Sister Wives’ Meri Brown Says It’s ‘Heartbreaking’ to Officially Be Granted Divorce from Kody Through Church

Meri Brown has officially ended her marriage to Kody Brown.

In a clip from the Sunday, Oct. 13 episode of Sister Wives — which was first shared by Today — Meri, 53, reveals that while she and Kody have been legally divorced since 2014, she recently took another step to end their marriage through their church (a.k.a. the Apostolic United Brethren).

“I texted Kody and said, ‘Hey, I started the process. In two weeks, if you want to give any input, have anything to do with it or whatever’ and he never responded to my text,” she explains.

Meri then shares that she recently took a trip to Utah to “meet with the leaders of our church” and was granted a divorce, or what is known as a “release” by the church.

“I was granted what is called in our church, a release, which is basically the equivalent of a divorce,” she tells cameras. “It was a very, very hard conversation, hard in meaning heartbreaking because this is not what I wanted to do. This is not what I intended when I married Kody.”

The reality star explains that the couple’s divorce from a decade ago was for legal reasons but their marriage was still strong at the time.

“Back in 2014, Kody and I did do a legal divorce, and for me, that whole process was purely for the fact that he could then marry Robyn [Brown] legally and then adopt her three older kids,” she shares. “But our spiritual marriage, our spiritual ceiling was still intact.” 

“When we marry, it is for eternity. That’s the intention,” she adds. “So once I had that terminated or released, that means it’s done.”

On the Sept. 22 episode of Sister Wives, Meri detailed her reasons for wanting to end the marriage. “I don’t want to be, like, sealed to him for eternity if he doesn’t want me,” she explained. “I’m at a place that like, let’s just separate this completely.”

Meri shared that she had been “asking Kody how he felt about moving forward with the release,” but he was “kind of resistant to it.” 

She insisted that she was “moving forward” with the release after “living in limbo in this relationship for nearly a decade.”

However, Kody saw things differently, explaining, “the damage was done so badly that we’re not going to reconcile no matter what.”

“However we are made accountable to God, I don’t want to be accountable to this church and all their BS,” he continued. “So I’m going to let Meri go and do her thing because if I’m angry at her, it becomes a fight. I needed her just to go away because it just took forever for her to finally realize it’s been done and over for years.”

Meri and Kody confirmed their separation publicly in January 2023 after 32 years together. Before Meri and Kody’s announcement, the patriarch’s fellow wives Christine Brown and Janelle Brown also decided to split from the reality star within a year of each other. Now, Robyn is Kody’s only remaining wife.

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Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.