Why Sister Wives' Janelle Brown Says Ex Kody Brown Is "A Failure"
As it turned out, what Sister Wives star Janelle Brown once shared with former husband Kody Brown wasn't all that great.
"When you marry into plural marriage, at least in our faith," she explained on the TLC series' June 1 one-on-one special, "you are expected to become more than you are."
In other words, with a greater number or unions comes greater responsibilities.
As a husband to Meri Brown, Christine Brown and Robyn Brown, in addition to Janelle, "He was expected to make those relationships, all of them, work," stressed the 56-year-old. While the marriages didn't necessarily need to be equal "because nothing's ever fair or equal," Janelle acknowledged, it was the patriarch's responsibility to "meet the needs of all the different relationships, right? Whatever that looked like."
Instead, the father of 18, watched as Christine announced the end of their 25-year union in November 2021, followed by Janelle and Meri roughly a year later.
Behind the divide, Janelle speculated, was Kody's inability to live up to his multitude of vows, particularly when he spent much of the pandemic holed up with Robyn and their kids Dayton Brown, 25, Aurora Brown, 23, Breanna Brown, 21, Solomon Brown, 13, and Ariella Brown, 9,
"I think he really did—especially during COVID—be like, 'I'm just going to shrug this off. You guys don't like each other. I'm tired. You're going to shorten my life span if I keep doing this,'" Janelle reflected. "Like all of a sudden he's like, "'I just don't want to do it anymore.' He kind of threw this little temper tantrum."
And after he stopped stomping his feet, he realized his first three brides had used theirs to walk away.
"He doesn't embrace the culture, everybody has left the church," Janelle acknowledged of their previous association with fundamentalist Mormon group Apostolic United Brethren, "but he is a failure as far as what's expected of a man who enters into plural marriage."
And she's not his only spouse reaching that judgment.
"In the religion, in the polygamist world, if you've got a guy who three of his wives leave," Christine detailed during the June 1 esisode, "it's a problem with the man. And when you see families where the guy loses all the wives, you're like, 'Yeah, that's him. That’s all him.'"
It's the sort of burden that could leave a man feeling as if he'd taken a knife to the kidneys.
Asked by host Sukanya Krishnan if she thought that was a tough pill for Kody to swallow, Christine responded, "I think it must be. He had this dream and this vision of everything beautiful and perfect."
But instead of accepting that bitter medicine, "He puts it on all of us for leaving," noted Christine. "And it's like before we left, it was broken. Before we left, everything had fallen apart."
Because if you ask Gwendlyn Brown—one of the Christine's six children with Kody—their relationship was unraveling well before the stay-at-home orders were handed down.
"I felt like they should have divorced for a while," the 23-year-old recently admitted to Teen Vogue. "I remember one time as a kid, I saw them arguing, and my first thought was, 'I hope they get a divorce.' What kid thinks that, right?"
Of course, she's not the only Sister Wives standout sharing her truth. See what the TLC series' other stars have detailed about their infamous brood.
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