#ruby franke child abuse

[thescoopess]

Momfluencer, Ruby Franke, Sentenced to 4 to 60 Years for Child Abuse

Ruby Franke was sentenced to prison on Tuesday for abusing her two youngest children, nearly six months after her son fled Jodi Hildebrandt’s house and called 911 from a neighbor’s house. Franke’s business partner Hildebrandt was also given a jail sentence on Tuesday. Both, Franke, and Hildebrandt plead guilty. According to KUTV, a CBS News station, Franke has been sentenced to four consecutive…

[mudwerks]

(via Ruby Franke, Popular Parenting YouTuber, Arrested for Alleged Child Abuse)

According to Salt Lake City’s Fox 13, arresting documents describe a child climbing out of a window and running to a neighbor’s home to ask for food and water. The neighbor noticed that the child had duct tape on their wrists and ankles and called the police. Another child was found at the home the first one escaped from, which belongs to Franke’s business partner and therapist Jodi Hildebrandt.

Viewers of “8 Passengers” and investigative vloggers have flagged Franke’s concerning behavior around feeding and withholding food from her children for a long time. In one video, Franke brags about not feeding her kids breakfast until they do their chores, despite them being “literally starving.” In another, Franke explains the reasoning behind not bringing her hungry 6-year-old lunch at school, because it’s actually the kid’s responsibility to pack her own lunch. It’s all deranged.

Why do people that hate kids ever have kids? And why do they have such strong urges to share their evil with others? I guess it’s...ATTENTION and MONEY.

One can’t help but notice the unfortunate pattern of Youtubers or parenting influencers on any platform who’ve compromised their children’s wellbeing. Remember Myka Stauffer, who “rehomed” her adopted child with special needs in 2020? Or the “FamilyofFive” parents, who were convicted of child abuse in 2017 for the elaborate and cruel “pranks” they pulled on their children? The parenting choices these people made are upsetting enough, but their incessant need to capitalize off of them for content at their children’s expense is horrific.

[peacesmovingcabaret]

EAT SHIT AND ROT IN PISS YOU EVIL BITCH!!!!!

[shewhotellsstories]

I feel like the family vlogger thing is inherently exploitative, in part because when it begins the people who will be the most impacted can’t really consent to being involved because of how young they are. Still, I see a lot of people saying they found 8 passengers so sweet and wholesome and the truth is that Ruby Franke being an abuser isn’t shocking if you recognize that children are people. No good parent takes away their kid’s bed for nearly a year over a prank. Or threatens to cut up a preschooler’s favorite stuffed animal as a punishment. What that woman showed for her own children wasn’t tough love, it was contempt and it wasn’t well hidden.

[danrifics]

man i hope ruby franke having to serve 30 years (up to 60) in prison changes something in the way youtube allows parents to exploit their children for views. she’s not the first family blogger to abuse her children and she certainly won’t be the last

[baku-usagi]

It's so hard not to truly blossom to hate Christianity when you come out of it. The obsession with evil, and the devil and his presumed role in the behavior of children.

I grew up in a corporal punishment home.

All my friends in the church we were part of were out through physical discipline. I don't believe Christians make good parents. They treat children like objects and animals.

And now, I've found myself seeing the ruby franke case and I'm just so sick and devastated. Those poor babies. Those poor babies.

The diary of this woman calling these children possessed, tormenting them.

It's not at all suprising that she considers herself a good Christian woman.

I hope she gets tortured to death in prison for what she put her kids through.

God I hope she does. Christians shouldn't be allowed to have kids if they're going to abuse them and project their weird moral system onto them before they've even grown old enough to develope impulse Control.

Sick sick sick

[tuhbanbuv]

Ruby Franke has pleaded guilty to abusing her children, depriving them of food, water, duct taping their mouths and restraining them via weights, handcuffs and other methods that sicken me too much to describe. Her jail sentence can be anywhere from 4 to 60 years.

Yet she puts all the blame on Jodi, yet both of them have not only boasted about their abuse against the children in what I can only describe as religious/ritual/cult abuse but actively advocating for it and potentially coercing other parents to do it as well.

Spread the word about her crimes. Contact the officials with your concerns. Raise awareness. Ruby Franke cannot get away with this. She will burn in hell for what she did to those kids.

This is where it ends.

I will be linking the Reddit post with the legal documents regarding her plea deal below, but please be careful, the account of her full abuse is very graphic and distressing. If you cannot handle it, be careful.

[havinganormalone]

I've been following this case since they were arrested back in August. What is so frustrating and heart breaking is how long people had been blowing the whistle, and how thoroughly the system had failed. Or worse- how the Mormon church enabled and funded this abuse. I have a lot of thoughts about abusive systems that I'll detail under the cut. It's a very rambling path on this high-control clusterfuck.

Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt, the two perpetrators who have each pled guilty to 6 charges of felony child abuse, were brought together by the Mormon church, they were enabled by systemic issues in the way the Mormon church operates and their regressive views on sexuality, and this abuse could have been prevented if the Mormon church had more oversight and was held accountable for the way they operated.

People had been calling out Ruby Franke for years for her strict -abusive- parenting style. I mean, when you post about letting your neurodivergent child go without food, about forcing your son to sleep on a beanbag in the living room for months, about dragging your feet taking a child to the ER so you can clean your house, to a youtube channel with 2 million subscribers, you aren’t exactly being low key. But despite the many, many times people called CPS, she was allowed to continue to escalate her abuse. In fact, it sort of had the backfire effect, with CPS being called so often that they started to tune it out. They had thousands of people blowing the whistle, but an overworked CPS system has to filter stuff out.

Her accomplice Jodi Hildebrandt had been the Mormon church's top referred therapist for years, despite the fact that her license was temporarily suspended in 2012 for her unethical treatment of Adam Paul Steed (more on this later). Despite the fact that Jodi's niece (nonbinary, they/them) Jessi Hildebrandt had reported to the police how Jodi had abused and tortured them as a minor, doing things like forcing them to sleep outside in the snow, forbidding Jessi from talking to others, and accusing Jessi of crimes so frequently that Jessi has said it took years of therapy to believe they were not inherently evil. (You can see echoes of this abuse in the way Ruby's daughter refused medical treatment for her injuries for hours, stating to authorities that they were her fault and she deserved them.)

While the Mormon church did remove her from the official referral list after the 2012 incident, she was still the #1 recommended therapist by individual clergy in the Salt Lake Valley along the Wasatch front. For those who are unaware of Mormon bureaucracy, each individual parish is headed by a bishop, who would meet and counsel with members. If a couple came to him with concerns about the husband viewing pornography, the bishop can recommend the couple to marriage counseling. He chooses the therapist, with no oversight. The church has a referral list of counselors they trust (the same one Jodi was on and then removed) but basically it is up to the individual bishop to choose, and if he (always a he, women are not allowed to be bishops) saw Jodi's name on the list in the past and didn't keep updated, or heard about her from other bishops, he's going to keep recommending her. And then when the young couple can't afford it (Jodi was allegedly charging upwards of $2k a month), the bishop can choose to pay for it from church funds. This was how Jodi was unofficially on church payroll. She never worked for the church, but by getting client referrals from bishops, she was able to charge thousands of dollars and funnel money from the Mormon church coffers.

If you want proof of just how much money Jodi was raking in, feel free to check out the $5.3 million home she was torturing children in. She's selling it to cover legal fees. For a while there, you could take a virtual tour of the home that included the bunker room where she had Ruby Franke's 12 year-old son duct-taped and rubbed a mixture of honey and cayenne pepper into his wounds. You might be able to find archives of people doing the 3D tour on TikTok.

There are also several rumors online that Jodi helped the church develop their Addiction Recovery Program (ARP). I have yet to find solid evidence of this, and have some doubts about those claims, simply because this predatory practice has been around so long that even if Jodi had put together the specific model the Mormon church uses, she is far from the one who developed it. Regardless, both the methods Jodi uses in her ConneXions classroom, Jodi's old company LifeStar, and the LDS (Mormon) Church's Addiction Recovery Program are all alike in the way they pathologize human sexuality.

The basic rundown is that ANY interest in porn or masturbation is treated on the same level as injecting heroin on a daily basis. You are encouraged to treat yourself like an addict, regardless of the frequency of these behaviors. Even men who masturbate once a month are referred to the program. Actual therapists conclude pretty strongly that treating these normal human behaviors like addictions does not help. It increases the amount of shame you feel when doing them, and that shame can have negative impacts on your self-esteem and behavior, not the porn usage itself. It's a viscous self-fulfilling prophecy: porn only negatively impacts you if you feel bad for viewing it.

However, Jodi Hildebrandt made a career off of diagnosing and then treating people for pornography addiction. That cycle is what eventually led Ruby Franke to her. Ruby and her husband were initially referred to Jodi for therapy, and while the exact reasons have not been made public, the fact that Ruby forced her husband to move out a short while later paints a pretty clear picture. This is the exact cycle of control Jodi had done in the past: convince the wife that their husband is a dangerous sexual predator for normal sexuality, make the husband feel guilty, use that guilt to place an ultimatum on the husband so that the wife can force him to go no-contact while still footing the bill, and then milk the couple for exorbitant therapy for as long as this strained relationship can last.

It was this modus operandi that she used against Adam Paul Steed, a victim of childhood sexual abuse while in the Boy Scouts of America. If you don't know who Adam Paul Steed is, the short story is that his bravery in coming forward and refusing to be silenced about his sexual abuse in Scouts resulted in Idaho changing the statute of limitations on underage assault (previously capped at 5 years, which meant the period would expire before many victims had even processed their childhood abuse and had words to define it). This had a ripple effect of allowing thousands of victims of sexual assault in Boy Scouts to come forward about their abuse. So yeah, he's a hero who does not suffer abuse in silence.

Flash forward years later to when Adam Paul Steed was married, and he and his wife were referred to Jodi Hildebrandt for therapy after it was discovered that Adam occasionally watched porn. Adam was forced into the same cycle of being told he is a dangerous predator, he is an addict, he isn't safe. Can you imagine what it's like for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to be told those things? And then as part of his therapy, Adam was essentially blackmailed into attending a support group that contained both men like himself, who occasionally masturbated, along with men who had committed incest and rape. In the eyes of the Mormon church and Jodi Hildebrandt, those sins are all interchangeable.

Being told he was on the same level as the man who had molested him as a child was Adam's breaking point, and that was when Adam put his foot down and refused to endure anymore. As a result, his wife divorced him, and Jodi broke client confidentiality to tell both Adam's bishop and the Honor Code Office of BYU (the Mormon college that Adam was attending at the time) that he was "the most dangerous person [Jodi] had ever met." This resulted in BYU kicking Adam out. He lost all progress on his college degree (BYU is notorious for stonewalling people kicked out when they try to transfer credits, often taking months to years to provide transcripts and making every effort possible to block students trying to transfer to other schools), along with his wife, infant daughter, and his reputation. This was the point at which Adam made a formal complaint about Jodi's breach of ethics in violating client confidentiality, which is what led to her 2012 suspension of her license.

But this did not stop the Mormon church from recommending Jodi. To them, Adam had gotten what he deserved for not being willing to overcome his "addiction." (If you really want to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, there are also theories that this was intentional retribution for what Adam had done to the Boy Scouts, since for a long time they were the Mormon church's pet program. However, these are just theories that would probably be impossible to substantiate, so I won't go in depth on them here.)

Adam Paul Steed's story is an amazing one of resilience and integrity, and he continues to speak out against Jodi Hildebrandt. If people had listened to him a decade ago, a lot of this horror could have been avoided. He did an amazing 5 hour interview on the Mormon Stories Podcast that brought me to tears several times. Unfortunately, his ex-wife threatened a defamation lawsuit (even though she isn't NAMED in the interview), so that interview has been taken down. It's a darn shame there are no mirrors anywhere.

Anyways, circling back to the point. Ruby Franke is not a victim. A recent evidence dump includes her journal, where she gleefully describes the inhuman torture she put her children through. You can find a ton of breakdowns on Youtube, although I personally recommend Jordan and McKay's video, as they have been covering 8 Passengers (Ruby Franke's Youtube Channel) for years, and were some of those early whistle blowers. Ruby has claimed that everything was Jodi's idea. Quite possibly it was. That doesn't change the fact that Ruby was an eager participant.

These two women were sociopaths who were allowed to operate unchecked. Or worse, were allowed to operate when the checks we have in place failed. They had a propensity towards abuse and exerting control over others that manifested long before it got to the point of forcing her daughter to repeatedly jump into a cactus to "discipline" her. My hope from this case is that it forces us to ask two things:

-How can we better enforce the safety checks we already have in place that failed in this case?

-How can we establish new safety checks to prevent this kind of behavior from ever happening?

While I don't claim to have all the answers, I think a good place to start would be by installing restrictions on exploitative "family channels" on social media. Clearly we need to be more skeptical of the kinds of person that would use their children to earn a buck. Allowing people to earn money from exploiting their children like this offers them the means to shield themselves from consequence. Ruby's money and influence was a huge buffer that allowed her to get away with this for so long. By restricting the income a family channel can make, we would go a long ways towards limiting the power a would-be sociopathic parent can earn. Youtube could demonetize any videos that contain an uncensored minor's face. Brands could not offer sponsorships to child-centric channels. Local government could be allowed to act on publicly available information, ie Child Protect Services could establish a child is in danger based on the exploitation in videos.

Another good place to start would be better restrictions and oversight on how a religious institution operates with for-profit companies. I obviously have very strong FEELINGS about the Mormon church's stance on... essentially everything. However, even allowing the church to continue their toxic attitudes towards sex (a freedom of thought that should be extended to all people), the damage that mindset could do would be limited if churches were not allowed to make mental health referrals with no oversight. This sort of relationship has long allowed things like conversion therapy camps, troubled teen centers, and other dubious for-profit enterprises to flourish. Maybe religious institutions could still financially support their members that were seeking help and needed assistance, but they would have less say on who the member went to. A non-partisan list of curated therapists or resources that members were allowed to choose from, rather than clergy only allowing them to seek help from people who will echo un-scientific and destructive viewpoints, would eliminate the Jodi Hildebrandt pipeline we saw in this case.

Sorry this was long and rambling, this was not 1/10th of my thoughts about this case and the systemic problems with the Mormon church, so it probably is hard to follow. I just needed to vent it somewhere.

[randomfoggytiger]

Hoping against hope that DD reads "The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom" and brings Shari Franke on his podcast to discuss the dangers and horrendous, soulless incentive of family vlogging.

[thedepressedweasel]

I hope Ruby Fucking Franke gets tortured to death in prison TBH

[katimorton]

It's time, let's talk about Ruby Franke and her recent arrest alongside Jodi Hildebrandt's. The truth is there have been warning signs of Ruby Franke and her 8 Passengers YouTube channel for a long time. I took the time to look back at the content from Ruby Franke and the 8 Passengers channel to ask were there any warning signs of child welfare or mistreatment? Or was there toxic or unhealthy or traumatizing behaviors that took place both at her home and within Ruby Franke's content. To no one's surprise, there were. Let's talk about the signs we should have seen from the 8 Passengers channel and Ruby Franke's personal accounts - and signs you should watch out for in your own family or families you may know. The truth is family abuse and toxic family behaviors are all around, and if you have experienced a toxic family or upbringing you may have not dealt with child trauma, childhood emotional neglect or PTSD that you may want to look into. What warning signs did you see from Ruby Franke, Jodi Hildebrandt or the 8 Passengers channel? What did I miss?

[valorrath]

TW: abuse, child abuse, SA, Ruby Franke

I don’t know the details about the Ruby Franke situation with her alleging that one of her children has been SAing other children. Abused children sometimes abuse other children. It’s possible that it’s true.

But I just can’t escape the feeling that she’s accusing her twelve-year-old son and that it’s her way of punishing him for escaping to get help. I was worried something like it would happen; I actually was waiting to see what heinous thing she would accuse him of doing to justify taping him up and starving him, so I wasn’t surprised at all to see that the accusation came up in her hearing. I don’t know. I’m so sad about this entire situation and those poor children.

[tisgifrants]

i feel bad for all the commentary channels that are documenting the recent events these days. people like cruel world, happy mind; swoop; adam mcintyre; even freaking hi! im wonder-- they have all been subject to the likes of illuminaughtii, colleen ballinger and johnny silvestri, and are now seeing what tf ruby franke did to her children.

ofc none of whom i mentioned suffered through such pain like the children (thank God), but me knowing that they did suffer through their own trauma and abuse-- that they documented for us viewers to see-- just to document (or soon to document) the horrible news that the so called "mother" did to her adolescent children.

so sad.

[kelcipher]

Another Christian influencer arrested for child abuse: Why conservatives keep falling for these cons | Salon.com

[skellybonesandtrees]

Ruby Franke, of mormon vlog mom fame, once said her biggest fear was waking up and finding all of her (6) kids staring at a wall and she'd have nothing to film.

Like...what...the...fuck...were those 2 million people doing enabling this complete basket case? Why CPS failed those kids so many times?

[imkrisyoung]

Put Ruby Franke under the jail.