On the June 15 episode of the “Cults to Consciousness” podcast, Mykelti Brown spoke in detail about what it was like growing up in the Mormon polygamist Brown family. One of the devastating details she shared was how the family’s rule against “table telling” kept her quiet about CSA (Child Sexual Abuse). Mykelti credited her father’s fourth wife Robyn for being the only parent who made her feel okay to share things that were going on in her life. She acknowledges that many fans of the show dislike Robyn and are free to do so, but that doesn’t take away from the help she feels she has received from Robyn.
About 30 minutes into the interview, Mykelti says that “table telling” was one of the most traumatizing things she experienced in the Brown family. “I know it sounds weird,” she says.
She says that a main rule from the children was that they were not to “slut” anything at all, and says that the term “slut” was what was used.
Mykelti says it was as extreme as they would get in trouble for telling their parent if another child put themselves in danger like climbing a tree they could fall from.
She says that all single parents had the same attitude about this until Robyn came into the family.
As a parent, Mykelti now wants to tell her everything that her children find important, so they know they can trust her to always tell her what’s going on in their lives.
She says this gossip rule prevented children from telling parents things they really needed to be told like, “The kid next door touched me in my private parts.”
That prompted the host to ask Mykelti if CSA actually happened, and Mykelti confirmed that “There is an experience that happened to me,” but she hasn’t healed enough from it to go into detail. She said she got in trouble as a child for telling them something important, and she feels she could have been spared a lot of hurt and emotional damage if she had developed trust in her parents.
She also didn’t trust her siblings because she felt different from them. The first family member she actually trusted was Robyn, who she says had a way of “breaking down” her walls and making her feel safe when she was emotionally vulnerable.
“A lot of people don’t like Robyn, and that’s totally fine,” says Mykelti. But she goes on to say that the reason she personally liked and felt connected to Robyn was because she was able to talk to her about things that happened to her without getting in trouble. Mykelti says Robyn even reached out to her father Kody and told him that he and the other wives had handled things wrong with Mykelti and told him she needed help.
She said it was a “big thing” for her to have someone come into the family who made her feel protected and that’s when her life started to change for the better. She says that many things have changed afterwards in the family as a whole and that “table counting” became okay for everyone.
