clip. “He just made the decision. I have never heard him say that to me.”
Meri, who shares 27-year-old Leon with Kody, has been married to him since 1990. Their marriage has been fractured since her catfishing scandal back in 2015. She said when she called him to wish him a happy anniversary last year, his response wasn’t exactly warm.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t even know why you called me, Meri.’ He’s like, ‘We’re not married. We’re not acting as married,’” Meri claimed. “And I said to him then, ‘If that’s where we are, don’t you think that we should address that publicly?’”
She tells Krishnan that he didn’t want to publicly “address it” and told her, “‘I don’t want that to be out there publicly because I don’t want that judgment.’”
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Though Meri and Kody were legally married (since she was the first wife), the couple divorced in 2014 so that the Kody could legally wed his fourth wife, Robyn, and adopt her three children from a previous marriage. Technically, Meri and Kody have been in a spiritual union ever since, but have been living very separate lives for many years.
“He’s already made the decision,” Meri said when Krishnan asked where the two stand now. “I would [think about reconciliation]. I don’t think that he’s interested.”