Parenting advice YouTuber Ruby Franke has been charged with aggravated child abuse against two of her six children. Photo / Instagram / LinkedIn
Parenting advice YouTuber Ruby Franke has been charged with aggravated child abuse against two of her six children. Photo / Instagram / LinkedIn
The daughter of a parenting advice YouTuber Ruby Franke who has been charged with child abuse, is calling for help from the public in collecting evidence against her mother.
United States-based Ruby Franke, who gave online parenting advice via a once-popular YouTube channel, was charged on Friday with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse after two of her six children were found abused and malnourished, authorities said.
Her eldest daughter Shari Franke, 20, who’s now estranged from her mother, has broken her silence in a bid to collect evidence.
Shari Franke, and her mum parenting advice YouTuber Ruby Franke, who has been charged with aggravated child abuse against two of her six children. Photos / Instagram / LinkedIn
Shari asked viewers of the now-defunct YouTube channel 8 Passengers to collate evidence from previous videos posted online.
Shari shared a link on her Instagram stories to a Google document for supporters to add video evidence to.
SK Pop reported that within a few hours, the document was filled with more than 40 links from fans scouring the internet.
In another Instagram story, Shari said, ”We’ve been trying to tell the police and CPS for years about this, and [I’m] so glad they finally decided to step up.”
Ruby Franke, who chronicled her family life on the 8 Passengers channel, was arrested on Wednesday night in the southern Utah city of Ivins. She was taken into custody at the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, who owns a counselling business that she says teaches people to improve their lives by being honest, responsible and humble. Hildebrandt was also arrested on Wednesday and faces the same abuse charges.
Franke appears in YouTube videos with Hildebrandt that were posted online by Hildebrandt’s counseling business, ConneXions Classroom.
Prosecutors allege Franke and Hildebrandt either caused or allowed someone to torture Franke’s 12-year-old son and injure her 10-year-old daughter. Both children were starved and harmed emotionally, prosecutors said.
Ruby Franke (left), who ran the 8 Passengers YouTube channel, was arrested along with her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt. Photo / Tiktok / utahvloggersyas
Both women are being held without the possibility of posting bail, court records said.
On Wednesday morning, Franke’s son climbed out of a window in Hildebrandt’s residence and ran to a neighbour’s house asking for food and water, according to an affidavit filed by an officer with the Santa Clara-Ivins Public Safety Department.
The neighbour saw duct tape on the boy’s ankles and wrists and called law enforcement, the affidavit said. The boy was taken to a hospital, where he was put on a medical hold “due to his deep lacerations from being tied up with rope and from his malnourishment”, arrest records state.
Franke’s daughter was later found malnourished in Hildebrandt’s house and was also taken to the hospital, officers said. Two of Franke’s other children were placed in the custody of child protection services, the affidavit said.
The Franke family was criticised online for its 8 Passengers video blog, which showed parenting decisions including banning their oldest son from his bedroom for seven months for pranking his younger brother, and also sending him to a wilderness therapy camp for undisclosed reasons. In other videos, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to take lunch to a kindergartener who had forgotten it at home, threatening to cut the head off a young girl’s stuffed toy to punish her for cutting things in the house.
Four minor children were taken into the care of Child and Family Services following the investigation, and two were rushed to hospital. Photo / Instagram / abbeyfranke_8passengers
In one video, Franke said she and her husband told their two youngest children they would not be getting presents from Santa Claus one year because they had been selfish and weren’t responding to punishments like being kept home from school and cleaning the floorboards.
“It’s because they’re so numb, and the more numb your child is, the bigger the outcome they need to wake them up,” Franke said in a video.
Some critics started an online petition asking child protective services to get involved. The Frankes’ oldest daughter cut ties with her parents, she has said in social media posts.
The YouTube channel, which started in 2015, ended after seven years.
After her arrest, Franke requested an attorney and did not speak with officers, the affidavit said. That attorney had not publicly been identified as of Thursday.
A voicemail left at a phone listing for Ruby Franke’s husband seeking comment on the arrest was referred to his attorney, Randy S. Kester. Kester said he was representing Kevin Franke’s interests in keeping his children together and in his care, and that he could not comment on Ruby Franke’s arrest.
Voicemails left with Hildebrandt’s counseling business seeking comment on Thursday and Friday were not returned.
While the children were found at Hildebrandt’s house, Franke had been seen on a YouTube video filmed at Hildebrandt’s house and posted two days earlier, indicating Franke was present at the residence and had knowledge of the abuse, malnourishment and neglect, arrest records said.
