‘Sister Wives’: Christine Brown Cut Off Her Mom Annie After She Left the Church and Denounced Polygamy
Sister Wives star Christine Brown and her mom, Annie, have a complicated relationship. Christine once cut her mom, Annie, out of her life after she left her plural marriage, left the church, and began exposing the truth behind polygamy.
Christine Brown’s mom Annie left her plural marriage
Around the time when Kody began courting Christine in the early ’90s, her mom, Annie, decided to leave her plural marriage. Annie made the difficult decision after years of not getting along with her sister wife and living in an unhappy marriage.
“I had a defining moment where I knew I was going to leave. And It was one of the most terrifying moments I’ve had in my life because you just don’t leave. People don’t leave,” Annie said in Sister Wives Season 8.
But after years of being unhappy in her marriage, she decided it was time to go. “Here I was doing life by the book, and I hated my life,” Annie said. Christine recognized her mother’s unhappiness about a year before she actually decided to leave. “She left my dad, and she left our faith, and well, it wrecked my world completely. It was awful,” Christine admitted.
“It wasn’t difficult to leave my husband or the place where we lived, but it was difficult to think that I was not going to please God. And that I was going to go to Hell. But I still had to leave anyway because it was living a lie at that point. I couldn’t live like that anymore. I didn’t believe in it. There just was not anything I could do anymore. It wasn’t right,” Annie admitted.
Annie began exposing the dark side of polygamy
Soon after Annie divorced her husband, Rex Allred, and left the church, she began exposing the dark side of polygamy. In 1999, about five years into her own plural marriage, Christine caught wind of her mom speaking up about polygamy.
“When Aspyn was about four, we heard that my mom helped organize this group against plural marriage. There were several people that talked to us about how we should not associate with her anymore,” Christine explained in Sister Wives Season 8.
“What was begun as a support group ended up becoming an antagonistic group, and they were making headlines in the news, making accusations of child marriages and child abuse,” Kody said.
Back in 2010, the Browns were under investigation by the state of Utah for practicing polygamy. “There is a witch hunt going on in the state of Utah. I mean, this is 15 years ago, but we thought that Annie was the head of the witch hunt,” Kody said.
Christine cut her mother out of her and her children’s lives
When Annie’s support group began turning “antagonistic” against families practicing plural marriage, the Browns became fearful. They were worried that Annie could be dangerous to their family.
“After I told my mom that she couldn’t have access to my kids, I didn’t talk to her again for a long time,” Christine revealed.
Six months later, Kody’s mother talked Christine into reconciling with her mother. Annie revealed to her daughter that she had left the support group once they started going after polygamous families.
Soon after, Christine allowed her mother back into her life. In 2016, she even moved into her home in Las Vegas to help fill in the childcare gaps while Christine was working.
Now that Christine has left her faith and her husband as her mother had, they appear to have more in common than ever. Perhaps Sister Wives Season 17 will reveal the current state of Christine and Annie’s relationship.
New episodes of Sister Wives Season 17 air Sundays at 10 p.m. EST on TLC.
