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Shari Franke, the eldest daughter of disgraced Utah parenting blogger Ruby Franke, shares the disturbing details of her mother’s downfall, including their last conversation together, in her new memoir.
Ruby, a mother of six and creator of the once-successful 8 Passengers YouTube channel, and her friend Jodi Hildebrandt, a mother of two, together ran a joint parenting and lifestyle YouTube channel called ConneXions Classrooms. In February, both were sentenced on charges of six counts each of second-degree aggravated child abuse inflicted upon two of Ruby’s’ children.
In her memoir, “The House of My Mother,” officially released on Tuesday, 21-year-old Shari recalls the last conversation she had with her mother not long before her arrest. At the time, rumors of her mother’s abuse had begun circulating on social media, and Shari took to Instagram to speak out publicly about the online discussions about her family life.
“I know that there are many rumors circulating online about my family. While it is true I am not in contact with my immediate family, and don’t support the extreme beliefs of ConneXions, please remember that this is my real family,” Shari wrote in part on her Instagram story.
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Ruby and Shari had one brief and contentious interaction before Ruby was arrested. Ruby had seen Shari’s Instagram story and asked her, “Can you promise not to talk about this any more on social media?”
“No,” Shari responded — that being the last word she spoke to Ruby before her arrest, as she recalls in her memoir.
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For years, Ruby had been obsessed with maintaining a perfect family image online as part of her 8 Passengers YouTube channel, which generated the majority of the family’s income. Her videos shared an intimate view of her family’s life and had more than 2.5 million subscribers before her downfall.
The popularity began to dwindle, however, after her eldest son admitted nonchalantly in one of the videos she posted to her account that he had been sleeping on a beanbag for seven months as punishment for his behavior.
“That one video burned down the 8 Passengers’ YouTube channel overnight and cost our family 90 percent of our income.”
“Hundreds of thousands unsubscribed, and brands, once eager to associate with our wholesome family image, couldn’t distance themselves fast enough,” Shari wrote in the book.
Hildebrandt entered Ruby’s life after 8 Passengers fell, and the two pals decided to create their own parenting channel called ConneXions Classrooms together.
In one ConneXions Classroom episode, Ruby tells her viewers, “If your child comes to you on fire, you don’t pat them on the head and say, ‘It’s okay, I’ll help you.’ No, you beat them, and you kick them, and you hit them with a rod. You cannot put welts on your child’s legs and then lovingly apply gauze and expect healing,'” according to the memoir.
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Hildebrandt soon became a central point of the Franke family’s lives, even moving in with the family of eight after Shari left for college and Ruby offered Hildebrandt her daughter’s room. Shari described Hildebrandt and her inner circle as a “cult.”
Shari describes the bizarre relationship that quickly unfolded between the two women in her book, recalling how Hildebrandt encouraged Ruby and her husband, Kevin, to distance themselves from each other while Hildebrandt eventually convinced Ruby to share a bed — her daughter’s bed — while Kevin slept in the master bedroom alone.
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Hildebrandt would suffer from delusions and visions while staying with the Frankes, and Ruby and Kevin would aid her through them, according to Shari’s memoir.
“Jodi and Ruby hunkered down in their upstairs sanctuary, rarely leaving except for occasional ice cream pilgrimages to Dairy Queen.”
“Their dietary habits were a cardiologist’s nightmare—a steady stream of sugar, saturated fat, and fried foods, liberally garnished with Jodi’s sole contribution to our household: gallons of ranch dressing,” Shari wrote.
Ruby and Franke also went on shopping trips to Mexico and would come home with bags of pills that Ruby claimed was a plan to “stockpile antibiotics for the end of days,” the book states.
Ruby’s followers were further outraged when she posted a video about punishing her two youngest children for what she described as selfish behavior by withholding gifts from them on Christmas morning while her older siblings were allowed to open presents. She and Hildebrandt, who was present for the Christmas charade, then made the two youngest clean up the torn wrapping paper.
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“As they wordlessly gathered the debris, Jodi launched into a sermon, her face glowing with self-satisfaction. ‘Children are not entitled to magical childhoods,’ she cooed, each word dripping with poisonous sweetness. ‘You can’t just expect love and presents. Many have nothing at all,'” Shari recalled.
Shari described coming home from college for the holiday that year and recalled her brother’s greeting at their front door: “Hey sis. Welcome to Hell.”
Utah authorities eventually arrested Ruby and Hildebrandt for abusing Franke’s two youngest children, a 9-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy, after Shari’s yearslong efforts to get the Department of Family and Child Services to take action against her mother. Some of the abuse occurred in Hildebrandt’s multimillion-dollar home in Ivins, Utah.
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The allegations against Franke and Hildebrandt only came to light after Franke’s son fled Hildebrandt’s Ivins home and ran to a neighbor, who called 911 after seeing the malnourished boy with duct tape on his wrists and ankles.
Franke and Hildebrandt were both sentenced to serve four consecutive terms between a maximum of 60 years in prison and a minimum of 30.
While prosecutors described the physical abuse inflicted on Ruby’s youngest children by Ruby and Hildebrandt, much of Shari’s memoir focuses on her mother’s intense psychological abuse stemming from Hildebrandt’s extreme online teachings and apocalyptic religious views. Ruby and Hildebrandt subjected Ruby’s children to Hildebrandt’s expensive and mind-bending “therapy” sessions and relentlessly over-analyzed every statement Shari made, whether said aloud or texted to either woman.
Ruby Franke spoke publicly for the first time at her sentencing hearing last year.
“For the past four years, I’ve chosen to follow counsel and guidance that has led me into a dark delusion,” a teary Franke said in a statement at the time. “My distorted version of reality went largely unchecked as I would isolate from anyone who challenged me. I was led to believe this world was an evil place, filled with cops who control, hospitals that injure, government agencies that brainwash, church leaders who lie and lust, husbands who refuse to protect, children who need abuse.”
“To my babies, my six little chicks, you are part of me,” she continued. “I was the momma duck who was consistently waddling you to safety. … In the past four years, I was consistently leading you to danger.”
“I was so disoriented that I believed dark was light and right was wrong.”
Shari remembers hearing her mother’s court statement in her memoir and the thoughts that went through her mind, saying “not once” did Ruby “acknowledge having been anything less than mother of the year before Jodi” entered their family’s lives.
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“There would be no apology for the years of torment and exploitation that preceded Jodi,” Shari wrote. “Listening to her hollow words, I wondered if, in her narcissistic mind, Ruby would ever fully comprehend the gravity of her actions or experience genuine remorse.”
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In dozens of YouTube videos and social media posts, Franke and Hildebrandt coached parents in calm voices from a living room couch on how to raise their children in “truth.” In a video posted just before their arrests, Hildebrandt said pain can be a good thing for children of a certain age.
The case has prompted discussions about how parenting and lifestyle blogs often present only a sliver of a person’s or family’s reality, as well as children’s rights to their own privacy if their parent is a social media star.
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