The Rise & Fall Of Kody Brown & The Sister Wives' Relationships

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"Sister Wives" fans will know that Kody Brown's relationships with his wives went from bad to worse in the span of just 14 months as his plural family fully imploded in 2022. What started out as seemingly strong, decades-long marriages deteriorated on-camera as the partners fought about everything from intimacy to COVID-19 protocols and bizarre rules Kody made the sister wives follow. Ultimately, Meri, Christine, and Janelle decided to call it quits, leaving Kody Brown in a monogamous relationship with his fourth and final wife, Robyn.

Since then, Kody has gone on to claim that he never loved his first three wives. "I was just choosing to be in that covenant of love," he told viewers in November 2023 (via ET), despite talking about loving his exes in past seasons. Even Robyn, allegedly the only wife Kody ever loved, had questions. "I wonder if it's just a rewriting of history," she mused. "There seems to be a lot of that." While we may never know the full extent of what went wrong behind the scenes, here's your look at everything we do know about the rise and fall of Kody and the sister wives' unconventional relationships.

Meri Brown met Kody in October 1989 when she was just 18 years old. As she recalled in a post deleted on TLC's website, via ABC News, she met up with a friend who was visiting from out of town and introduced her to her brother, Kody. "During that weekend while she was visiting, the three of us hung out together, shopping, going to movies and just having fun together," Meri recalled. "After she went home, I figured that would probably be the last I would see of Kody for a while."

What actually happened was that Kody proposed just two months later, on Christmas Eve, and they got married in April 1990. Despite the whirlwind courtship, they were on the same page from the beginning. Having been raised in a polygamous family, Meri knew that, like Kody, she wanted to build a plural family. Indeed, they seemed to be the perfect fit in every aspect. As future sister wife Christine once told TLC viewers, per People, Mari and Kody were clearly smitten when she first met them. "They were so cute and everybody wanted to be around them — they were the 'it couple,'" Christine enthused.

Meri and Kody went on to have one child together, Leon, in 1995. The couple tried for more children and got pregnant 12 years later, but they experienced heartbreak when Meri had a miscarriage at around 10 weeks.

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Meri and Kody always had plans to add more wives to their union, and they finally acted on them in 1993 when Kody had a spiritual wedding with Meri's friend, Janelle. The future sister wives had known each other for years when Meri decided to introduce her then-fiancé to her friends. As Janelle would later recall, per ABC News, she was instantly drawn to Kody. "When he walked into the room I looked at him and had that feeling of remembering something I had forgotten," she recalled. "It was a singular experience." Even so, she didn't act on her emotions. Instead, she developed a friendship with Kody and even attended the couple's wedding. However, as she recalled, "Eventually, Kody and I became as good of friends as Meri and I were."

While Meri and Kody made it clear they wanted a sister wife, Janelle was initially apprehensive. "I wasn't in a faith that embraced plural marriage," she later explained on "Sister Wives." Her feelings changed once she joined the same faith, and she and Kody finally wed. However, it took time for them to transition from friends to lovers, even after saying "I do." "I knew nothing about you really when we got married, I just knew I belonged in your family," Janelle told viewers. The couple went on to welcome their first child, Logan, in 1994, followed by five more kids: Madison, Hunter, Garrison, Gabriel, and Savanah.

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Kody was already married to Meri and was building a relationship with Janelle when he first crossed paths with his third sister wife, 19-year-old Christine Brown. It was the summer of 1990, and Christine had just graduated high school when her sister, Wendy, introduced her to Kody and Meri, who had been her chaperones on a youth wilderness trek. Reminiscing about the start of their relationship on an episode of "Sister Wives," Christine said she did all of the flirting, but it took some time before she confessed her true feelings to Kody. "We were really good friends for about three and a half years," she recalled. Ultimately, Christine — who also came from a polygamist family — told Kody she wanted something more, and on Valentine's Day weekend in 1994, they had their first date, and he proposed.

The pair had a spiritual wedding ceremony in March 1994, but as Christine later ad mitted, "Our wedding day was sad." Not only were the nuptials thrown together quickly and in secret, but she hated her dress and, as she recalled, "I hadn't seen Kody for a long time, we'd just been talking on the phone, we hadn't connected." Even so, they moved past it and had their first child, Aspyn, in 1995, followed by kids Mykelti, Paedon, Gwendlyn, Ysabel, and Truely.

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Robyn had just gotten out of a difficult marriage and had sworn off relationships when she met Kody at church in 2009. "The first thing I noticed about the man was his eyes," she recalled in a since-deleted blog post saved by ABC News. "I love laugh lines and this man had beautiful ones." Robyn continued watching Kody closely when he suddenly looked back and caught her eye. "A jolt of lightning shot through my body," she wrote. Even so, she was cautious about pursuing a new partnership, especially because she didn't want her three children to experience more trauma. Meanwhile, Kody later said on "Sister Wives" (via In Touch Weekly) that he initially didn't consider Robyn romantically. "I thought, 'I didn't need a van, a divorced woman and three kids in my life — that's just trouble,'" he critiqued.

However, that had all changed by May 2010 when Kody had a spiritual wedding ceremony with Robyn. Although her first marriage had been monogamous, Robyn grew up in a polygamist family, and she was all for being a sister wife. The pair had their first child, Solomon, in 2011, followed by Ariella (Kody's 18th child) in 2016. What's more, they actually wed legally in 2014 — after Kody divorced Meri — so that Kody could adopt her three kids from her first marriage. That, in turn, may have been the beginning of the end for Kody's existing plural family.

The strain of Robyn's addition in 2010 was clear from the beginning. At the time, Christine told viewers she was happy with only three sister wives while Janelle mused, "It just changes everything." Meanwhile, Meri struggled with jealousy, which only became tougher after Kody asked her for a legal divorce in 2014. Speaking candidly on a 2023 special called "Sister Wives: One on One" (via People), Christine shared that her heart broke when she realized Kody was in love with Robyn and that his feelings for her were so much stronger than for his other wives. Indeed, Kody admitted that Robyn was the first wife he had ever fallen in love with. "The two of us had a click whereas I was working for years with these others to get them to get this place," he claimed. Meri, for one, didn't buy that excuse, noting Kody simply threw in the towel. "I think that he has, in his life, had the capacity to love and care for multiple of us, right?" she asked. "He has a capacity and, for whatever reason, he's not doing it." Janelle agreed, noting, "It really felt like he more and more pulled away from wanting to be a plural husband."

For her part, Robyn told People that the blame wasn't on her but on the other wives. "Their focuses started to shift to kids that have left home to go live their life, instead of focusing on their relationship with Kody," she argued.

Cracks really began to show in Kody's relationship with Meri after he legally divorced her in 2014 to marry Robyn and adopt her kids. Although she initially said on "Sister Wives" that it didn't affect their union — "Our spiritual marriage, our spiritual ceiling, was still intact," she assured — that wasn't entirely true. In a clip from the 2015 "Sister Wives Tell All" posted by People, Meri revealed she had mixed feelings about the divorce. "It's the end of something that we had had for 24-and-a-half years," she mused. Meri also later admitted to feeling jealous, despite wanting a plural marriage, and claimed that Kody didn't know how to handle it. "He's human; he is going to not know how to deal with a woman's jealousy," she told People in 2023.

Likely due to these shifting dynamics, Meri sought a connection outside of her marriage, and in 2015, she began flirting with someone she believed to be a businessman named Sam. The pair first chatted on X, formerly Twitter, before taking their conversation private. Six months later, she discovered she had been the target of a catfishing scandal and that Sam was actually a woman named Jackie Overton. This infidelity strained her marriage with Kody, going as far as to proclaim (via E!), "Meri was never loyal to me, ever." However, Meri is adamant their issues ran deeper. "A lot of people like to look at that as the defining moment and the fracture in mine and Kody's relationship and it wasn't," she said, via In Touch Weekly.

Kody's plural family began to implode in November 2021 when Christine announced she was divorcing him. Taking to Instagram, the third sister wife told fans, "After more than 25 years together, Kody and I have grown apart and I have made the difficult decision to leave." Rather than one single reason, it was a series of factors that pushed Christine to pull the plug. She struggled with not being listened to and taken seriously by Kody and ultimately felt he was pushing her away. She called her marriage sad, admitting on "Sister Wives," "I never wanted to be so estranged and have extremely limited physical contact — not even handholding." She later told People in 2022 that the final straw came in September 2020 when Kody refused to show up for their daughter Ysabel's major scoliosis surgery in New Jersey because he worried about traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic. "He broke my little girl's heart," she slammed.

Christine went on to find love again after giving online dating a try. She met David Woolley in 2022, and they married in October 2023. "It's everything I never thought I would have," she told People ahead of her wedding day. "It's a dream come true." And while she no longer has a relationship with Kody or Meri, she's continued to be friends with Janelle. During a joint interview with E! in 2024, Christine couldn't help but enthuse, "We're living our best lives."

In December 2022, Janelle became the second sister wife to officially call it quits with Kody. As she told viewers, she had been questioning their compatibility for several years, but their biggest issues stemmed from Kody's estrangement from two of their sons, Gabriel and Garrison. After the boys refused to follow their dad's strict COVID-19 protocols, Kody cut ties with them, leaving Janelle to wonder what had happened to the devoted father Kody had once been.

However, unlike Christine, who proudly told the world she was divorced, Janelle didn't see the logic in using that particular term. "Because we never were legally married, I can't really say I'm divorced," she told People in 2024. Instead, she simply preferred to tell folks, "I'm no longer with my partner." However, she decided to make the split official, and Janelle fully embraced her new single life. "It's kind of a renewal season," she told E! that year. "I have a whole new life that I'm creating for myself." That included buying herself a new home on a 156-acre property in Chocowinity, North Carolina, as well as starting her own business. Teaming up with daughter Madison and son-in-law Caleb Brush, Janelle launched Taeda Farms, a flower farm and event space, in September 2024.

Just 14 months after Christine left Kody for good, his plural marriage dream completely broke down in December 2022 when Meri became the third sister wife to quit the union. As she would later tell TLC viewers, their marriage truly began to suffer after the family's move to Arizona in 2018. They slowly grew apart until Kody surprised her by abruptly ending their union during a phone call. Meri explained she was wishing Kody a happy anniversary when he told her, "But we're not marri –- but we're not living as a married couple" (via ET).

Following her decision to ditch Kody, Meri embraced life to the fullest. In May 2023, for example, she shared an in-flight selfie while heading to London, England, and wrote that she was "saying YES to meeting new people; saying YES to doing unexpected things." Jump to April 2024, and she revealed in an Instagram video that she was indeed dating again, but cautiously. "Prince Charming has not arrived," she shared. "I'm not really looking for a prince. No, I'm looking for a king." As for her relationship with Kody, she made the termination permanent by seeking a "release" from church leaders in an October 2024 episode of "Sister Wives." It proved to be an emotional and difficult decision, as it was not something she ever planned to do. "My choice was always to stay," Meri later told Kody in the following episode.

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Despite being married for decades, Kody Brown has had nothing nice to say about his exes since their respective splits. In Season 19, Episode 6 of "Sister Wives," Kody told viewers that his relationships were actually terrible but that he never thought of ending them because it went against his religion. "Leadership will never allow you to marry again if you're discarding wives," he explained. Kody also previously implied that he didn't love his first three wives, hinting that their unions were doomed from the start. In that same vein, he told Meri during the episode that he had married the wrong person, leaving her speechless. He then appeared to attack all three ex-wives, throwing their unions under the bus. "Some people call it F&F, and the second word is fight," Kody quipped. "That doesn't create intimacy, that just creates orgasms."

Speaking with Us Weekly in 2023, Christine and Janelle agreed that Kody was likely acting out because of his hurt ego and said they didn't recognize him anymore. "I would not have married this guy who he is now, like this mean person who says these things," reasoned Janelle.

While Kody Brown was quick to start shading his exes, Robyn found it much harder to watch her plural family fall apart. She repeatedly shed tears on the show, telling viewers in December 2023, via People, "It feels like we're going through a death." Making things harder, while she was busy mourning the loss of her sister wives, Kody was taking his anger out on her, lashing out and sabotaging the only union he had left. "A lot of dark winds were going through me," Kody admitted. "A lot of devil, a lot of temptation, which would be destructive of my relationship with Robyn."

Even so, Robyn stuck it out through Kody's outbursts while also holding on to hope that Meri might not actually leave. "I'm trying really hard not to feel like it's the end of our world," she said on the show in 2024, revealing she was dealing with depression. "I'm struggling not to be blue and crying constantly." She also told viewers she had tried her best to keep her fellow sister wives happy by hiding her strong connection with Kody. Indeed, she was still hoping for reconciliation as of late 2024. "She's been holding on to the dream that I sold her on with my family for a lot longer, but I keep trying to go, 'Let's move on,'" Kody said, per People.