‘Sister Wives’ Star Kody Brown Says His Split From Ex-Wife Meri Brown Started ‘7 Years Ago’

While fans have watched Sister Wives star Kody Brown’s marriages to Christine Brown, Janelle Brown and Meri Brown end, the father of 18 revealed his split from Meri was actually the first to start “seven years ago.”

“We started a breakup seven years ago and have been going through just a process of trying to figure out what to do,” Kody, 54, told Us Weekly on Wednesday, October 18, describing his current family dynamic as a “civil war.”

Kody and Meri, 52, legally married in 1990. He went on to have spiritual marriages with Janelle, 54, and Christine, 51, until Robyn Brown — his only remaining wife — joined the family in 2010. Meri and Kody remained married until they divorced in 2014 so that he could marry Robyn, 44, and legally adopt her kids from a previous relationship.

TLC fans have watched the former couple face many challenges in their marriage, including a major catfishing scandal in March 2015, which happened not long after the pair’s 2014 divorce.

Meri began a relationship with a man named “Sam,” whom she met on Twitter. However, after six months of online communication, the Lizzie’s Heritage Inn owner’s romance with “Sam” came to a sudden halt after she discovered that her Internet lover was actually a woman named Jackie Overton.

Jackie, an infamous online scammer, tricked the mom of one into falling in love with her by pretending to be “Sam,” a business tycoon in his early 40s. After flirting publicly via Twitter, Meri and “Sam” (a.k.a. Jackie) started to chat privately on the phone. Meri even sent “Sam” naughty text messages, which Jackie later leaked, that included images of the TLC personality posing seductively with a banana.

Once the TLC personality discovered that “Sam” was Jackie in August 2015, she was understandably devastated.

While Meri — who shares child Leon Brown with Kody — has been very candid about how being catfished impacted her family’s life, she acknowledged that her marriage was already strained.

“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 during the season 16 reunion, which aired in January 2022.

Kody and Meri confirmed their split in January 2023, and the Wyoming native’s relationship with Meri is his third failed marriage. Christine announced their split in November 2021, while Janelle and Kody called it quits in December 2022.