It took place eight years ago.
And yet: Here Meri Brown is once again, having to dredge up an incident that has almost come to define her life.
On this past Sunday night’s episode of Sister Wives, the long-time cast member addressed her catfishing scandal from 2015… bringing up the time she exchanged messages with someone online who she believed to be a man.
But it turned out to be a woman pulling a mean prank on the reality star.
“From that experience, Meri and I sort of saw our marriage just dissolve,” Kody said on the aforementioned episode of the controversy.
But Meri went on to emphasize that the whole thing has been turned into something that it really wasn’t.
“That whole story was so completely blown out of proportion and so much crap was made up about it,” she said on air.
“I still have a hard time talking about it just because everybody has their opinions about it. But like, I know my truth.”
Kody certainly has his opinion on it, and it’s a passionate one.
“Meri had an affair. She was leaving my ass. She made it clear to everybody that she was getting out of there. She was done with us,” Kody said on the Sister Wives Season 16 tell-all special, adding back then:
“She was deceived. She found something better.
“She was leaving me for a better, richer man.”
For her part, however, the beleaguered Sister Wives star tried to defend herself on this same special, stating she was in a “dark place” and never had any intentions of leaving Kody.
“Did I start talking to this person? Absolutely I did. Did I think I was talking to a friend? Absolutely,” Meri explained.
“It literally was not just, ‘Okay, I’m going to meet some dude online and fall in love and want to leave my family,’” Meri added of the topic.
Without getting into specifics, Meri hinted at the same theme on the November 5 episode of Sister Wives.
“You have to be very careful with people that you meet online,” Meri said in a confessional early on in Season 18, Episode 12, citing the “big fat liar” who duped her all that time ago.
“I talk to people online for business all the time, and one of my prerequisites is that I do a video chat with them. I just want to make sure that they are a legit person.”
Lesson learned at least, huh?
For Meri and Kody, though, they never recovered from this incident.
“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 former spouses wrote on January 10, 2023.
“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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