INFAMOUS: Ruby Franke
- Yasmin Sudarsanam
- Mar 22
- 4 min read
Trigger Warning: The following case includes depictions of violence against minors and neglect. Please read at your own discretion.
Just a year ago, resolution was achieved in the cases of Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt with their sentencing. After years of posting seemingly wholesome and transparent YouTube videos, the dark truth behind Franke’s treatment of her children was revealed due to the courage of one of her children in escaping and seeking help. This is the story of Ruby Franke.
Ruby Franke was born on January 18, 1982 in Utah. As an adult, three of her sisters are family vloggers, likely inspiring her transition to YouTube as a content creation platform, although her family has issued multiple statements distancing themselves from Franke following the revelations we will be discussing today. Franke created a YouTube channel in early 2015 called 8 Passengers where she documented her life with her six children with husband Kevin through videos posted five days per week. By June of 2020, the channel had amassed 2.5 million subscribers and one billion total views.
In a 2020 video, one of Franke’s 15-year-old children claimed that he had been banned from his bedroom and forced to sleep on a beanbag for seven months. Additionally, her youngest six-year-old daughter was also sent to school without packed lunch because Franke believed she was old enough to be responsible for preparing her own meals, and she refused to bring a meal for her daughter when her school contacted her about this. Franke has also made several concerning remarks and enacted worrying punishments over the years, including sending a child to wilderness camp for troubled teens, threatening to behead a stuffed toy, and telling two young children that Santa would not bring them anything for Christmas due to their conduct. All of these instances raised concerns in viewers about her disciplinary methods, prompting them to start a Change.org petition to report perceived child abuse and neglect. However, the Franke parents vehemently denied any wrongdoing and claimed that all these incidents had simply been taken out of context.
The Frankes separated in 2022 and Ruby deleted her YouTube channel that year. She began working as a mental health coach at ConneXions, a company managed by Jodi Hildebrandt, a licensed clinical mental health counselor in Utah. Hildebrandt had a concerning record of child abuse, including reports made by a teen under her care who reported to police in 2010 that she had forced the teen to sleep outside in a sleeping bag and even duct-taped their mouth shut at one point.
The two women launched a new channel together titled ConneXions as well as a joint Instagram account where they offered parenting classes, and Hildebrandt moved into the Frankes’ home in 2022. Neighbors and the Frankes’ eldest daughter, now in college at BYU, often called authorities to check on the family’s children since they were often left alone without supervision, but no concrete action was taken until a year later.
In August of 2023, Franke’s twelve-year-old son burst from Hildebrandt’s house through an open window, emaciated and with open wounds and duct tape remaining on his wrists and ankles, and ran to a neighboring house to ask for food and water. When emergency services were called by the concerned neighbors, they also found her ten-year-old daughter in the house, malnourished and emaciated. The children were taken to a hospital to receive care and nourishment immediately.
After searching the house and finding evidence of long-standing neglect and abuse, the boy and girl as well as two more of Franke’s children were taken into the care of the Utah Division of Child and Family services. Soon after, Franke and Hildebrandt were arrested in Ivins, Utah, and prosecutors charged each with six counts of felony aggravated child abuse of two of Franke’s children. Later, Franke’s eldest daughter would claim that while Franke had always physically neglected her children, the torture turned psychological after Hildebrandt was introduced to their lives. Ultimately, Franke pled guilty to four counts and not guilty to the other two counts and was sentenced to serve between four and thirty years in prison on February 20, 2024. While Franke was expected to testify against Hildebrandt in her trial, Hildebrandt ultimately also pled guilty to four counts of felony aggravated child abuse with the other two counts dropped due to a plea deal, and she was sentenced to four consecutive sentences of between one and fifteen years behind bars. Though, according to her sentence, Hildebrandt could serve up to sixty years for her crimes, the Utah Code maintains that inmates serving consecutive sentences may not be imprisoned for over thirty years unless they were given life imprisonment or the death penalty, so her exact term is up to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to determine
Following the discovery of Franke’s mistreatment of her children, YouTube banned Franke from the platform and deleted two channels attributed to her. Kevin Franke, the father of Franke’s children, sued Hildebrandt over the abuse of his children, and he is currently seeking custody of their four children. The story of the Franke family has since been portrayed in several movies, memoirs, and docuseries, including a memoir written by Franke’s eldest daughter, Shari, detailing the fear and uncertainty she experienced while growing up. Shari has also spoken to the Utah state legislature about the dangers of family vlogging and the negative impact it can have on young children who are too young to consent to being in such videos, hoping to prevent other children from being abused and mistreated like her siblings were.
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