Now that Janelle Brown has the chance to look back on her relationship with Kody after walking away from their plural marriage, she isn’t holding back. On this week’s episode of Sister Wives, Janelle slammed Kody for favoring Robyn and marveling over his luck to be with her after she wasn’t the one who suffered through the more difficult years of their family’s life together the way that Janelle, Christine, and Meri did.
Reflecting on their marriage, Janelle said it was always clear Kody favored Robyn.
Now that everyone but Robyn has left the family, she’s the last wife standing – and the only one who is legally married to Kody. In recent years, Kody’s now-former wives have spoken up about her being his “favorite,” but on Sister Wives, Janelle said Kody had shown he favored Robyn from the beginning.
“Kody has said, ‘Well, all of a sudden, I met Robyn and she’s this Diesel Jeans model and she’s everything I want.’ And I’m thinking, ‘That’s rich, dude,'” Janelle said on the show.
She, Meri, and Christine were there through the years when the family was ‘starving.’
When Robyn joined the family in 2010, the other wives had been with Kody for quite some time – Christine, Kody’s third wife, married him in 1994, while Meri and Janelle had been with him for 20 and 17 years, respectively. Together, Kody and his first three wives had to overcome a lot of hardships that were in the past by the time Robyn came around, as Janelle pointed out.
“We went through all the starving years, when I was holding my bra together with diaper pins and we were broke as broke, and we went through all of your crazy, ‘Let’s move here, let’s move there.’ We’ve been through all of this with you and she’s not been through that with you,” she said. “So that’s great. You just take your little Diesel Jeans model and just go live happily ever after.”
The family has struggled with money in the past.
As The Ashley’s Reality Roundup pointed out, multiple members of the family have talked about those “broke” years that Janelle mentioned on Sister Wives. During a December 2024 episode of Janelle’s daughter Maddie’s podcast, she shared that her family was “very poor” before they started sharing their lives on reality TV.
“I think my dad made decent money, but we had, like, 15 kids,” she shared, adding that Kody was often sucked into “the get-rich-quick scheme.”
Fans are taking Janelle’s side on this one.
On Reddit, many fans shared that they can see Janelle’s point, with one writing, “The OG wives did the hard work to establish the family dynamic and ‘rules.’ They compromised to achieve a common goal – one family.”
Another person shared their opinion that Kody used Robyn as his “escape” from all that hardship.
“She was the affair partner he escaped to during his family’s struggle years, when money was tight and relationships were strained as a result,” the commenter wrote. “When things got better financially Kody and his younger happier woman rode off into the sunset believing they’re soulmates because their marriage never had to face the scarring of a real marriage’s heart ache milestones.”
