This meeting, previewed in an exclusive clip for the upcoming December 7 episode, marks the first time the former couple has truly looked each other in the eye since their marriage unraveled. Kody, visibly humbled, opens the conversation with a confession he’s been rehearsing for months.
“I just wanted to come and say that I apologize,” he tells her, explaining that he came with a “list of apologies.” His first: “I want to apologize for just being so angry and so bitter over the family breakup, and just nobody deserved to have me be that angry.”
Janelle Confronts the Man She No Longer Recognizes
For Janelle, the man sitting across from her is both familiar and foreign. She admits she barely recognized him in the final stretch of their marriage. “I kept thinking I don’t know who this guy is,” she says. “I used to always tell everybody, I’m like, ‘This is not the guy that I was married to forever.’”
In her confessional, the emotional distance is even clearer. “The person I would see speaking all these things publicly, I’m like, ‘I don’t know who that guy is.’ I still don’t recognize him.” She describes the version of Kody she sees today as someone built from pieces of the man she once knew, yet living “a completely different life.” And in truth, she feels she has changed just as much.
Still, the shared memories run deep. As they continue talking, Janelle reflects on what she believed their plural family stood for — the ideal that once held them all together. “I never saw this coming in a million years,” she says, revisiting the vision she thought they were building.
Their mission, she explains, was always the kids: “Thank goodness the kids are all still pretty much they’re siblings, really… that was one of the biggest things that we did accomplish.”
But with time comes clarity, and Janelle acknowledges that her commitment to maintaining the broader family may have overshadowed the marriage itself. “I think maybe I lost track of our relationship,” she admits in her confessional. “I probably should have been focused a little bit more on our relationship and not so much the family.”
Kody’s Reckoning, Loss, and the Road Ahead
Her separation from Kody became public in 2022, ending a nearly three-decade-long partnership. She was the second of Kody’s wives to walk away, following Christine in 2021. Meri would make her departure official in 2023.
Two years after Janelle left, tragedy struck the family again with the loss of their son, Garrison Brown, who died in March 2024 at age 25 — a wound that still hangs heavily over every family interaction.
Kody’s apology, he says, is rooted in uncomfortable self-reflection. Last week’s episode showed him telling Robyn that a lingering spiritual unease pushed him toward making amends. The awkward property signing at Coyote Pass — where neither Meri nor Janelle so much as acknowledged him — only made that inner tug stronger.
After reflecting and praying, he said he felt compelled to take responsibility: “I just started getting this vibe that I need to go apologize. What I need to own about the breakups, about how things happened with the family… I want to set them free.”
What comes next between Kody and his ex-wives remains to be seen, but this meeting with Janelle marks a notable shift — perhaps the first real attempt at healing after years of bitterness, distance, and silence.
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
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