‘Sister Wives’ Star Mykelti Brown Claims She Was Not Paid for Filming Childbirths on TLC Series

Sister Wives star Mykelti Padron (née Brown) claims she was not paid for filming the births of her children on the family’s TLC series.

“Do you get paid for things like filming your births? I would hope so,” a fan asked during a recent Q&A with Mykelti, 27, and her husband, Tony Padron. “Technically, Jenny, no,” the reality star simply replied. 

The couple – who share daughter Avalon and twin sons Archer and Ace – went on to say that Kody Brown and his wives “don’t like” that their older children are “more active” and speaking out about their family in recent years. 

“They don’t like it because it’s a risk,” Tony, 28, added. 

Mykelti’s younger sister Gwendlyn Brown and her now-wife, Beatriz Queiroz, previously dished on her family’s reaction to Gwen’s popular YouTube channel, claiming she has received backlash from unnamed members of the Brown clan.

“Are you being paid or influenced by the network to be doing these videos?” one user questioned during a June Q&A on her channel. “Who does your fantastic editing?” Beatriz replied, “She isn’t influenced by the network at all. It’s all her own opinions. She does get some influence when she gets “angry calls from some family members.” 

Gwen, 21, later claimed that her father and his last wife, Robyn Brown, “have a terrible habit of spending very crazy.”

“Janelle and Meri are kind of similar to my mom and that they’re not gonna be salty or petty and try to take money from him even though they totally deserve it because he’s been spending all of their money on whatever,” she added in April, while rewatching a season 3 episode of the show. “[They will] probably be a lot better off now that they’re no longer with him, and they’re no longer financially tied to him because you still make a lot of money separately.” 

While Mykelti and Tony did not expand on their claims of being unpaid for appearances on the long-running reality series, Jill Dillard (née Duggar) recently opened up about her similar situation for her years on 19 Kids & Counting and Counting On. 

“I never received any payout — no check, no cash, no nothing. For seven and a half years of my adult life, I was never paid,” Jill, 32, explained during her appearance on Prime Video’s Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets documentary. 

She later divulged that her father, Jim Bob Duggar, had “grown rich off the show” after “tricking” his children into signing contracts. “Over the years Pops had bought more and more properties, and his fleet of private aircraft now contained multiple airplanes, including one with ten seats,” the mother of three wrote in her memoir, Counting the Cost, adding that Jim Bob, 58, was paid a calculated $8 million throughout the shows’ runs on TLC. “It was hard to face the reality that my own father had seemingly tricked me on the day of my wedding rehearsal into signing such a document.”