Sister Wives’ Meri Brown Claims Kody Threatened to Be ‘Horrible’ to Her for 20 Years Before Split

Sister Wives star Meri Brown claimed that her ex-husband, Kody Brown, threatened to be “horrible” to her for 20 years before they eventually split.

“One time he told me, this was right after he moved to Vegas,” Meri, 53, told her friend Jenn Sullivan about Kody, 55, during the Sunday, January 5, episode. “He said, ‘You have been really horrible to me for 20 years. So you’re going to have to wait at least that long for me to fix my relationship with you.’”

Meri continued to reflect on Kody’s comments, explaining they were made while the family was living in a rental property after they moved to Nevada in 2011. She recalled Kody telling her, “‘Listen you’ve been hard to live with. You’ve been mean. And so now I am going to be this way to you and you’re just going to have to deal with it for 20 years,’” Meri said.

Jenn was clearly shocked by the comments and asked how Kody could have said that to her, though Meri proved she was no longer bothered by the interaction by quipping, “Listen joke’s on him, I didn’t last that long.”

“No wonder people look at me and are just like, ‘Really? Why did you not get the clue?’” Meri said in a confessional. “I got the clue. I got the message that he was giving. I was chalking it up to, you know, the fact that he was trying to figure things out.”

The mother of one continued, “A lot of times really nasty things spew out of his mouth when he doesn’t mean them. Also I know I wasn’t the easiest to live with. I get that.”

Meanwhile, Kody insisted during the new episode that he didn’t make the comment because he was “mad” at the time. “I was saying it because I was mad enough to tell the truth. Looking back on the marriage, I was like, ‘We should have divorced here, we should have divorced here, we should have divorced here.’ But I didn’t believe in divorce,” he explained of his reasoning.

Meri concluded the topic by stating that she planned to make the most of the lessons she learned during their marriage moving forward. “All I can do is look in the mirror, figure out where I can improve and be a better person and just make the rest of my life as good as it can be,” she told Jenn. “And I tried to do that with, you know, the marriage.”

At the time of the incident, Kody was still married to Meri, Christine Brown, Janelle Brown and Robyn Brown. Meri and Kody – who wed in 1990 – legally divorced in 2014 so that he could marry Robyn, 46, and adopt her kids from a previous relationship, though the former couple remained in a spiritual marriage until they split nearly a decade later.

Christine, 52, left the Brown patriarch in November 2021, and Janelle, 55, followed suit in December 2022. Meanwhile, Kody and Meri confirmed their own split in January 2023 after facing separation rumors for several months.

“We feel compelled to share our own truth, in our own way and in our own timing,” the former couple wrote in a joint statement posted via Instagram at the time. “After more than a decade of working on our relationship in our own unique ways, we have made the decision to permanently terminate our marriage relationship.”