With season 18 premiering this Sunday, Sister Wives fans might think they know the Brown family. But though the current, fractured status of Kody Brown’s relationships with his wives is well documented, their shocking history isn’t as well known. Kody and his first wife, Meri Brown, have since “permanently terminated” their marriage, and his second wife, Janelle Brown, has declared their marriage to be “over,” calling herself single.
His third wife, Christine Brown, announced their divorce in 2021 and has since gotten engaged to fiancé David Woolley. Kody’s fourth wife, Robyn Brown, is the only one he’s still in an active relationship with. He is also legally married to Robyn after divorcing Meri and tying the knot with Robyn in 2014 for legal purposes in order to adopt Robyn’s three children from a previous marriage.
And though much is known about the current status of Kody’s marriages, less is documented about his complex connections to the four women he’s married and their family ties to him.
Here’s what ET uncovered:
Meri Brown
Kody’s first wife, Meri, grew up in a polygamist family and had 27 siblings. Kody and his family joined the faith later in his life and Kody and Meri met at church when she was 18. They were introduced through Kody’s sister, Christy, at the time.
“I was a little taken with Kody right off the bat,” Meri said in the family’s 2012 book, Becoming Sister Wives. “He was definitely cute, and had a great attitude. He was talkative and engaged me in conversation, and made me feel comfortable around him.”
Kody said of Meri in the book, “Meri was so cute and sweet when I met her that I had a hard time suppressing my hopelessly romantic nature. She had a remarkable purity about her. I had a sneaking suspicion that we were soulmates.”
Though the two abstained from any physical intimacy before getting engaged, including kissing, they tied the knot in April 1990, noting that they were both fully aware of their intention to add more wives to the family.
While Janelle was Kody’s second wife, he was also her second husband. She met her first husband, Adam Barber, in high school and quickly realized that she was more interested in his family and their religion than in him.
“My husband wasn’t really interested in either his new faith or the branch of fundamentalism he’d been raised in,” Janelle explained of her ex in the 2012 memoir, Becoming Sister Wives. “He had very little spiritual conviction. His family, however, fascinated me.”
In fact, Janelle first met Kody when he and Meri were still dating, and she was in the middle of a “horrible divorce” with her first husband, who is, in fact, Meri’s brother.
Janelle described meeting Kody as “the strangest feeling,” saying, “I felt as if I had forgotten something and suddenly remembered it. It was a feeling of relief and recognition.”
Janelle even attended Kody and Meri’s wedding with her first husband, who at the time was Kody’s brother-in-law.
As if this wasn’t complicated enough, Janelle’s own family soon integrated into Kody’s. Janelle noted in the book that she was not raised in a polygamist family and her own mother, Sheryl, was against the idea, until she met and soon married Kody’s father, Winn, becoming his third wife. This made Janelle’s future father-in-law her stepfather.
As for Kody and Janelle, Kody described their romance as having more to do with “spirituality and intellectual compatibility,” but added that he found her “extremely attractive.”
For their courtship, they only went on one date and were married two weeks later.
