Four years after Kody Brown and his four wives fled the state of Utah for Las Vegas under the threat of bigamy persecution, the patriarch tells Oprah Winfrey's Oprah: Where Are They Now? that his family still feels the sting of their brush with the law.
In a new interview airing Sunday, March 8 on the Oprah Winfrey Network's season 5 premiere of Oprah: Where Are They Now?, 2010 Oprah guest Brown offers an update on what he and his family, including wives Meri, Christine, Robyn and Janelle, have been up to since their appearance.
As Brown and the women explain, the family dynamic has changed immensely in the years since. Forced to uproot his wives and 17 children in 2011 from Utah to Las Vegas to avoid arrest, Brown tells Where Are They Now that he and his wives put precautions in place if they ever got locked up.
"We had all listed who our kids would go to in the event . . . we were taken away," Meri explains in the interview, which was taped in January. Robyn, Brown's newest wife, says she lived in fear that each family meal would be her last. "I remember having dinner with Kody during this time and looking across the table, [wondering] if it was the last time," Robyn said.
Moving their kids across state lines with just three days' notice, the Browns later learned that a Utah federal judge struck portions of the state's polygamy laws. In the 2014 ruling, polygamy was decriminalized, but bigamy remained legal.
Wrapping the fifth season of their TLC series, Sister Wives, earlier this month, the Browns stunned fans when Meri announced that she was seeking a divorce after 24 years. She shares one daughter, Mariah, 18, with Kody, and helps parent the other wives' 16 children.
As Brown explained in a post on the family's website, their much-buzzed plural marriage makes him a better man, husband, and father. "We have chosen to live in a plural family for many reasons, above all we have a testimony that this is what God wants us to do, and that it will make us better people," Brown wrote. "We value family above all else."
Oprah: Where Are They Now? — also featuring interviews with Leeza Gibbons, and the parents of Matthew Shepard — airs March 8 on OWN. Sister Wives returns to TLC in fall 2015.
