‘Sister Wives’ Star Kody Brown Once Courted an Underage Teen: ‘We Were All so Young’

Yeah, this is definitely a little weird. For fans who may not be aware, the Sister Wives spilled several secrets in their 2012 tell-all Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage. In the book, Meri Brown revealed that she and her husband, Kody Brown, courted another woman who almost joined the family, according to Radar Online. But Christine Brown — another one of Kody’s four wives — explained later in the book that the girl wasn’t technically an adult when Kody and Meri started pursuing her. Yikes!

Kody, 50, and Meri, 48, were apparently in their early 20s when they entered into a courtship with a girl they met at a church gathering. Meri wrote in the 2012 memoir that she and the girl, “became close friends right away. This was unusual for me and I immediately took it as a sign that Kody and I were destined to marry her.”

The courtship ultimately didn’t work out, and Christine, 46, wrote of the situation in the book, “I didn’t want to hear about the courtship. It had been prolonged because Kody and Meri wanted to wait for the girl they were courting to turn 18 before making their engagement official.” So she allegedly wasn’t 18 when they first started seeing her. That’s…a little icky. However, according to the Utah state legislature, the legal age of consent is 16.

Meri wrote that she “felt confident that the three of us had a wonderful future together and I was certain that while she would be a great wife to Kody, she would remain one of my best friends.” She was devastated when the woman left, and Meri continued, “Back then we were all so young, she was only 18 and Kody and I were in our first year of marriage — so we may have mistaken a crush for love…Nevertheless, I felt personally betrayed. I had lost one of my closest friends, a woman I imagined would have been a perfect sister wife.” Hmm.

Eventually, Kody went on to marry Janelle Brown, then Christine, then Robyn Brown. So he clearly ended up expanding his family even though that second possible relationship didn’t work out. It’s probably all for the best because the optics around Kody courting and eventually marrying someone who was allegedly underage when they met would probably not look good when the family became reality TV stars. Heck, it still doesn’t sound great.