Mykelti Brown is once again opening up about the abuse she says she and her siblings suffered as kids at the hands of Meri Brown. The Sister Wives star recently did an interview with the Cults to Consciousness podcast, in which she went into more detail about how scared she and her siblings were of Meri when they were kids. Mykelti talked about how the Brown kids would often “cower” when Meri was in charge, and how they all learned not to speak up about the alleged abuse, due to their dad Kody and his other wives usually brushing it off.
While Mykelti has spoken about her dislike for Meri on her Patreon account in the past, she used this interview to really rip her wetbar-enthusiast former “mom” for being awful to her and her siblings. “I do not like Meri. She is my dad’s first wife. I do not like her… she was mean growing up,” Mykelti said, adding that Meri “still is” mean to this day.
“I don’t care what she looks like on the show,” Mykelti said. “She was aggressive. She was manipulative. She was the favorite wife, and she got the favorite wife privileges and perks.”
Mykelti said that the Brown kids were afraid when Meri was watching them. “All of us kids were cowering and we were all scared,” she said. “We were all like, ‘OK, whatever you say, Meri. Just don’t hurt me, don’t be mean to me. Don’t yell at me.’”
Mykelti went on to describe what would happen when Meri didn’t get what she wanted. “She had this, like, scream she would do [when] she wasn’t getting her way and it was, like, pure loud and angry and just scary,” Mykelti stated. “It was like what you would imagine a freaking dragon screaming at a little child. Think about that.”
Mykelti went on to say that, when Meri was in charge of caring for the Brown kids, they all got “severely disciplined, talked down to, grounded…” but wouldn’t speak up about it. She claimed that the kids learned not to tell the other parents because they would blame the kid or explain that Meri was doing what she thought was right. “They didn’t talk about it [and say], ‘No, no, that’s not OK for any parent to do that,’” she said, adding that her dad often brushed off the alleged abuse. “If Meri had hurt me and I told my dad that Meri had hurt me, he would be like, ‘Oh, you’re fine. She was probably just taking care of what she needed to,’” she said.
Mykelti said she rarely told the other adults in the family what Meri had allegedly done, although some of the other Brown kids did speak up. “A couple of my other siblings were stronger, they would stand up,” she said. “They would say something, but nothing would change. So it got to the point where we just stopped saying something. Until we got older and then we got bigger, stronger, tougher, and knew this wasn’t OK. That’s when it stopped.”
Mykelti— whose mom is Kody’s third wife Christine— stated that, as a general rule in the family, only the kid’s biological mom (and Kody) were supposed to impose severe discipline on their kids. However, that is not how if often worked out.
“There were so many kids and there was so much chaos, and all the moms had a part-time or full-time job,” she said. “… So a lot of things just didn’t get talked about until they got exploded.” Mykelti added that severe discipline of a kid was often left to “the parent that was watching the children at the time.”
Mykelti said that when her family began filming for ‘Sister Wives,’ the kids were told not to talk about things like Meri’s behavior. “It was stressful because we had to put up a fake front,” she said. “All of us kids did.”
Mykelti is not the only Brown child to speak out against Meri. In 2019, Madison Brown tweeted about growing up with an “abusive human” who was a “monster.” (She didn’t, however, name Meri.)
In 2023, Mykelti’s brother Paedon confirmed that Madison’s tweets were, in fact, about Meri. That same year, Paedon gave an interview in which he credited Kody’s fourth (and now only) wife Robyn with alerting the other adults in the family to Meri’s alleged abuse, claiming that Robyn, “probably saved several of our lives … Definitely saved Mykelti’s life.” He also stated that Meri’s alleged abuse of Kody’s kids was not just verbal. Mykelti and Paedon’s sister Gwendlyn also spoke out in 2023 about Meri allegedly putting her hands on Mykelti, noting that it only happened once, but that Meri “had moments where she was rude and scary” with Mykelti and other kids in the family.
Earlier this year, Mykelti stated on her Patreon that Meri “was not a good person to [her]” and claimed that her decision to talk negatively about Meri online is her way of getting revenge. “I have not had good moments with Meri,” she said on Patreon. “She was an awful person to me growing up so I probably need to have my revenge arc of her, and this is the best way that I can do it: speak publicly negatively about her. So, maybe I haven’t healed or moved on either, that’s what this is.”
Mykelti also stated in an interview in February that the Browns were very unhappy that Mykelti had spoken on her Patreon about Meri’s alleged abuse, as they were afraid that it would cause TLC to cancel ‘Sister Wives,’ among other things. “At the beginning of our Patreon, I [said] a word that Meri did to us kids and because of that word, it caused a ton of backlash and a ton of negative stuff and we got in, like, severe trouble [with] family [and] other people,” Mykelti said during an appearance on The Sarah Fraser Show in February. “Like, it was like, ‘Don’t say that word, ‘cause the word can completely end the entire show, it could end all of our income, it could make investigations happen, because that word in 2024 means something different than it did in 2009 [or] in the 2000s … ,’”
Meri has never publicly addressed Mykelti’s claims of abuse. You can watch Mykelti’s full interview with Cults to Consciousness below.
