On Sunday’s episode of TLC’s “Sister Wives,” patriarch Kody Brown declares that his family is in a “civil war” in a confessional interview while reflecting on whether the majority of the Browns will ever physically be in the same room again.
He also appears to warn some of his older children that they aren’t going to be able to separate him from his legal wife, Robyn Brown.
“Some day our family’s civil war may end and then that contempt, you know, we can deal with it. And Robyn and I are gonna be like this,'” he says, touching his palms together.
“You’re not gonna separate us,” the 54-year-old father of 18 continues. He’s likely talking to some of the adult children he shares with exes Christine and Janelle Brown, because he says his children want their father but “don’t want Robyn,” which isn’t a dynamic that will work for him.
The episode begins with the majority of the family on a video call together as Brown and Christine’s daughter, Mykelti Padron, (who is pregnant with twins at the time) reveals the genders of her babies.
Padron is close to Brown, Robyn, and most of her half-siblings. So, some of the children that Brown is estranged from — including Janelle’s daughter Maddie Brush and her son Gabriel Brown — are seeing Brown and Robyn for the first time during the video call after a long period of no communication.
On an earlier episode of season 18, Janelle’s son Robert “Garrison” Brown, who is also estranged from Brown and doesn’t appear to be on the video call — called Robyn the “catalyst” that turned his dad into a monogamist.
The Brown family has been giving America a peek into the plural family lifestyle on TLC since 2010. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the cracks in some of Brown’s marriages became so deep that some of his wives decided to leave him.
Christine, Brown’s third “spiritual” wife, left first, announcing that she and Brown were divorced in November 2021. Then in December 2022, his second “spiritual” wife Janelle announced that she and Brown were separated (they later permanently split). Brown’s first wife Meri announced her relationship with Brown was over in January 2023.
Garrison previously said Robyn was “using COVID to make dad exclusive, and then turning herself into the victim and saying that it’s our fault.”
The gender reveal video celebration appears to go off without a hitch (Padron welcomed twin boys Ace and Archer Padron in November 2022, People reported). But all of the focus is on Padron and her family.
Reflecting on the event in a solo confessional interview, Janelle says she has hope that the whole family will be together in person one day.
“All I’m going to be is cordial,” Christine tells cameras, admitting she can’t commit to an in-person event yet. “I would love to say I’m going to be more, but I’m not. And I’m not interested in that, either.”
