Mykelti Brown says she endured CSA as a child, kept it secret because “Tattle Tales” were punished in the Brown family.

In the June 15 episode of “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 rule against “tattle telling” caused her to keep quiet about CSA (Child Sexual Abuse.) Mykelti gave credit to 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 don’t like Robyn and are free to do so, but it doesn’t take away from the help she feels she received from Robyn.

Around the 30 minute mark of the interview, Mykelti shares that “tattle telling” was one of the most traumatizing things she experienced in the Brown family. “I know that sounds weird,” she says.

She says a major rule from the kids was that they were not allowed to “tattle tell” anything at all, and says the term “tattle telling” was what was used.

Mykelti says it was as extreme as they would get in trouble for telling their parent if another child was putting themselves in danger like climbing a tree they might fall from.

She says everyone single parent had the same stance on this until Robyn came into the family.

As a parent, Mykelti now wants to told anything that her kids find significant so they know they can trust her to always tell her what’s going on in their lives.

She says this tattletale rule prevented kids from telling the parents things that they really needed to be told like, “The neighbor kid touched me on my private parts.”

The triggered the host to ask Mykelti if CSA actually happened, and Mykelti affirmed that “There is an experience that happened to me,” but she’s not healed enough from it to go into detail. She did say that she did get into trouble as a kid for telling them something important, and feels like she could have been saved a lot of hurt and emotional damage if her she had developed trust with her parents.

She also didn’t trust her siblings because she felt different than 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,” Mykelti says. But she goes onto the say that the reason why she personally liked and felt attached to Robyn was because was able to talk to her about things that happened to her without getting into trouble. Mykelti says Robyn even when to her dad Kody and told him that he and the other wives had handled things wrong with Mykelti and told him that she needed help.

She said it was a “big thing” for her to have a person come into the family that made her feel protected, and that’s when her life started to change for the better. She says a lot of things changed after that in the family as a whole, and “tattle telling” became okay for everyone.