What you need to know
Sister Wives’ Kody Brown begins his apology tour by visiting North Carolina to visit ex-wife Janelle Brown.
On the final episode of the TLC show, the Brown family matriarch revealed that he wanted to apologize to his current wife, Robyn Brown, and to ex-girlfriends Meri, Janelle, and Christine.
PEOPLE has an exclusive clip from the Dec. 7 episode where Kody and Janelle come face-to-face.
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“I just wanted to come here and say an apology,” Kody began, adding that he had a list of apologies. “I just love apologizing. First of all, I just want to backtrack a little bit. I want to apologize for being so angry and upset about my family’s separation, but no one had the right to make me that angry.”
Janelle responded that towards the end of their marriage, she didn’t recognize Kody.
“I always thought I didn’t know who this guy was,” Janelle replies. “I always tell people, ‘This is not the man I was married to forever.’ You know what I mean.”
Janelle says in her confessional: I still don’t recognize him. ”
She continued, “It feels like someone I knew a long time ago. There’s a lot of work that I know, a lot of common things that we can remember together, but I’m different, I don’t recognize[him]. He’s had a completely different life. I feel the same way I do now. So do I.”
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The clip then cuts back to the two talking, with Janelle reminiscing about her dreams for her marriage and family, saying, “I never in a million years saw this coming.”
“When the family fell apart, I was really more sad about the loss of the ideal of what we were trying to do, right?” she says. “We had that ideal… We were all going to come together and raise our kids. Thankfully, our kids are still mostly siblings. Really, you know, that was one of the biggest things we accomplished. We had this complete ideal of what was going to be.”
In a confessional, Janelle added, “When I finally broke up with Kodi, I think for years and years, I was thinking about my family more than our relationship.”
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“I think maybe I lost sight of our relationship and it was toxic,” she says. “Maybe I should have focused a little more on our relationship and less on my family.”
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Kody’s hospitalization comes after years of estrangement from Janelle, who announced her separation from Kody in 2022 after 29 years of marriage. She is the second wife to break up with Kody, following Christine Brown in 2021. Meri Brown soon followed suit, permanently dissolving her marriage to Kody in 2023.
Two years after Janelle and Kody separated, their son Garrison Brown, 25, passed away on March 5, 2024.
Kody revealed on last week’s episode why he wanted to apologize to each of his ex-wives.
“Even after everything I’d been through, it was still weird at Coyote Pass,” Kody explained to Robin on the Nov. 30 episode. The sale of the Coyote Pass joint property had been completed before the episode, causing an unpleasant conflict with Janelle and Meri. Neither ex-girlfriend spoke to Kody or Robin when they signed the papers to sell the property.
Gabe Ginsberg/Film Magic
Kody continued, “And you talked to me about going to therapy, so I sort of prayed and put my heart together and tried to think, ‘Okay, God, what do I do about this mess that I’m in and how I’m feeling?'” I’m just starting to feel like I need to go apologize. What I need to know about breakups and family events. I don’t know how to say this as straight as I can. I want them to be free and stop thinking and talking about me. ”
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10pm ET on TLC.
