Mykelti Brown and her husband Tony Padron are set to move from Utah to North Carolina later this month, making them the latest members of the Brown Family to migrate away from the Southwest (and the Brown Family drama) to the Tar Heel State.
Mykelti’s sister Maddie Brush already lives in North Carolina– and apparently Maddie’s mom Janelle Brown also recently made the move east, according to Tony.
During a live Sister Wives watch session posted to her YouTube channel last week, Mykelti revealed the reason she and Tony decided to move their kids away from Utah— and her family.
“[It’s] a way to distance ourselves from the drama,” she said. “And really just figure out our own lives and our own things that we want to do with our kids.”
As ‘Sister Wives’ fans know, Mykelti is one of only a few Brown kids who still speak to their father Kody and his wife Robyn.
While Mykelti was supportive of her mom Christine leaving Kody several years ago, she has also managed to keep a relationship with Kody and Robyn–something most of the family’s adult children have declined to do– which likely puts Mykelti in the middle of her parents.
During the YouTube session, Mykelti explained that she is no longer needed in Utah to support her mom Christine, who married David Wooley last year.
“Some of the reasons we chose to move to Lehi, too, was kind of to make it easier for my mom to separate [from Kody], to leave, to have a home base, to have kids close by to have a support system,” she said. “And now she’s got all of that.
She’s got her support system; she’s got the love of her life. She has people, she’s good. She doesn’t need me to hold her hand.
“And I’ve never really wanted to live super-close to family,” Mykelti continued. “I’ve always wanted to be able to do my own thing and be independent and run my life how I like it, and kind of how I want to.”
As The Ashley previously reported, Christine was not happy when she found out that Mykelti is moving away.
“She supports our choices because we’re doing it for us, as a family, but she’s also extremely sad that we’ll be leaving her,” Mykelti said of Christine in June. “There’s a lot of feelings there…”
Tony and Mykelti also revealed that they were motivated to move to North Carolina because Tony was offered a job at one of the biggest chess instruction centers in the country.
“Basically for my chess career, it was huge,” Tony said. “It was a huge offer…and Mykelti has always wanted to live somewhere more green….it was a huge opportunity and a chance to live the dream, basically.”
Mykelti, Tony and Madison aren’t the only ‘Sister Wives’ stars who have made North Carolina their home, though. During the Live stream, Tony blurted out that Janelle is now living in North Carolina, too.
“It will be nice too because I’ve always grown up very, very, very close to the ‘Christine Brown Household.’ So this will be a nice way for me to get very close again to the ‘Janelle Brown Household,’” Mykelti said.
“Janelle lives out there,” Tony revealed.
“I also don’t think that was released yet too,” Mykelti said.
Janelle has made it clear via her Instagram posts that she was staying in North Carolina for long periods of time, but she had not yet admitted that she had moved there full-time.
Last month, one of her Instagram followers asked Janelle if she still lived in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“Yes I still have a home here. I’ve been in NC a lot this past 6 months – splitting my time,” she wrote at the time.
According to Tony, though, Janelle has since made the move permanent. (It’s likely that Janelle’s move will be used as a storyline for the next season of ‘Sister Wives,’ which is why she and the other cast members weren’t supposed to talk about it publicly.)
While most of the Brown Family moved to Flagstaff in 2018, very few of the family members are still living there.
Currently, only Kody, Robyn and their five kids reside there, as does Gwendlyn Brown. The rest of the family mainly lives in Utah or Las Vegas.
TLC has not revealed when the next season of ‘Sister Wives’ will premiere.
