A Utah woman who became well-known on YouTube thanks to her strict parenting received a minimum four-year jail sentence for child abuse.
Ruby Franke, 42, sobbed in court as she asked for forgiveness after discovering her destiny. She acknowledged that she had abused and starved her kids.
She appeared in court alongside Jodi Hildebrandt, 54, her former business partner, who was also given a comparable term. The judge gave them individual sentences ranging from four to fifteen years.
According to Utah law, the maximum penalties will be applied in each case, and the sentences will run consecutively. The state parole board will ultimately decide how much time each will spend.
Franke has 30 days to file an appeal of the ruling.
Prosecutor Eric Clark of Utah stated in court that Ruby Franke’s two children, who were eleven and nine years old at the time, were living in “concentration camp-like conditions” and constituted a serious threat to the community.
According to Mr. Clark, “The children were deprived of regular meals, water, beds for sleep, and nearly all forms of entertainment.”
Following the announcement of the verdict, Franke sobbed in court. “I was so misguided that I believed darkness was light and wrong was right,” she apologized to her kids.
She said, “I was convinced that this world is a dark place, filled with corrupt police officers, abusive hospitals, brainwashing government agencies, lying and lustful church leaders, husbands who refuse to provide security, and children in need of abuse.”
When Ruby Franke’s undernourished 12-year-old son broke out of Hildebrandt’s house through a window in August 2023, both ladies were taken into custody. The kid then reportedly ran to a neighbor’s house and asked for food and water, according to the police. Police documents stated that he had wounds from being restrained on his body. An extensive and contentious career on YouTube came to an end with the arrests. Franke began her channel, “8 Passengers,” in 2015, and has since amassed over two million members.
Parenting vloggers were having a great time, and Ruby Franke told a local news source that filming with her family allowed her to “enjoy her children and find joy in the present.”
In her movies, a particular suburban Mormon family was shown cooking, dining, chatting, and homeschooling.
But when one of her sons disclosed in 2020 that he had been made to sleep in a bean bag for seven months, admirers started to have their concerns.
Upon closely examining her records, users on YouTube alluded to further unsettling and contentious tactics employed by Franke, including depriving her of food, threatening to chop off the head of a stuffed animal, and canceling Christmas as a form of discipline.
Thousands of people signed a petition calling for an investigation, and Utah’s child protection department was contacted—although no legal action was pursued at the time. At first, Ruby Franke and her spouse disregarded the criticism, saying certain videos had been edited out of context.
But as the channel’s popularity declined, it was taken down in 2022—the year Franke and her husband got divorced.
After that, Ruby Franke started to show up in YouTube videos that life coach and counselor Mrs. Hildebrandt had uploaded to her website, Conscious Classroom.
Behind the scenes, though, Franke’s kids were still being brutally abused.
This included tying them up, hitting and kicking them, not feeding them, and making them labor outside without sunscreen, which led to serious sunburns, according to police records.
In exchange for a reduced sentence, Hildebrandt said that she had either abused the kids personally or knew they had been abused and had made one of Franke’s daughters “jump into a cactus multiple times.”
Franke urged her kids to “repent” because they were “wicked and evil.”
Before the trial, Ruby Franke’s ex-husband Kevin Franke asked for the maximum penalty through her counsel, calling the torture their kids endured “horrific and inhumane.”
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