‘Sister Wives’: A Complete Timeline of the Demise of Kody Brown and Meri Brown’s Marriage

Meri Brown and Kody Brown had a dysfunctional marriage for years before officially announcing their spiritual union’s end. Sister Wives fans have suffered through several seasons of bickering, arguing, gaslighting, and, eventually, the official end of the marriage. As the show enters its 18th season, Meri Brown seems to be suddenly much more realistic about Kody Brown’s faults, the pitfalls of plural marriage, and life in general. As we work toward Meri officially walking away from Kody on screen, it’s important to remember how the plural couple got here. We’ve collected the key moments in the couple’s downfall. The divorce was years in the making. 

Meri Brown and Kody Brown legally divorced in 2014 

In many relationships, it is hard to pinpoint when things started to go really wrong. The Brown family has the misfortune of having their terrible moments filmed and shared with the public. Sister Wives fans have spent years dissecting Kody and Meri’s marriage, and most viewers seem to agree that things became irreconcilably broken in 2014 when Kody and Meri ended their legal marriage so Kody could marry Robyn Brown and adopt her three children from a previous marriage. While the Brown family insisted the “restructuring” was purely for legal reasons, Robyn made a big deal of the legal marriage. Meri was clearly hurting when you review episodes from that period. 

The couple has maintained that the divorce in 2014 was purely logistical. Still, Sister Wives fans are unconvinced. Meri’s bombshell statement about a lack of intimacy in her relationship stretching back a decade added fuel to speculation about Kody’s real motivation for a legal divorce from Meri. Despite that, however, Kody has used Meri’s catfishing scandal the following year as ammo against her for years. 

In 2015, Meri Brown was wrapped up in a catfishing scandal 

Shortly after the legal divorce, Meri was entangled in an emotional affair with someone she met online. Meri assumed the person she was talking to was a wealthy businessman from Chicago. She was chatting with a woman named Jackie Overton instead. Overton had spent years catfishing women online.

Overton later released messages and texts Meri left for the man she thought she was romancing. Eventually, the entire Brown family was brought into the drama. They spent several seasons of Sister Wives unpacking the incident and discussing its fallout.

In the early moments of the catfishing scandal, Kody seemed supportive of Meri. Later, he turned on her. He has spent the years since the incident using the emotional affair as proof that Meri had wronged him. Fan opinions on whether the catfishing situation constituted an affair remained split, even now. 

Kody and Meri claimed to have been working on their marriage for several years 

From 2015 until 2022, Meri and Kody waffled between total estrangement and attempts to work on their marriage. In 2019, Kody and Meri returned to a therapist they worked with in Nevada to speak about their relationship. In previous years, they insisted they were working on repairing the damage, but by 2019, they both seemed more realistic about the situation. 

Kody and Meri admitted they had reached a difficult point in the relationship and were mostly estranged. The move from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Flagstaff, Arizona, did nothing to help the disconnect. If anything, the move, which placed Kody’s four wives far from one another, made things substantially worse for everyone.

In 2022, Kody Brown said he didn’t consider himself married to Meri Brown 

In 2022, the Brown family started to get honest about how things were going inside their plural family. With Christine Brown officially out of the picture, Kody didn’t think he had anything to lose. In one extremely honest moment in December 2021, he revealed that he did not consider himself married to Meri Brown and that she was free to meet and marry someone else if she wanted. 

Meri reacted to Kody’s statement and later revealed that she wanted to release a statement about the state of their marriage years earlier but that Kody stated he did not want to be judged for their marriage failing. Sister Wives fans took the statement as confirmation that the couple’s marriage had ended many years earlier. 

Meri announced the divorce the following month 

While Sister Wives viewers thought both Kody and Meri had confirmed the end of their marriage during the season 17 tell-all episodes, they both decided to underscore the obvious with a public statement. In January 2023, Meri took to Instagram to lambast the media for reporting on her divorce before confirming that she and Kody had decided to end their romance for good. 

Kody, who rarely uses social media, took to Instagram to share the same statement. He has not posted anything on the public profile since. Season 18 of Sister Wives, which is airing now, will cover how the couple came to the decision. Season 18 will also focus on Janelle Brown’s decision to leave her plural marriage, too.