Sister Wives’ Kody Brown Wants to Be Friends With Meri After Split: ‘We’ll Always Have a Relationship’

Nearly one year after Kody Brown and Meri Brown announced that they were “permanently terminating” their marriage, the Sister Wives stars appear to be in an amicable place. 

“[We] needed to move forward without being in a relationship of marriage,” Kody, 54, told People in an interview published on Monday, January 1. “But I think the realization of that has brought us to a place where we can be friends again. Meri and I do, I believe, go forward very quickly, I hope, with love and grace, forgiveness and charity to where I want her to feel free to call me if she ever needs anything.”

The TLC star said he wants to have an “open” dialogue with Meri, 52, even though they are no longer married. “Her and Robyn [Brown] are still, I think, close,” Kody added, referring to Meri’s relationship with his only current wife. “She still wants to come and see the kids. We’ll always have a relationship of what I hope is at least [some] kind of friendship.”

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Meri was Kody’s first wife after they tied the knot in 1990. The two remained legally married until 2014, which is when Kody married Robyn, 45, so that he could adopt her children from a previous relationship. Although Meri and Kody stayed spiritually married from then until their split in January 2023, their relationship was strained for quite some time before they officially called it quits.

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Many of Meri and Kody’s issues stemmed from her 2015 catfish scandal. Meri embarked in a months-long online relationship with someone she thought was a man, but turned out to be a woman. Her relationship with Kody was not the same after the online affair was exposed. 

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“The experience of Meri’s catfish [still] makes me extremely angry,” Kody admitted in December. “[Because] she’s in full denial of what actually happened.” However, Meri insisted that the scandal was not the “defining” moment in the demise of her and Kody’s marriage. “There was a lot of things that were happening for years prior,” she explained. “[Looking] at that moment as the thing that broke the marriage is very inaccurate.”

Despite their differing opinions about the past, Kody and Meri are in a good place moving forward. “I don’t know how to rationalize that, but we’re not angry with each other anymore,” Kody shared. “I’m like, ‘We are in a place where we are finding friendship in this breakup.’”