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Former YouTuber Ruby Franke (42) has been given the maximum jail sentence after a court found that she abused and neglected her young children.
It was discovered in 2023 that the mom of six, who gave parenting advice on her YouTube channel, had been abusing two of her six children.
Last year her son escaped from the home of Jodi Hildebrandt (54), Franke’s business partner.
The 12-year-old begged a neighbour for help.
“The children were regularly denied food, water, beds to sleep in and virtually all forms of entertainment,” prosecutor Eric Clarke told the court.
The children, who were between the ages of nine and 11, were malnourished.
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Franke was sentenced to four consecutive terms of between one and 15 years — the maximum sentence allowed under Utah law.
Hildebrandt was handed the same sentence.
Franke acknowledged her wrongdoing in court.
“For the past four years, I’ve chosen to follow counsel and guidance that has led me into a dark delusion. My distorted version of reality went largely unchecked as I would isolate from anyone who challenged me,” she said during her sentencing.
She also claimed that she “believed dark was light and right was wrong.”
“I was led to believe that this world was an evil place, filled with cops who control, hospitals that injure, government agencies that brainwash, church leaders who lie and lust, husbands who refuse to protect and children who need abuse,” she said.
The following story was first published on 15 September 2023
To the outside world she was a mom raising six kids, a devout Mormon and a hard taskmaster. Ruby Franke made a name for herself and her husband, Kevin, documenting their family’s daily life on YouTube with her hugely popular channel, 8 Passengers.
She shared her slice-of-life videos of suburban America with her 2,5 million followers and generously doled out parenting advice.
But the image Ruby tried to portray has forever been shattered by disturbing evidence that paints her more as a monster than a mom trying to do her best for her brood.
Her kids have claimed she beat and starved them when the cameras stopped rolling and their home was more house of horrors than nurturing environment.
Ruby (41) and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were recently arrested and charged with multiple counts of child abuse after Ruby’s emaciated 12-year-old son, Russell, escaped from Jodi’s home in Ivins, Utah, and ran to a neighbour begging for food and water.
The neighbour noticed he had duct tape around his ankles and wrists and called the police who found the boy was malnourished.
According to a statement by the authorities, Russell also had deep lacerations from being tied up with rope and duct tape around his extremities.
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After searching the home they found Ruby’s 10-year-old daughter, Eve, in a similar malnourished state.
The two starving children were hospitalised and are now in protective custody along with their siblings, Chad (18), Abby (16) and Julie (14).
Ruby’s eldest, Shari (20), who’s estranged from her mom, welcomed the news of her mother’s arrest. She shared a picture of cops outside the home along with the word “Finally”.
“Today has been a big day,” she added. “Me and my family are so glad justice is being served. We’ve been trying to tell the police and child protective services for years about this, and so glad they finally decided to step up.
“Kids are safe but there’s a long road ahead. Please keep them in your prayers.”
Ruby decided to document her journey of parenthood in 2015.
“I just want women who are still nursing babies, women who are still trying to get their families, women who aren’t sleeping through the night, to see what it looks like at the finish line,” she told a local news station in 2016.
“I want them to see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s beautiful and it’s powerful and it’s worth it. It’s worth all the effort that families put into their family.”
Viewers were drawn to the family’s reality-style videos and by August 2017 the channel had one million subscribers tuning in to see the kids learning to shave, trying on new clothes and being reprimanded when they did something wrong.
The numbers grew and soon the Frankes were being offered sponsorships and brand deals.
However, in 2020 things took an unexpected turn when the momfluencer uploaded a now-deleted video of son Chad recounting how his parents had forced him to sleep on a beanbag as punishment for pranking Russell into packing a suitcase for a fake trip to Disneyland.
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“My bedroom was taken away for seven months,” Chad said in the clip. “I was sleeping on a beanbag since October.”
In another since-deleted video Ruby refused to drop off lunch for then six-year-old Eve after she’d forgotten to take it to school.
“Her teacher is uncomfortable with her being hungry and not having lunch and it would ease her discomfort if I was to come to school with a lunch,” she said. “My hope is she will be hungry and come home and be like, ‘That was really painful being hungry all day, I’ll make sure to always have a lunch with me’.”
Her controversial parenting style drew a public backlash. Viewers petitioned child protection services and implored them to intervene but the case was dropped due to insufficient evidence.
Ruby dismissed allegations of abuse and neglect and accused social media users of stirring up drama and taking clips out of context. But by January 2022 she stopped uploading videos and 8 Passengers was shut down.
Around the same time, she made a comeback on YouTube with Jodi on a new channel called ConneXions, focusing on mental health and counselling.
Jodi (54) is a therapist who had her licence suspended in 2012 after she disclosed a patient’s porn addiction to his Mormon church leaders, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Ruby and Jodi also had a joint Instagram account called Moms of Truth and started spending more time together.
“It started getting weird,” one of Ruby’s neighbours told Rolling Stone magazine. “People were concerned because Ruby completely stopped her YouTube stuff. And then it just kind of turned dark.
“She taped up paper over all of her windows. She would disappear for weeks at a time and there’s all these little kids just left alone in this house.”
Neighbours feared for the children’s wellbeing and repeatedly called authorities to investigate but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Everyone is just breathing a collective sigh of relief,” one neighbour told NBC News after Russell’s escape. “We thought they were going to come out of that house with body bags.”
“I’m really angry because I spoke up,” another neighbour says. “Other people spoke up. And nothing happened.”
Yet another says he found Ruby’s parenting style disturbing.
“I remember that she took away the kids’ Christmas one year. She would say things like, ‘They’re not repenting correctly’, which is a Mormon term for ‘they’re sinning’. Just complete insanity.”
Ruby and Jodi now stand accused of causing or permitting serious injury to the children in three different ways: a combination of multiple physical injuries or torture, starvation or malnutrition that jeopardises life and causing severe emotional harm.
Each has been charged with six counts of child abuse and each and face up to 15 years in prison.
Kevin, Ruby’s 45-year-old husband, isn’t being investigated by the authorities. His lawyer, Randy Kester, says Kevin and Ruby have been separated and living in separate homes for the past 13 months.
“My client’s urgent focus is simply to keep his children together under his fatherly care,” he told Good Morning America. “He’s a good person. He’s very gentle. No one’s ever made any allegations that he’s ever physically abused those kids.”
Ruby’s sisters, Ellie Mecham and Julie Griffiths Deru, released a statement after her arrest.
“For the last three years we have kept quiet on the subject of our sister for the sake of her children,” they said on Instagram.
“Behind the public scene we have done everything we could to try and make sure the kids were safe.
“Ruby was arrested which needed to happen. Jodi was arrested which needed to happen. The kids are now safe, which is the number one priority.”
SOURCES: INSIDER.COM, DAILYMAIL.CO.UK, NPR.ORG, NBCNEWS.COM, NEWS.SKY.COM, PEOPLE.COM
