'Sister Wives' Star Meri Brown Denies 2015 Catfish Incident Broke Her Marriage To Kody: 'Very Inaccurate'
Meri Brown shut down rumors that a catfishing incident alleging she had an affair while still with Kody Brown was the "defining" moment in their marriage.
Meri, 52, and Kody, 54, had different accounts of how their marriage ended. The "Lizzie's Heritage Inn" owner downplays the "catfishing" incident as a factor in why she and Kody split.
"I'm going to clarify something here, and this is what a lot of people really misunderstand, and that is the fact that a lot of people look at the catfishing as a defining moment of the demise of our marriage or even the family," she told People. "And it's really not because there was a lot of things that were happening for years prior."
She added, "[Looking] at that moment as the thing that broke the marriage is very inaccurate."
However, Kody had a different take on the incident. In Sunday's episode of "Sister Wives Look Back: How We Started," the Brown patriarch admitted he was still "extremely angry" over the incident that happened in 2015 because Meri was allegedly "in full denial of what actually happened."
Meri, for her part, felt that Kody was feeling that way because they had various speculations about her plan for the family at the time and how her relationship with the person she only spoke to online turned out to be a big lie.
"Everybody thought that I was leaving the family and I was having an affair. And I wasn't," Meri said in the episode, saying that it was a point of contention for Kody up to this day. "She had an online affair, which she now denies because she was a victim."
Meri struck up an online relationship in 2015. However, it turned out that the person she thought was a man was actually a woman deceiving her. In previous episodes, Kody said the catfishing incident "dissolved" their marriage.
In January, Kody and Meri confirmed their separation after a report about their split made headlines. They were married for 32 years and share a son, Leon, 28.
In a post on Instagram, Meri said they had tried to work their relationship out for over a decade, and "we have made the decision to permanently terminate our marriage relationship."
She also asked her supporters to be considerate and not congratulate her for the breakdown of her marriage to Kody.
"Please try to refrain from congratulating me [on the breakup] of my marriage. I value the relationship I had," she said.
