Whenever I report on a show I used to watch and haven’t been keeping up with I feel guilty, like I should know everything that’s going on with the plot but fell behind. In the case of “Sister Wives,” though, I think I have the gist from the first two episodes this season, even though I’ve missed this week and last. They moved to Las Vegas after they were put under investigation for felony bigamy in their native Utah and started getting worried that authorities were going to break up their family. The move and even just the trip itself was very stressful and difficult for the Brown family, including dad Kody, his four wives and their sixteen combined kids. (With another one on the way.) It was a huge change for the Browns, both culturally and in terms of their living arrangements. The wives were set up in four different homes in Vegas a few blocks apart instead of in one home with separate apartment-style accommodations for the first three wives and another house for newest one, Robyn. Kody felt the move was necessary in order to keep the family together, but it’s becoming clear that he acted in haste and not in the best interest of his family. The teenagers are suffering the most visibly, the wives are stressed out, and it’s been hard on all of them.
In new legal papers in their court case, the Browns are requesting that the law they’re being prosecuted under be dismissed. That probably won’t happen, but they probably won’t get prosecuted at all either. The prosecutors have mentioned that they trying to get the case dismissed, since all of the wives have entered into it on own free will and there isn’t any incest, underage marriage or tax or welfare fraud. So Kody uprooted everyone, took his kids out of their school, giving them three days notice (and telling them not to tell their friends goodbye!) and hightailed it to Vegas, all based on his own paranoia. He could have just stayed put and ridden it out. At least he created a great new plot line for his reality show, right? Here’s more on this story, from E!:
Fighting the good fight on behalf of polygamists, the husband at the center of TLC’s Sister Wives and two of his wives have filed addendums to their lawsuit in a Utah federal court explaining how the state’s bigamy laws in their view have threatened to tear apart their family and caused ongoing anxiety.
Here’s what they had to say.
We literally live day to day without knowing whether our family will be destroyed by a decision of some prosecutor in Utah to charge us,” wrote Janelle Brown in court papers obtained by the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Kody and Meri Brown (Kody’s legal missus) also submitted statements to that effect hoping to persuade a federal judge that the family suffered irreparable harm as the result of Utah’s statute prohibiting plural marriage, a once-traditional (though no longer sanctioned) Mormon practice that became a third-degree felony that could net violators up to five years in prison. (The official Mormon church banned plural marriages more than one hundred years ago.)
The point of the filing, say the Browns, is to show that the law was not being fairly applied and persuade the court to declare it unconstitutional so they’re not punished for an arrangement that’s mutually consensual among adults.
A spokesperson with the Utah Attorney General’s Office was unavailable for comment.
However, prosecutors previously told the newspaper they’re seeking the suit’s dismissal, noting they have no intention of bringing charges against the family, and furthermore on the grounds that the Browns failed to show how they they’ve been harmed by the state.
Kody Brown himself said as much in his statement, indicating that Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and his press secretary told the reality star on three separate occasions that state attorneys would not be pursuing a criminal case.
“I asked Defendant Shurtleff if Shurtleff would pursue me criminally if I went public, and Defendant Shurtleff answered that he would not,” wrote Brown.
He added that the attorney general informed him he didn’t have the resources to prosecute polygamists unless he discovered they were marrying child brides or committing incest or welfare and tax fraud.
[From E! Online]
This is just more proof to me that Kody is a self centered dumbass who doesn’t think things through, to the detriment of his family. I guess that could explain how this nimrod ended up with four wives and is about to have his fourteenth biological kid.
On a side note, wouldn’t you like to hear Robyn’s first husband come out and trash talk her? It’s so wrong of me, but I’d love to hear the guy say that she cheated on him and was always after fame. I like the original three wives, but Robyn just seems like an idiot with an agenda. She’s perfect for Kody in that way.
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