Ruby Franke 8 Passengers Mommy YouTuber pleads guilty to 4 counts of child abuse as court documents describe series of tortures and mistreatments in a bid to ‘redeem her evil and possessed’ youngest two children.
A distorted sense of morality. A YouTuber mom who came to prominence offering parenting advice has admitted to abusing her pre-teen children who she claimed were, ‘evil and possessed.’
Ruby Franke, a Utah member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, shared her family life on a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers. Though the Frankes — Ruby, husband Kevin, and their six children — reached more than two million subscribers, their videos attracted controversy due to Ruby’s ‘harsh treatment’ of her two youngest kids.
Legal documents allege Ruby, 41, inflicting ‘physical torture’ on her 12 year old son Russell and ‘severe emotional harm’ on her 9 year old daughter Eve. Among other punishments, Franke made her children perform hours of hard labor, forced them to sleep outside, along with withholding food and water for days at a time.
Warped moral codes
In one instance the vlogger mom admitted to binding the feet of her son when he tried to escape, according to court documents cited by the nypost.
‘Many times, the binding included two sets of handcuffs, one on [the child’s] wrists and one on his ankles,’ according to court documents.
During the summer, Franke made the 12 year old boy work in the heat without enough water until he had ‘repeated and serious sunburns,’ court documents stated.
Franke would only treat the boy’s wounds with ‘homeopathic remedies and covered with duct tape.’
In other misdeeds, the mom admitted kicking her son while wearing boots, holding his head underwater along with cutting off his oxygen by placing her hands over his mouth according to court documents.
The disgraced ‘8 Passengers’ host also abused her 9-year-old daughter, forcing her to complete physical tasks and denying her food and water.
‘Acts of love’
The matriarch defended her punishments by claiming that her children were possessed by evil forces and in need of repentance.
Franke told her two children that the torture they endured were ‘acts of love,’ and that they were both ‘evil and possessed.’
As Franke’s misdeeds became public, a Change.org petition called for a public investigation into the Utah mom’s behavior. On August 31, 2023, the mommy vlogger and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt were arrested on child abuse charges.
The pair’s arrest followed Franke’s 12-year-old ’emaciated’ son escaping from Hildebrandt’s house in the southern Utah city of Ivins. At the time of his escape, the boy asked a neighbor to call police, according to the 911 call released by the St George police department.
8 Passengers show also came under scrutiny
But it wasn’t just the parenting of the two youngest that came under scrutiny — but the overall 8 Passengers show itself.
Controversy also surrounded parenting decisions including Kevin and Ruby Frankie banning their oldest son from his bedroom for seven months for pranking his younger brother. In other videos, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to take lunch to a kindergartener who forgot it at home and threatening to cut the head off a young girl’s stuffed toy to punish her for cutting things in the house.
In one video, Franke said she and her husband told their two youngest children that they would not be getting presents from Santa Claus one year because they had been selfish and weren’t responding to punishment like being kept home from school and cleaning the floorboards.
The 8 Passengers channel which launched in 2015 and ran for 7 years has since been deleted, with husband, Kevin Franke filing for divorce.
Franke initially faced six counts of child abuse, but two of those charges were dropped as part of her plea deal. She agreed to testify against Hildebrandt, who she alleges ‘took advantage’ of her and led her to develop ‘a distorted sense of morality.’
As part of her plea agreement, Franke agreed to serve prison time with the sentences running consecutively. Each charge carries a sentence of one to 15 years in prison.
The disgraced mommy vlogger will be back in court for sentencing on Feb. 20.
Franke despite admitting her abuse maintains she is a ‘devoted’ mother.
