General Days

Wasn't the whole quote, "Peace out, sayonara bitches"?

Wow, I'm surprised to see "dramatic" in there. I bet you're right.

I just showed Robyn's, "And this isn't me being dramatic! Thank you, Christine," outburst to my daughter (who used to watch with me when she was a teen). Last night, I noticed it, but I didn't really take it in. Today, it struck me so funny, I had to rewind the scene like 5 more times. I can't stop laughing at her. I shouldn't have wasted my time finding the episode with the personality test-related scenes. Robyn's "This isn't me being dramatic! Thank you Christine," is all the proof I personally need that Robyn is lying about the whole thing. Think about it. If you really didn't remember personality test, or think you didn't take it, Suki telling you that Christine remembered that your results said you were "dramatic" probably wouldn't land that fast. You'd still be in, "I don't know what the heck Christine is talking about mode." When you get as pissy as Robyn was, when she said, "And this isn't me being dramatic! Thank you, Christine," it's usually because something is a long-lasting sore spot. I will say, I doubt the original test results said that Robyn was "dramatic." Personality tests don't usually use words that are so loaded. They'd find some other way to say it — demonstrative, expressive, emotional — something like that. My guess is Christine characterized it as "dramatic" back in the day, in order to throw some shade, and you know what? Good on her.

What does this refer to? I don't think I have ever heard anything like this, but I also don't really understand what you mean. What are SMS posters?

I also watched S06.E10, "Polygamist Marriage Therapy," to figure out the personality test backstory. (Perhaps we should compile a list of "Take One for the Team" volunteers, after episodes that raise these issues. 😉) There's another little tidbit that shores up Christine's version of events. Okay, so Nancy had administered the test to the Browns the week prior to that marriage retreat in Sedona (when Pat handed off their case to Nancy). Nancy presented the results on Day 1 of the retreat, and as @nosediveindicates, the clips shown mostly focus on Meri and Kody, with regard to Meri's test (and Janelle's disinterest in the sister wife dynamics). BUT THEN... On the morning of Day 2 (as indicated by a caption), Nancy, Pat, Meri, Janelle, Kody, and Christine all meet outside. Robyn is noticeably absent. When Nancy asks where Robyn is, Christine looks down at the ground for a second, the way a guilty child does, when they can't meet mommy's eyes. When Kody starts explaining that Robyn doesn't feel well, Christine bites her lip, then looks up at him and kind of scrunches her face. She blah blahs some fake surprised response to the news that Robyn is supposedly under the weather. Christine and Robyn definitely either had already had words over whatever Christine said about Robyn's personality test results — OR — Christine had already heard from Kody that Robyn was upset by whatever Christine said about Robyn's results.

I know she is using Woolley for her personal life and Brown for her professional life. Generally speaking, professional name changes can be detrimental for women in media (and other professions). Susan Sarandon; Demi Moore; Ivana Trump; Erica Jong; Joy Behar; Suzanne Somers; Raquel Welch; Tina Turner; Pat Benatar; Faith Hill; etc. kept using their ex-husbands' surnames as their professional names, for a reason. It's the same reason lots of actresses do not change their professional names upon marriage. Every single one of the above women are/were more well known than Christine. Every single one of them were known to be divorced from the husbands whose names they took. They were all capable of getting enough media coverage around their name changes, but they kept those names for a reason, and the reason was that it's hard to build up name recognition well into your career. I don't know that it would matter to Christine's kids. I said I would be reticent to change my name, because of my kids. Not because they would object, but because it's part of our family identification (for me). I didn't say Christine would want to use Allred. I think the Allred Group is a pernicious cult, so I personally would have loved it, had she reverted to Allred, so that there was one more Allred woman of note known to have fled the cult.

Nice. I like that. I'd also love to see something that acknowledges Meri is breaking free: Meri Brown: Sayonara Bitches* Meri Brown: I Am a Single Woman Meri Brown: I Don't Have Sister Wives, Just FYI *I know the editors did us dirty by the way they teased Meri's "Sayonara Bitches" clip, this season, but it's still a great quote. Edited to Add: You know the "rilly big dill" thing, where the Browns say their long "E" sounds like short "I" sounds? We could invert that and flip the meaning of Meri's opening line in the old show intro: "I believe in living this lifestyle; it just makes each of us better," so that it more accurately reflects current events: Meri Brown: I Believe in Leaving this Lifestyle; It Just Makes Each of Us Better

I planned to join in tonight, but things came up in the house, so I missed it. See you all in the episode thread, after I read through this one.

If I divorced and remarried in my 50s, I'd be reticent to change my last name from my first husband's name, because that is my children's name. If I became professionally known under that name, I think it would be even harder. Part of me would like to see Christine revert to Allred (her maiden name), so there was one more Allred who left the AUB (which is often known as "the Allred Group").

When Robyn saw the credit fixer on the show (in order to qualify for a mortgage for the Vegas cul-de-sac house), her debt was supposedly $4,000, and $1,000 of that was Victoria's Secret. That $32K figure has been floating around the fandom for years came from reports supposedly based on divorce documents. I don't know if it is a well-attested figure, or if it's just an often cited figure from one report (which might have come from a fannish online tabloid like Hollywood Life). On the show, Robyn spoke as though she assumed all the marital debt (from her marriage to Jessop), just to get through the divorce with less contention. I am not inclined to believe she was telling the truth. There are a lot of reasons to assume she lied, because we've been watching her in action on the show for 18 seasons, and she more often than not seems utterly full of shit. I don't know where the whole $32K came from though (if, indeed, the reports were accurate). Does anyone know how the figure jumped from $4K to $32K? @ginger90, you always have receipts on this sort of stuff. Do you know?

Oh please no. Nobody elected me queen of posting, but I would hate seeing it on the index, every time I loaded the forum. It's been played out for a long time.

I don't think so, only because Meri gave Kody that ring when they married. Janelle didn't join the family (well, the Brown family, not the Barber family) until 3 years later.

Thank you! That's been driving me crazy. I don't necessarily believe the catfish about that bit, but I don't necessarily believe Janelle, either. I think Kody probably got money for the gold (and diamonds?), or just sold or pawned the ring, and the "melt it down for the kids" was bullshit he peddled to shut Meri up, because then he could berate her for not thinking of the family. Not that Gwen would necessarily know the facts of all the rings, because she was so little (8 maybe?) when Robyn came on the scene, but in her livechat over the weekend, someone asked her about rings made from Kody's ring, and she said the parents just bought the girls claddagh rings when they turned 16; they didn't have them made.

No, but where is the line? Would it be kosher to you if Meri had been the one to disclose in a talking head, in a lighthearted moment, that Christine didn't like to go back to the Lehi house, because her miscarried baby was buried in the yard? Christine had already disclosed that she had a miscarriage. I had no blessed clue that the catfish told the story about Meri's ring until this past weekend. I had no clue about the ring itself until this past weekend. I suspect most fans who aren't and haven't been involved in online fandom did not know about it. From what I understand, the catfish wrote about it in that ridiculous book they put out. I'd never heard even one fan mention it. I think most people didn't want to give the catfish any money, and most of those who did read it got their hands on a free download. The Browns didn't sign their lives away to be on TV. They agreed to let cameras into their home and to otherwise follow them at agreed upon times. They're still human beings. They don't owe us all their grief. Now when they do tell us a thing, what they tell us should be true. That has not always been the case, and that is wrong of them (and of the producers, to the extent they're complicit). But owing the audience the truth in any given story presented on the show doesn't mean the Browns owe us every detail about their lives. It doesn't mean full disclosure. How and when did they tell us that Meri's participation in the show was a scam? We watched the Kody/Meri relationship deteriorate over the years (most acutely since the catfish, but also before). They weren't "only pretending" to be in a relationship. They were in an unhealthy relationship that died over the course of the show. Now they're just finally (belatedly) calling time of death. For the last however many years, Kody may have been pretending that he still considered Meri a wife (although he dropped that pretense over the past few years), but he was pretending that to her, too. How did Meri lie to the audience from the beginning? The AUB doesn't have some secret ritual where you melt a ring and a marriage is unsealed.

Where does that detail come from (that the rings were going to be for Robyn's oldest girls)? I've seen fans repeat it, but I've never seen any source material. That's on me. The most I've seen is Janelle half mumble a "we were going to melt it down for some of the girls" type thing, and Christine looked at her like, "Oh, we didn't discuss this lie before the interview." Does anyone have a link or a real quote? I think the legal Meri/Kody divorce, the catfish, and Christine leaving have each saved the show. I say this with tunnel vision. I've stopped watching a few times. News of these events eventually caught my notice, even though I wasn't following any sort of reality TV shows or content, and those news items made me pop back in. I remember being really disappointed that Meri was only legally divorcing Kody back then, instead of "dumping his ass."

The melting of the ring happened 12-15 years ago or so. Meri has already had her time being hurt/humiliated/angered by that act of emotional abuse. The Browns may have even talked it over in therapy with Pat and/or Nancy. Meri has had a long time with it being a painful fact of her life. I don't think Christine told the story to be mean to Meri, but I understand why, in the very moment, Meri reacted to the fact that Christine told the story rather than the facts of the story themselves. Meri was primarily hurt and angered not by the old wound, but by the new wound -- that her one-time friend/sister wife exposed one of Meri's painful, humiliating experiences on national television. Meri's used to the fact that Kody melted down her ring. It's not shocking to her any more. She already has scar tissue in that spot. Christine's betrayal, if you will, is fresh, so it is what shook her. My guess is, all five of the Brown adults have some nasty stories they could tell that would humiliate the others. It felt like Christine broke some sort of code under which the parents used to operate. It also felt though, like the producers used a typical reality TV show producer trick (i.e. making sure Meri found out what Christine said in the moment), in order to set off some fireworks. They don't usually operate that way, but I think it's likely they did here.

Importing from S18.E16 episode thread. What's even crueler still is that Meri wasn't the one who initiated it. Kody pushed Meri into the exploration, then pulled the rug out from under her. It was the first time I really let myself realize that he got off, not just on having four wives, but on being subtly cruel to them and effing with their heads. There'd been plenty of talk in the first season or so about Meri's secondary infertility, but Meri had already gotten to a place where she had accepted that a big bio family wasn't in the cards for her. She was sad, but okay about it, because Leon was going to be going away to uni soon, and Meri knew she'd be entering a new stage of life. Then, when Robyn gave birth to Solomon, she offered to be Meri's surrogate. Meri didn't know what to make of it. Kody started pressing Meri to make a decision. Robyn pressed Meri to accept her offer. Meri and Kody went to see a fertility doc to look into their options (fertility treatments, IVF, etc.), before deciding whether to accept or decline Robyn's offer. Meri is an annoyingly indecisive person (particularly, as far as I can tell, when Kody and the family are pressing her on something). Kody kept hounding Meri to make up her mind whether she wanted to pursue conception or surrogacy. He made it sound like he gave a toss whether Meri had a baby, but I think he just wanted to knock up Robyn again with a baby of their (R+K) own, so he wanted Meri's decision. Meri asked him to wait until they got into their Vegas cul-de-sac houses. Finally, Meri decided to tell Kody she wanted to try to to have another baby with him, and Kody twisted the words as they came out of her mouth, and pretended right on our screens that she didn't want to do that. I still remember the look on her face, as she sat with him and tried to act like she agreed with him. My pet Sister Wives conspiracy theory is that the whole conversation was also Kody's code for letting Meri know he was shutting her off sexually.

Taking my response to the Meri thread.

Yup. It bugs me too (which is why I was able to find her Instagram post). It's not an illogical conclusion, but it is so far from a foregone conclusion, but that's how I see it discussed in the wider fandom.

In a different exchange, something came up about physical discipline from Kody. Gwen said that whoever used "paddling" about discipline from Kody just meant spanking. Gwen also said that while she considers spanking abuse, Kody never hit them with a paddle, or a belt, or anything like that. Gwendlyn then went on, however, to say (kind of off the cuff) that her brother (she didn't say his name, but it seemed clear to me she meant Paedon) used to grab a belt. He would force his sisters (I imagine this is about Gwen and Ysabel, and maybe Robyn's older girls, but Gwen didn't specify) to put their hands in it, then he would snap it. She said it hurt "so freaking bad and he never got in trouble for it either which was awful." Does anyone remember the couch segment with Aspyn and Mykelti? It was either from when they were moving in with each other, or moving out of their shared apartment. They talked about their physical battles, and that (at least) one time when they were fighting, they threw knives at each other. Talk about "not safe." Sorry. I didn't see this before. I feel like this is one of those conclusions the fandom leaps to, based on a possible pointer, rather than hard evidence. Almost a year ago, Meri made some Instagram post about how every story has two sides, and how there is so much more to the story. In the picture of her, she's holding a book. It's here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmbwOE9LllV/?hl=en

Yesterday, hours ahead of the airing of Season 18 Episode 16, "One on One: Part 2," Gwendlyn did a three-hour live chat. It wasn't a live watch or recap of any episode, just a random chat with patrons. A couple of people asked her to characterize any abuse from Meri. Here is what she had to say. At the 2:44:03 mark, Gwendlyn read aloud a question from a patron: "was meri actually as abusive as janelle says" Gwendlyn's response: "I think it's up to interpretation. Not by your (sic) guys interpretation." [i.e. Gwendlyn's video audience] "I mean like it's up to the specific kid, and it's up to, you know, who says what. So, if Janelle thinks Meri was as abusive as she says, then I think, well, Janelle wasn't abused by Meri, and I don't think her kids had much of the brunt end of it." "But at the same time, when I say that, I'm erasing their experience. And Meri wasn't abusive with me. And I have a lot of good memories with her." "Like one time, she gave me this little blue stuffed bunny, and my mom ended up putting it in the washing machine. And then that night I woke up, and there were like four more — three or four more stuffed bunnies in the washing machine. And I woke up my mom, and I was like, 'Mom, the stuffed bunnies multiplied!'" "I know now that Meri snuck them into the washing machine, so I'd have a surprise when I woke up. But my mom, at the time, was like, 'Shut the fuck up, and go to bed'." "I — I have — I think Meri was I don't know — she was like more of a disciplinarian, whereas the other parents were like complacent, and they would let their sibl—their kids beat other kids." "And it turned, you know, Logan into a parent. And Meri knew how to be a parent. And the other three didn't, is I think what the thing was. The other...* Janelle, dad, my mom — yeah. Um, but that's just my perspective." Answer ends at 2:45:29 mark. [*Note: it was clear while watching that Gwen was counting making sure she meant 3 parents, in addition to Meri. The ellipsis above indicates Gwendlyn's pause as she double-checked her numbers in her head, but the entire statement is quoted.] At 2:46:57, after more chat about other subjects, Gwendlyn read aloud a question from a different patron: "Like what did Meri do that was SO bad that just a comment almost cancelled an entire season? TLC airs almost everything anyway. Wouldn't the truth be better than speculation?" Gwendlyn's response: "I agree that the truth is so much better than speculation, because what — like some of it wasn't amazing, but I feel like the truth is a lot better than speculation." "Like I absolutely agree — that like what she actually did is not as bad as what people think that she did. I think she was just a disciplinarian, when we didn't have one." Answer ends at 2:47:27 mark. Source material, via Gwendlyn Brown, available here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/youtube-live-94012178

Christine and Meri said he melted it when he was courting Robyn. Meri added that it was seven years prior to the catfish, not seven years ago. It's an old, painful story from Meri's humiliating marriage. Why would they have told it? (It probably pre-dates the series.) I get why Christine brought it up here (she shouldn't have, but I get it), but not telling every story that ever happened isn't "hiding" it, and * telling someone else's humiliating story from their marriage doesn't make Christine some brave truth teller.

Some people in the live chat were still bored by this episode, and I get that. At this point the format itself (tease, commercial, recap, fulfill tease, tease next thing, commercial, recap, fulfill tease, etc.) is an enjoyment killer. That said, I enjoyed this episode. I think we covered some new ground. I felt terrible for Meri about the whole melted-down ring thing. She was hurt and angry in the couch segment, but what really got me is that I could almost feel her humiliation. That whole story is humiliating in and of itself, but then she likely knows the catfish already made it public (I didn't know that until the weekend, but Meri must have, right?). Meri may have had years to tell it, but I don't think she wanted it told, and I don't blame her. I think it's a shame Christine told it, and I think Janelle is full of shit about what was done with it, but I can't remember if she mentioned that in this episode, so I'll leave it there. I think Christine is something of a mean girl, but I don't actually think she was trying to be a mean girl is sharing that. I think the whole ring dance with Robyn, Kody, and (against her will) Meri, was just incredible to Christine, and that's why she talked. She shouldn't have told the story, but I don't think Christine was trying to be hurtful in that instance.

And a lie! Don't forget the lie. She was definitely in the family when Kody melted down Meri's ring. (Sorry, I'm behind, but I just had to get that off my chest). See you all in the episode thread. Oh yeah, and go Meri, with the Knife to the Kidneys!

It feels like @TurtlePower hasn't posted in a long while. Is anyone in contact with her outside this board? I'm just wondering if she's okay. She's usually a regular here.