The McBee Dynasty’s Steven “Steve” McBee Sr. took a step back from the Bravo series during season 2, later revealing his FBI investigation was to blame.
As a result, his sons, Steven McBee Jr., Jesse McBee, Cole McBee and Brayden McBee, took over his responsibilities on their family farm in Missouri and also helmed their reality show.
Prior to the season 2 premiere in June, Steve pleaded guilty to one count of federal crop insurance fraud in November 2024. He admitted to falsifying reports about his crop yields in 2018.
Although fans knew about his FBI case before the show aired, only his eldest son, Steven, was in the loop when they filmed. He finally told Jesse and Cole about the investigation during the season 2 finale, which aired in September 2025.
The McBee Dynasty brothers vowed to show “the good, the bad, the ugly” on their reality show — including their unfiltered reactions to dad Steve McBee’s FBI investigation. “It’s really, really tough because that is constantly at the forefront of your mind, no matter what you’re doing,” eldest son Steven McBee Jr. exclusively told Us […]
“I’m obviously afraid,” Cole confessed to the cameras.
Jesse, meanwhile, revealed, “My dad, he’s 51 years old. He’s getting up in age. I’m definitely a little scared at the thought of my dad going to jail.”
While Steve is still waiting to be sentenced in November, his family has spoken out about his legal woes both on The McBee Dynasty and off camera.
The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys is streaming on Peacock. Scroll down to see what they’ve said:
Steven McBee Jr.
“We’ve leaned into family. We take it day by day,” Steven exclusively told Us Weekly of their mindset in July 2025. “The situation is still ongoing. We’re hoping to have it wrapped up and have some finality to it before the end of the year. That’s the goal, just so we can move on and say, ‘OK, we’ve got this figured out. We can start life again now.’”
During the season 2 finale of the Bravo series, which aired in September 2025, Steven got real about the stress he and his father felt amid the legal woes.
“We’ve been going back and forth with the government [for a year],” Steven said on the episode, explaining that their dad “is under the most intense pressure I’ve ever seen in my life. I can tell this has taken a toll on him. I don’t know what the end result of this thing is going to be.”
Jesse McBee
“It was a shell shock just seeing the weight that Steven had been [dealing with],” Jesse exclusively told Us in July 2025, noting that he found out on camera about his dad’s FBI issues. “It made a lot of things make a lot more sense, just the way that Steven was stressed out and we were trying to figure out why we thought we knew all of his stresses, and obviously he was holding that in and bearing that weight on his shoulders.”
The following month, Jesse exclusively told Us that both he and Cole “wish” Steven would have told them “sooner” to “help share that burden,” but understood why their big brother kept it a secret so long.
“He gave us the nitty gritty of pretty much the entire situation, and obviously we have daily conversations with my dad still about it,” Jesse explained. “And kind of what the game plan is and how we’re going to just move forward.”
He continued, “At the end of the day, we’re still family, and we support each other no matter what,” noting that in Steve’s absence from the farm, the brothers have stepped up. Jesse told Us that he is head of construction, Steven is still CEO and head of their meat company, while Cole runs the farm aspect.
Cole McBee
After learning about Steve’s FBI investigation during the September 2025 finale, Cole told the cameras, “Part of me is scared to death right now. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Once Cole and girlfriend Kacie Adkison welcomed their daughter, Blair, in December 2024, which was featured in the season 2 finale, he again spoke about his dad’s troubles. “There’s a lot of tough problems that we’re going through, but when I hold Blair it just all goes away,” Cole said through tears.
He later confessed, “It’s upsetting to watch someone work your whole life, every single day and have one mistake change everything.”
Calah Jackson
Calah, who dated eldest son Steven on and off from 2021 to 2024, revealed during an August 2025 episode of The McBee Dynasty that she was in the know about Steve’s FBI drama.
“Steven told me that Steve was being investigated by the FBI,” she said after a day of drinking with then-boyfriend Steven in the Ozarks. “I definitely think he’s trying to stop me from talking about it to his family.” (Steven and Calah split at the end of 2024 amid filming season 2.)
Calah proceeded to leave the family’s vacation and hinted that Steve’s issues would soon come to light. “I have so much tea on this family. If I wanted to, I could bury them. Trust me, there are secrets they would not want to come out. Although there might be one coming out very soon.”
Let the cameras roll. Chrisley Knows Best is certainly not without drama, but its stars have been at the center of more controversies than a single reality show can handle. Fans met Todd Chrisley, Julie Chrisley and their kids — Chase, Savannah and Grayson — when the series premiered on USA Network in March 2014. […]
In August 2025, Calah exclusively told Us she never planned to tell anyone about Steve’s FBI scandal, but rather she was trying to “defend” herself during her fight with Steven and his brothers.
Looking back, Calah told Us she thinks Steven only told her about the FBI drama because she was a “shoulder to lean on and help him go through those motions.” She also revealed that she was told about Steve’s troubles “six months or so before everybody else.”
Kristi McBee
Steve’s ex-wife and the mother of his four sons was in the loop about the investigation from the moment Steven was informed. However, Kristi has not publicly weighed in on the scandal, instead she’s spoken on camera about how it’s affected her eldest child.
“Steven’s just having a hard time being positive about anything right now,” she revealed during the September 2025 finale, noting, “We don’t know at all what’s going to happen with Steve. We don’t know what’s to come.”
