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Why was Ruby Franke Arrested? Parenting Advice with a Side of Pain

Who is Ruby Franke, host of the former 8 Passengers channel?

Ruby Franke is a former family vlogger whose net worth is estimated to be around $1.5million. She and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt were arrested on August 30th without bail on severe child abuse charges. Members of the Mormon Church, Franke became notorious on her and her husband Kevin’s original YouTube channel called “8 Passengers” for their punishing parenting style. However, it appears that no one, not even Franke’s family, thought the neglect and abuse was as bad as it’s now being shown to be.

Reports directly from the police state that a child climbed out of a window and asked a neighbor for food and water. Neighbors saw duct tape on the child’s hand and wrists, along with open wounds. On a police scanner published, you can hear how difficult it is for the EMT to process the condition of one child. A total of four children, with at least two confirmed to be from the Franke family, were taken into custody by DCF (the Department of Child and Family Services). You can read the entire Santa Clara-Ivins Public Safety Department Press Release below.

Screenshot from Connexions YouTube channel (Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt) and a screenshot of Shari Franke’s Instagram, with a photo of her mother in handcuffs and the caption “Finally.”

Why Did Viewers Suspect Abuse– But Not This Bad

A number of Ruby and Kevin Franke’s videos revel in the harsh punishments doled out to their children.

  • Telling her daughter– in no uncertain terms and on camera– that if she cuts anything else in the Franke’s house, her mother will take her favorite stuffie and twist its neck to cut off its head. Franke also demonstrated the action in front of her crying child.
  • Refusing to bring her 6-year-old daughter food when her kindergarten teacher said she didn’t have a lunch. Why? Because Franke said it was her 6-year-old’s responsibility to make her own lunch and not eating was a natural consequence. Now, I get tired of making my kids’ lunches and dinners as much as any parent, and I love it when they make their own. But if they forget their lunch, or we forget snacks on an outing, then we get our kids food. Even if our budget is tight at that time, we find a small snack to fill our kids’ bellies until we’re home. Actively not feeding your kids or not letting them eat because a 6-year-old’s developing brain forgot to bring a lunch was one of the first signs that YouTube viewers noted that could count as abuse.
  • The real turning point for viewers was when her teenage son told the camera that he no longer has a bed. His mother Ruby sits next to him in visible discomfort, repeating that they didn’t tell their viewers that yet. Yes, at that time, Kevin and Ruby Franke took away their son’s bed for at least seven months while he slept on a beanbag chair. This is because her son played a prank on his younger sibling, waking him up at 2am to tell him that they’re going to DIsneyland and he needs to pack, which his sibling did. Now, I often point out pranks that YouTubers do for the camera. I have multiple articles where I offer advice on explaining pranks and why pranks aren’t cool if the people you are pranking don’t have fun.

However.

Punishing a minor in such a literally back-breaking way, or in any way that even comes close to what the Frankes did, it just shouldn’t happen. Why do we even have to say this?

There is so much more, and their oldest, estranged daughter asked people to document incidents on TikTok and in a Google Document before anything else can be wiped off the internet.

Who is Jodi Hildebrandt?

Hildebrandt was a therapist who got her license revoked for breaking patient-doctor confidentiality. Before four kids under the age of thirteen were found malnourished in her panic room, she ran The Connexions Classroom with Ruby Franke as her co-host. If you want to learn more about Hildebrant, someone compiled a website of relevant information, including reviews that detail how her therapy ruined their relationships with loved ones.

According to many sources, Ruby Franke’s net worth is around $1.5million.

Why Did it Take so Long to Arrest Them?

On the YouTube channel JordanandMcKay, who are ex-Mormons themselves, Jordan uses her background as a social worker to explain how “airtight” a case needs to be for police and DCF to take action. Relatives and neighbors tried to sound the alarm multiple times, according to Franke’s sisters and an article in Rolling Stone. But when a young child escaped to beg for water, law enforcement apparently had what they needed for the arrest.

Why Does Ruby Franke Matter?

Family vlogging channels are a complicated problem on YouTube. I touched on this when applauding the state of Illinois for their new law that requires family vlogs to pay their kids when they appear in videos. But the business side is one thing. Here are just a few of the problems inherent in family vlogging.

  • How can the children consent? There are multiple studies explaining how minors don’t understand the impact of being online.
  • COPPA, or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, details how companies on the internet can or cannot collect data from children, but there are no regulations on collecting data from a minor who appears on an adult’s channel.
  • How would you like to see every poop you dropped, every tantrum you had, and every punishment you endured on the internet for all your friends to see? That is, if you have friends. The eldest children in the Franke family often told their parents how they had no friends, citing their family’s channel as a cause.
  • How can you keep your location private if you film inside your house? Showing your child’s habits, routines, and what they do or don’t like, can give multiple clues to groomers and predators that make it easier to target your children.
  • Once it’s out there, people can capture any video, remix it, place it elsewhere on the internet, and you have no control over anything you post. This includes images, still or moving, of your children.

Every parent/guardian chooses their own level of comfortability with what to post online, and including our children in that conversation helps them understand their own comfort level before they can give consent. Since Franke often declared how her children have no right to privacy, we can assume their children could not give consent even if they wanted to.

Parenting Advice With a Side of Pain

Regardless of your taste in family channels or YouTube viewing in general, the Franke Family is hopefully the most extreme version we will see. Their entire image centered around how their morals and parenting styles leaned heavily on punishment. After Kevin distanced himself from Connexion, Ruby and Jodi ran a private Facebook group Moms of Truth with Jodi & Ruby where they offered advice such as not believing a group member’s daughter has an eating disorder, but that she chooses to have an eating disorder as part of her distortion of the Truth (always with a capital T). The group still has over 13,ooo members.

In the very same home where Franke and Hidebrandt filmed themselves doling out parenting and relationship advice on a couch, at least four children were tortured and malnourished for months or years, inside what the escaped child called a “safe room” and emergency responders identified as a “panic room,” according to the police scanner.

Their parenting tactics were discussed and often applauded in plain sight of any of their milions of viewers on a daily basis. I’m curious to see how YouTube responds beyond banning Ruby Franke from their platform, but the real tide must turn in who who we give our time, and our eyeballs, and our views to. Views equal advertising money, which equals motivation to create more disturbing content for viewers’ entertainment.

If people didn’t tune into the 8 Passengers channel, they wouldn’t have risen to the top of the algorithm and gotten millions in brand deals over the years. You may recall reading about channels like “DaddyOFive,” where the parents (Heather and Michael Martin ) saw that the crueler they are to Michael’s (the “daddy’s”) two biological children, the more views their videos get, and thus more money made off advertising.

In 2017, after year of attempts to help her kids, their mother was able to aid in the prosecution of Michael and Heather, who are arrested on two counts of midemeanor child neglect, according to an article in People Magazine. That same article explains how “The couple’s controversial videos have since been taken off YouTube. But they showed Heather and Michael destroying the children’s belongings and berating and swearing at them until they cried.”

If people enjoyed the Franke’s and Martin’s content, but didn’t turn away when it was clearly venturing into abuse, we need to look deeply into why that is. Some did raise the alarm, and we’ll always be grateful for those viewers and commentators. No one, including myself, is immune to shrugging off some signs of bad behavior when we like content. But that’s why we must be more observant, more diligent, and more specific in what we consume. Evaluating media for kids is the exact purpose of creating this website, but it’s clear to me that we adults must hold ourselves up to our own standards when it comes to creators as well.

Photo/Image Credit: Canva, Screenshots by Connexion’s YouTube (taken down by YouTube after the arrest) and Shari Franke’s Instagram Stories (since taken down)

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