We really must hand it to Kody Brown — in a manner of speaking.
Just when you think the Sister Wives patriarch can’t sink any lower a human being, Kody goes ahead and proves us wrong.
On the most recent episode of this TLC reality show, Kody and Meri Brown celebrated their anniversary.
Or, to be more accurate, Meri tried to celebrate her and Kody’s anniversary by calling her former legal spouse and asking if he wanted to hang out.
When Meri suggested the pair go out to dinner, Kody told her he was watching the kids and would have to check with Robyn.
“I need a minute to think, I needed a reason to be able to say no in the event I just didn’t think it wasn’t the right thing for me to do,” Kody admitted in a confessional, although the two did end up out together.
“At one point he made some reference to faking relationships or something like that. I was like, ‘What do you mean faking?’ He kind of gestured with his fingers between the two of us, ‘Well, this,’” Meri claimed on air.
“I went, ‘What do you mean, I’m not faking anything.’
“He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you even bothered to call and say happy anniversary, Meri.’ I’m like, ‘Because it’s our anniversary.’
“He went, ‘But we’re not m–‘ and he paused and he goes, ‘but we’re not living as a married couple.’”
Meri and Kody were married.
They exchanged vows in 1990 and then Kody filed to divorce Meri in 2014 so he could legally wed Robyn in order to adopt her kids from a previous relationship.
There’s been tension between the couple ever since.
We learned last year that Meri and Kody had not slept together in a decade, and that Kody had no interest in rekindling that sort of flame.
On this Sister Wives episode, Meri went on to allege Kody told her the following:
“Don’t you understand Meri, this is never going to happen? Your life is not one I want to insert myself into.”
She said this remark was “very painful to me” and, in the moment, she felt her “heart speeding up” as she felt he “promised” to be there for her forever.
She continued:
“He actually said to me ‘I have no desire, Meri, to have a relationship with you.’ This is the first time he’s ever said this to me, ever.
“Like, our marriage is done. You can stick around and you can come visit me and Robyn and the kids if you want, but we’re never gonna have a marriage relationship anymore.”
Kody said something similar to Meri on last Sunday’s installment, too.
It gets worse, though.
Meri went on to say Kody told her he actually “never loved you and I never felt like that about you” and was only “trying to affirm” it all these years.
This claim, said Meri, was “a bunch of bullsh-t,” saying anyone who saw the husband and wife together in their earlier years together would know what “a bunch of crap he’s spewing maybe to try and justify how he feels now.”
Meri added that she was struggling with whether or not to “stick around.”
The TLC personality said she told Kody the two should issue a public statement about the state of their relationship, but he balked at that idea.
“I’m not going to go the rest of my life hiding the fact that this is a way that our relationship is and hading the fact you said to me you don’t want to ever have a relationship with me,” she said on air.
“This is my story too and I have the right to tell my story.”
Eventually, largely because People Magazine ran an article that reported this romance was over, Kody and Meri announced the termination of their marriage in January 2023.
“After more than a decade of working on our relationship in our own unique ways, we have made the decision to permanently terminate our marriage relationship,” the parents of one said in a joint statement back then.
“During this process, we are committed to kindness and respect toward each other and to all members of our family,” concluded the exes today.
“We are also committed to the continued healing of any and all relationships with the family so that we can move forward with forgiveness, grace, and love.”
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