YouTuber Ruby Franke sentenced to prison for child abuse, Jodi Hildebrandt, who had worked with Ms. Franke, received the same sentence on Tuesday.
Ruby Franke, a mother from Utah who gained notoriety for posting videos of her rigorous upbringing on social media, was given a minimum four-year prison sentence on Tuesday for allegedly subjecting her kids to “physical torture.”
An emotional Franke, 42, stated that she is “willing to serve a prison sentence as long as it takes to unravel what I believed” during the sentencing hearing in Washington County, Utah. Franke then claimed that her business partner, former therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, had brainwashed her into assaulting her children. Franke was a frequent YouTuber, posting videos of her family, including her disciplining her kids.
“I have chosen to follow advice and guidance that have led me to a dark delusion for the past four years,” Franke stated.
Hildebrandt, 54, was given the same punishment on Tuesday. In December, she and Franke entered guilty pleas to four counts each of cruelty against children. The women will serve consecutive terms ranging from one to fifteen years in prison. According to Utah law, successive sentences cannot last longer than 30 years. The length of their sentences will be decided by the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole.
Requests for response on Tuesday night were not answered by the lawyers for Franke and Hildebrandt.
LaMar Winward, Franke’s lawyer, claimed in court that Hildebrandt had “indoctrinated” his client. Hildebrandt’s attorney, Douglas Terry, refuted the portrayal, stating that the former therapist “is not the person she has been portrayed to be.”
After Franke and Hildebrandt, who had collaborated on parenting and life-coaching social media videos, were detained and charged with child abuse, the cases gained widespread media attention and reverberated throughout Utah’s conservative religious circles, where the women were closely involved.
Following Franke’s 12-year-old son’s escape from a window at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah, the two women were initially charged in August with six counts of severe child abuse each. The boy, who looked “emaciated and malnourished,” fled to a neighbor’s house and begged for food and water, according to arrest records. Upon discovering “deep lacerations from being tied up with rope” and duct tape around the boy’s extremities, the responding cops searched Hildebrandt’s home. There, they discovered Franke’s daughter, age 10, in a comparable condition.
A few months later, the prosecution and Franke came to an agreement wherein two of the six counts against them would be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas. In accordance with the conditions of the agreement, the ladies acknowledged giving the kids treatment that prosecutors characterized as akin to “physical torture” and “severe emotional harm”; this included regularly depriving the kids of food, water, and bedding and keeping them apart from other people.
Court records state that Franke’s son’s head was once held underwater. Another involved forcing Franke’s daughter to constantly jump onto a cactus. In addition, the kids were made to labor and run in the intense heat of southern Utah while wearing no shoes, which led to sunburns, “scabs, blisters, and sloughing skin,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors wrote that the ladies informed the kids “these things were being done to [them] in order to help” them because they were “evil” and needed to “repent,” and they presented their treatment as acts of “love” to them. This information is included in the plea deal.
The mother of six, Franke, gained notoriety in the 2010s when she launched the “8 Passengers” YouTube channel, which highlighted her family’s life in Springville, Utah. The station had roughly 2.5 million viewers at its busiest.
However, worries were raised even before Franke was arrested, especially since her son Chad said in a 2020 video that he was punished by sleeping on a bean bag for months, as The Washington Post previously revealed. In a another video that received harsh criticism, Franke stated that her 6-year-old daughter should go without meals as she neglected to prepare her own lunch for school. Over 17,800 people signed a petition in 2020 requesting an investigation as a result of the incidents.
Franke defended her parenting approach to Business Insider following a visit from Utah child protective services, saying, “What people aren’t understanding is that we give our children choice in everything.” Our kids are learning how to be self-reliant.
Her YouTube channel had become less popular by 2021.
Franke started working with Hildebrandt’s online self-improvement program, “ConneXions,” in 2022. Hildebrandt developed the program in 2012. Participants berated the program in numerous evaluations, accusing it of encouraging seclusion and pushing people to break up relationships with family members or friends who don’t follow its principles. The two also started sharing content on their social media profile, “Moms of Truth,” and received similar backlash for their parenting suggestions.
Shortly after Franke and Hildebrandt were taken into custody, YouTube closed the ConneXions channel, as reported by Business Insider.
The Post previously revealed that following Franke’s arrest, the mother blogger’s eldest daughter expressed her happiness on Instagram, writing, “I’m so glad justice is being served.” The three parenting influencer sisters of Franke, Ellie Mecham, Bonnie Hoellein, and Julie Deru, wrote a statement together on their Instagram profiles stating that the arrests of Franke and Hildebrandt “needed to happen.”
At Tuesday’s sentencing, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke (R) concurred.
“Heaven only knows how much longer he could have survived in that situation if the older child had not had the courage to run away and ask a neighbor to call the police,” Clarke remarked.
Hildebrandt spoke in court shortly after Franke was sentenced, expressing her love for the children and her hope that they would recover “physically and emotionally.”
Judge John Walton, who oversaw both proceedings, cited Hildebrandt’s background as a licensed therapist in his ruling, stating that individuals with this kind of advanced education “are supposed to protect children.”
“In this instance, you didn’t do that,” he remarked. “In this instance, you scared the kids.”