Meri Brown is giving her Sister Wives family more insight into her traumatic catfishing experience, introducing them to another woman who fell victim to the same con.
In Sunday’s season premiere of the TLC reality show, Meri Brown introduced her husband and fellow wives to meet her friend Kristie, who was a victim of the same catfish in 2014.
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Kristie explained that after separating from her ex-husband, she found herself lonely, turning to online dating, where she met “Sam.”
“He was gorgeous,” she explained to Meri’s husband Kody and wives Robyn, Christine and Jenelle during dinner. “This vegan, tall — I was like, how is this guy talking to me? You get kind of drawn into this, especially when you’re lonely.”
Just five days in, Sam was telling Kristie he loved her, which filled an empty spot in her heart.”I mean, I felt like I was in love with him,” she explained. “For sure. The thing is that he knows how to become what you want. The first time we talked, he asked me what were the 10 qualities that I look for in a man and he became those 10 things. Not because that’s who he is, but because he was molding himself into what I wanted.”
Despite Sam’s promises, Kristie said all her efforts to meet him over the next few months were rebuffed: “There was always an excuse and we would never meet,” she said. “So I would continuously start questioning him and he would say, ‘Fine. Do you want a picture in a yellow shirt or a pink shirt?’ And I’d be like, ‘A yellow shirt.’ And then he’d send me a picture of him in a yellow shirt. It wasn’t me asking for a specific thing, it was a collage that he had and he would say, ‘Okay, I have a yellow shirt and a pink shirt.’ “
“And then it would in my mind trick me into thinking, ‘He put on this yellow shirt for me and took this picture,’ ” she continued. “That’s part of the manipulation.”
As things got more serious between Kristie and Sam, he asked her to take care of friend “Jackson Walker,” who had just had heart surgery and needed help recovering.
“I definitely had strong feelings for him and I thought he had strong feelings for me,” Kristie explained. “He wanted her to come and stay with me, he wanted me to physically take care of her because she just had surgery. She basically lived with me for two weeks.”
In the end, Jackson was revealed to be the catfish behind Sam, and the same woman who took advantage of Meri, which she revealed in 2015.
“She catfished us all with this male character named Sam,” Meri said. “Sam always had a very strong female character, but that person, her name was different. It was Jackson with Kristie, but it was Lindsay with me.”
“It’s like, what is the motivation?” Meri added. “Why does she do this? I mean, is she just evil? Is she lonely? I don’t know.”
Since Meri’s catfishing incident, she and her family have worked to repair their relationships, but will they be able to get back to the way things used to be?
Sister Wives airs Sundays ar 8 p.m. ET on TLC.
Photo credit: Instagram/Meri Brown
