Even after Sister Wives star Meri Brown realized her and former husband Kody Brown‘s love was meant to be divided, she didn’t want to be the one to remove herself from the equation.
For a while, she held onto hope that all the problems that happened while they were living in Las Vegas would stay in Vegas.
As she explained to former sister wife Christine Brown (now wed to David Woolley) in the TLC show’s Oct. 25 episode, “I felt like I had a lot of hope that OK, maybe this is a new beginning because he talked about that.”
But they never fully recommitted after she filed to end their union in 2014 so that he could legally wed fourth wife Robyn Brown and adopt her three older children.
“Things haven’t been working in mine and Kody’s relationship for a really long time,” the 55-year-old explained in a confessional on the long-running series. “And I really had hope he would work on it.”
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Sister Wives: A Guide to Kody Brown’s Kids With Janelle, Christine, Robyn and Meri
She lived in that uncertainty for years “with him just, like, never coming around and then him saying, ‘Oh, cheers to a new beginning,'” she noted. “And then, ‘Just kidding, I’m not going to talk to you for a year.'”
It was at that point she realized the joke simply couldn’t be on her.
“To be honest with you,” Meri told Christine during their sit-down, “I got to the point that I was pretty confident that it was never going to work out and he was waiting for me to say something about it so that he could be the innocent party. And so I got a little bit stubborn and just stuck around.”
In other words, she wasn’t going to subtract herself from the relationship and take the burden off of the dad of 18.
“I wanted him to say it,” she explained to Christine. “Like he’d been saying it everywhere else, but never to me. And I got to the point that I’m like, ‘I will be the thorn in your side or the knife in your kidney,’ or whatever.”
And so it wasn’t until Christine and Kody’s second wife Janelle Brownannounced their separations in 2021 and 2022 that Meri decided to excise herself and follow them straight out of Arizona.
Though Christine would argue Kody and Meri’s issues dated back several states.
When she joined the fam in 1994, “I’d say for the first several years I saw Meri and Kody together, I feel like they were just terrible to each other,” the mom of six recounted during the episode. “They were terrible to each other and they were equally yoked.”
But after the duo’s legal separation, “I saw a real shift in their relationship,” Christine continued. “There was a definite separation from that point on.”
Despite that chasm, however, Meri—who shares 31-year-old Leon with Kody—simply wasn’t going to let him cut her out of his life without some sort of explanation.
“I knew for a fact that he was just trying to push me out,” the Utah-based founder of Lizzie’s Heritage Inn reflected. “And if I was the one who left first, then he could throw up his hands and be like, ‘See, she’s the one who left. I’m all innocent in this situation.’ And I was not going to let him be innocent in this situation. Sorry, I wasn’t.”
Of course, she’s not the only one delivering her verdict on the former polygamist.
Though he and Robyn remain committed, Janelle has estimated that Kody is “alienated from 90 to 95 percent” of his adult children. Keep reading to see what they’ve shared about their ongoing estrangement.
TLC
Kody’s issue, recounted Janelle Brown, who shares sons Logan Brown, Hunter Brown, Garrison Brown and Gabriel as well as daughters Madison Brush and Savanah Brown, with the patriarch, was that he felt his kids hadn’t been loyal to him and his rules.
“He kept phrasing it like I owed him an apology,” Gabriel detailed to Janelle in an October 2024 episode of Sister Wives. “Eventually I was just like, ‘Hey, unless you’re, like, actually ready to have a relationship and fix things, then we’re not going to talk anymore.’ He came back a couple of days later and texted me. He’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve been, like, thinking about what you’ve been saying. I forgive you, Please forgive me.’ I was like, ‘Forgive me for what?'”
So tight with his dad he used to accompany him on business trips, Gabriel remains confused about what he did. But, he noted to Janelle, “I told Dad that if he doesn’t change and he can’t take accountability, then I just won’t ever see him again. And I’m perfectly OK with that.”
“I worry,” a tearful Ysabel shared in a confessional on a November 2024 episode, “that my dad and the chance of having a really close relationship with my dad is slowly going away.”
Not that she didn’t appreciate David as a stepdad.
“He comes off as a very present dad with his children, so I mean, how lovely would that be, right?” she noted. “So I would love to have a relationship that is as amazing with my own father.”
And she’s still holding out hope, admitting in a November 2025 episode, “My dad and I aren’t like, close, close, close, close, close, close.”
Still, while she thought of Christine as both mom and dad, she wouldn’t call her relationship with Kody—who refused to fly cross-country when she had back surgery mid-pandemic—nonexistent. “I mean, he’s still my dad,” she insisted, “and I love him.”
Speaking with YouTuber John Yates in January 2023, Paedon recalled receiving an “out of the blue” phone call from his dad. “It’s like an hour-long conversation and it goes really, really well,” he recounted. “And I’m like, ‘OK, I might be getting my father back. This is wonderful.'”
Then he called his mom.
Talking to Christine—also mom to Aspyn Thompson, Mykelti Padron, Gwendlyn Queiroz, Ysabel and Truely Brown—Paedon learned that Kody had been working to convince producers not to let his children trash him, “trying to put it in our contracts that we are not allowed to say anything negative about him on our platforms.”
But it was a deal he couldn’t close. “My mom was like, ‘No, you’re not allowed to tell our children what they can and can’t say about you. You have to earn their love back,'” explained Paedon. “And I realized he didn’t call me because he wanted to talk to me. He called me because he doesn’t want me talking negatively.”
And while she’s happy they get “an active father,” she noted, “I don’t remember coming home from kindergarten or anything and seeing my dad being happy that I ate all my lunch, or that I made a friend at school.”
That being said, she was still willing to play nice.
In a January 2023 YouTube video she labeled their relationship as “very flip-floppy.”
In person, “my dad’s sweet to me now,” noted Gwendlyn, who invited Kody and Robyn to her and Beatriz Queiroz’s July 2023 wedding. “We had our differences in the past, but we’re getting better. And since we’re not around each other as much, we can’t really be angry with each other as much.”
But when she tunes into the Sunday night episodes, she added, “I do tend to dislike him a little bit. And I just have to remind myself that he’s going through a difficult time and it’s just hard on everybody and, you know, he’s still my dad and he’s still kind to me.”
But in the years since, she seems to have resigned from Team Kody, giving her take on the rift months after she and husband Tony Padron made the move to North Carolina with their three children.
“I think that if he took more accountability in any of his actions, his kids—maybe not all of them, but at least some of them—would reach out,” she noted during an October 2024 fan Q&A shared on the Instagram account @withoutacrystalball. “Instead of blaming the children, or blaming how they feel about his relationship with his other wife or blaming the parents or blaming gossip or whatever, if he just said, ‘Look, I understand I did blank wrong. I’m sorry. Can we talk about it?’ I feel like that would go such a long way.”
As for his stance that he shouldn’t need to beg his children to repair their relationship, she wasn’t having it.
“No matter what happens between myself and my kids, I would always sit outside that door, knock, apologize and ask, and ask, and ask, and just continue to try to do whatever I could to make that relationship stronger,” the mom of three insisted, before referencing Kody’s claim that his former wives had metaphorically stabbed him in the back. “I feel like that’s what you do as a parent. Sometimes you just have to take the knife in the kidney, get over it, and apologize.”
But Leon insisted there’s no missed calls on their cell. “There’s a ridiculous video of my father circulating where he says he reaches out to his children,” they wrote on their Instagram Stories in November 2025. Noting they hadn’t heard from Kody since brother Garrison’s March 2024 death by suicide, Leon added, “kody blatantly blew me off at garrison’s funeral. he is a liar. he is a joke of a father. that’s all.”
“I am open to reconciliation and forgiveness and closure,” she shared on a November 2025, episode of the TLC series after welcoming fourth child Emilia in March 2025. But if her father wanted to fully be let into the life she shares with husband Caleb Brush and kids Axel, Evie, Josephine and Emilia “there would need to be a pattern of consistency.”
And judging by her scathing October 2025 social media rebuke, she’s still waiting.
Sharing an inspirational quote to her Instagram Stories about carefully deciding what is “worth your energy,” Maddie explained how she was able to reach that point.
As she wrote in a DM to one follower looking for tips, “Your dad saying lies about you for the entire world to hear teaches it to you REAL QUICK.”
Her main issue, she noted on a 2024 episode of her The Authentic Society podcast was that “he doesn’t have any respect for boundaries. And you have to play by his rules, and I just don’t care to do that.”
