Sister Wives star Meri Brown is revisiting old family wounds and revealing where they started.
In a new teaser clip for the upcoming episode, Meri, 55, admitted that she is still harboring unresolved feelings about Janelle Brown joining her marriage to Kody Brown — especially after Janelle’s history with her brother Adam Clark Barber. (Janelle, 56, was previously married to Adam from 1988 to 1990 and the now-exes were in a monogamous relationship together).
“There’s a lot of emotion,” Meri said in a preview obtained by People and published on Thursday, January 22. Kody, 57, and Meri legally married in April 1990. Janelle was the second wife to join the brood, spiritually tying the knot with Kody in January 1993.
Adding to the complexity of their family dynamic was the fact that Janelle’s mom, Sheryl Usher, exchanged vows in a spiritual union with Kody’s dad, Winn Brown, in October 1992 — just three months before their own wedding.
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“Well, people don’t — I’m not just going to say people, I’m going to say Kody — Kody and Janelle fail to recognize that possibly some of the issues that I had in polygamy could have stemmed from the fact that, oh, they wanted to get married on my birthday,” Meri explained in the clip. “They had planned to get married on my birthday.” (Meri’s birthday is January 16.)
What frustrated her the most was that Janelle and Kody apparently thought “it doesn’t matter, we’ll just celebrate [Meri’s birthday] a different day.” It wasn’t until Kody’s mom shut down the idea that they decided to change the date, according to Meri’s recollection.
“Like, excuse me? It does matter,” Meri doubled down in the clip. “So let’s start the marriage relationship, the family relationship, with that. And they forget that there might have been some emotions involved with the fact that she used to be married to my brother.”
Janelle and Meri previously discussed their past connection on the January 4 episode, and how they crossed paths. “She’d been married to my brother and she was actually at my wedding with him,” Meri noted. “And then they divorced after Kody and I got married.”
Janelle also reflected on her first marriage on that episode, noting that it “didn’t really matter.”
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Meri said it was a different experience for her, adding, “It was a tough thing to wrap my head around on multiple levels just because she had been married to my brother, you know?”
Janelle became intrigued by the idea of plural marriages as she got to know Kody’s family, who also practiced polygamy.
“My mom came to save me from the polygamists because no daughter of hers was going to marry some into some crazy cult,” Janelle said on a November 2025 episode of their TLC series. “And she ended up marrying Kody’s dad.”
Janelle and Kody ultimately went their separate ways, splitting in 2022. He and third wife Christine Brown, who joined the Brown brood in 1994, called it quits in 2021. Kody and Meri later broke up in 2023.
Kody is now only romantically tied to fourth wife Robyn Brown, whom he married in 2014. The father of 18 divorced Meri to legally wed Robyn.
