Ruby Franke’s Journal: The Momfluencer Who Called Abuse Righteous

In this episode of GBRLIFE Transmissions: Of Crimes, we examine the case of Ruby Franke, the former momfluencer behind 8 Passengers, and the journal that revealed how she justified abusing her own children.

After her 12-year-old son escaped from Jodi Hildebrandt’s home asking for water and help, investigators uncovered starvation, isolation, forced labor, and a belief system that framed cruelty as righteousness.

This episode looks at Ruby’s rise, her connection to Jodi Hildebrandt, family vlogging, coercive control, moral disengagement, and what happens when the image of the perfect family matters more than the children inside it.

This is the story of how motherhood became a brand, and how the script kept running after the cameras stopped.

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Transcript

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A journal sits in an evidence room in Washington County, Utah. The handwriting is neat, steady. It's the handwriting of a woman who once filmed. Herself baking bread for two and a half million people. Inside that journal, a mother documents day to day in her own words, the starvation of her children, the forced labor in desert heat, the withheld water, the shaved head, the hand pressed over a small boy's mouth and nose, She does not write like a woman hiding something. She writes like a woman keeping a record of her righteousness. Last week, we told you about the architect, the one who built the system. This week, we're going inside the journal, inside the house, and inside the mind of the mother who held the pen. Her name? Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them. Today, we're examining the case of Ruby Franke, the momfluencer behind the Eight Passengers YouTube channel, the mother of six who turned her family into a brand and then turned two of her own children over to a belief system that nearly killed them. If you listened to last week's episode on Jodi Hildebrandt, you already know the shape of this case. You already know about the counseling empire built on truth versus distortion. You know about the 12-year-old boy who climbed out the window in Ivins, Utah on August 30, 2023, emaciated, with rope wounds on his wrists and ankles, and in such bad shape he asked a neighbor for water. But there's a question that episode could not fully answer, because it was not about the person who could answer it. Jodi Hildebrandt needed a follower. She needed someone with children, with a platform, with an audience, and with a hunger for. For certainty. Certainty so deep that she would hand over her own family to get it. And the question this episode asks is the one that keeps parents up at night after they read about this case. How does a mother watch her own children starve, beg, and bleed, and simply write in her journal that she is saving them? Not a stranger, not a monster from nowhere, a mother. Their mother. That's the question we are sitting with today. Because Ruby Franke was not born in Jodi Hildebrand's house. She walked there, and the road she walked is longer, more ordinary, and more uncomfortable than most people want to admit. Ruby Griffiths was born on January 18, 1982, the oldest of five children in a devout Latter-day Saint family in Utah. Her parents, Chad and Jennifer Griffiths, raised their children inside a faith and culture where family was not just important, family was the entire point, the eternal unit, the measure of a woman's life, and Ruby was the firstborn. If you know anything about firstborn daughters in large, high-expectation religious families, you will already know part of the story. The oldest daughter is the prototype. She's the second mother, the standard setter, the one whose behavior tells the community what kind of family this really is. Ruby grew up performing family before there was ever a camera in the room, and nearly her entire family would eventually become vloggers. Her parents launched a YouTube channel of their own. Three of her sisters, Ellie, Bonnie, and Julie, all became family influencers with their own audiences. One family, four daughters, four family content channels. This did not happen by coincidence. That happens when a family system has at its core an unspoken rule. The image of the family is a product. The appearance of harmony is the achievement. And what things look like is what things are. Ruby did not invent that rule. She inherited it. Her daughter, Shari, in her memoir, The House of My Mother, traces her mother's behavior back to that upbringing. The perfectionism, the belief that motherhood was the only path to a meaningful life. The conviction that a woman's worth is measured by the visible righteousness of her household. In 2000, at 18 years old, Ruby met... Kevin Franke at Utah State University. He was 22 years old and an engineering student from a more relaxed LDS family, and they were engaged within two weeks. They married three months after meeting. Ruby dropped out of college. By her early 20s, she was doing exactly what she had been raised to do. Shari was born in 2003. Chad in 2005. Four more children followed. Six kids, a returned missionary husband with a good career ahead of him, and a home in Utah. By every metric her culture had ever given her, Ruby Franke had won. This was her lottery, and she was the most successful person around. And according to her oldest daughter, the hitting already started. Shari writes that long before YouTube, long before Jodi, her mother slapped her for small mistakes, especially at the piano. One hint of displeasure on a child's face was enough to trigger it. The perfect family was already being enforced. At this point, it just wasn't being filmed yet. Two psychological frameworks explain what was forming in Ruby Griffiths long before she became Ruby Franke, and both of them matter for everything that comes later. The first is what psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett call socially prescribed perfectionism. This one is the perfection of a person who believes that other people. Her family, her community, her God, require perfection from her, and that falling short means losing love, standing, and worth. Socially prescribed perfectionism is the most dangerous form of perfectionism, at least in the clinical literature. It's associated with rigidity, shame, hostility under stress, and an inability to tolerate imperfection in oneself or others. A socially prescribed perfectionist who becomes a parent does not experience her children as separate people. They're evidence. And their behavior is her report card. Their visible obedience is her righteousness. Their defiance is her failure. And it's displayed in public. And that second framework ties very closely. And it's what developmental psychologist James Marcia called identity foreclosure. Identity foreclosure is what happens when a young person commits to identity or a role or a belief system, maybe even a life path, without ever going through a period of genuine exploration or questioning. The identity is handed to them, usually by family or culture, and they accept it as whole. Ruby was engaged at 18 after two weeks, married three months later, out of college, into motherhood. The entire architecture of her adult life was locked in before her prefrontal cortex finished developing. Foreclosed identities look stable. They often look impressive even, but they're brittle because they were never tested. The person has no practiced ability to sit with doubt, to question authority, or to rebuild themselves when the script fails because it will inevitably fail. And when a foreclosed identity starts to crack, when the marriage strains, when the children rebel, or the image stops holding, the person does not typically loosen their grip. Instead, they'll look for someone who will tell them that their script was right all along. And that they simply have not been following it hard enough. And in about 15 years of story time, a woman named Jodi Hildebrand is going to say exactly that to Ruby Franke. And Ruby is going to hand her everything. In early 2015, Ruby Franke started a YouTube channel called Eight Passengers. It featured herself, Kevin, and their six children. Eight passengers in the family car. Five days a week, every week, having been filmed, edited, published, while raising six children. That's insane. The channel grew into a phenomenon. And by 2020, eight passengers had roughly 2.5 million subscribers and over a billion views of one family's private life. Ruby was not selling entertainment, although it does seem that way. But remember, she was selling the thing that she was raised to produce, the image of the righteous household, homemade bread, well-behaved children, and a mother in control. Viewers praised her discipline, and they came to her for parenting advice. And the discipline, well, that was the content. That was the mechanism that people miss when they talk about this case. Ruby's harsh parenting was not hidden behind the channel. It was on the channel. It was the value proposition. Millions of people watched her punish her kids and called it refreshing. And Shari would later write in her memoir that her mother directed the children like a producer, telling them when to smile. And that no moment was too mundane to escape the camera. Shari describes the constant surveillance of her own puberty as excruciating. She also admits, with visible guilt, that at 14, she started her own channel and followed the exact blueprint because that was the family business that she had been raised inside of, and the money was real. The brand deals were real, and Ruby, by her daughter's account, grew visibly happier every time the numbers went up, telling her children that God had given her this platform. She really thought that God had given her this platform. The audience was not just an audience anymore. It became a divine assignment. The performance of the perfect family was now literally sacred work. Then in 2020, the cracks went public. Viewers learned that Ruby's 15-year-old son had been banned from his bedroom and made to sleep on a beanbag in the basement for seven months. In another video, Ruby refused to bring lunch to her six-year-old daughter, who had gone to school without one, saying the girl needed to learn responsibility. And there was a wilderness camp for struggling children. The Christmas presents withheld from the two youngest because they were, in Ruby's words, too numb to respond to other punishments. And then a Change.org petition accused her of abuse. Child welfare was contacted. The Franks posted a defense saying everything had been taken out of context and the channel began to decline in 2021. The audience that had been built was now starting to turn on her. Maybe that was her message from God. Either way, a socially prescribed perfectionist with a foreclosed identity. Was now watching her life's visible proof of righteousness collapse in public. And her marriage was really strained at this point. Her oldest children were pulling away, and her report card with 2.5 million witnesses, it all said F. She was failing, but she did not question the script. Instead, she went looking for someone who would tell her to grip it harder. Exactly what she was looking for. In 2021, the Franks began marriage counseling with a licensed counselor, at least at the time, named Jodi Hildebrandt, the founder of a program called Connexions. You know from last week what the program actually was. A closed ideological system dressed in therapeutic language. And it was run by a woman who had already lost her license to probation once and who diagnosed people who had invented conditions like lust addiction and, as she liked to call it, distortion. Ruby did not just attend Connexions. She ascended in it. By 2022, she was working as a mental health coach under Hildebrandt. Her YouTube channel was gone, and in its place came a new joint channel called Connexians. And an Instagram account called Moms of Truth, where two women with no functioning families left between them sold parenting and its certainty, at least their method of parenting certainty, to strangers. Hildebrandt told the couple to separate. So they did. Kevin moved out in 2022 and was instructed to cut off contact with his own family. He was told, and for a devastating stretch of time, he believed. That he was the problem. Former male Connexion's clients would later say the program treated men indiscriminately as addicts and predators. Ruby's own family saw the change. Her sisters would later say they hated what she brought to family gatherings and came close to banning Connexion's talk outright. Her parents wrote that starting in the summer of 2020, their daughter became unrecognizable, accusing them of things that never happened. In a letter to the court, they used a that should stop you cold coming from a mother about her own child, brainwashed. Ruby cut her parents off. She disowned Shari. She pushed Kevin out. One by one, every person who had known her before Jodi was removed. And by late 2022, Ruby Franke had moved with her two youngest children into Jodi Hildebrand's home in Ivins, Utah. The isolation was complete. The system was sealed. And inside that system, two children who now had full-blown abuse with no one helping them. The starvation, forced labor in triple-digit heat, rope tied around them. Wounds dressed in cayenne pepper and honey. The nine-year-old girl forced to jump into a cactus multiple times. No food, no water. In Ruby's own journal, she writes about her 12-year-old son. Refusing to stand in the sun outside with no shoes on. In triple-digit heat, as I stated, she writes that his demon is staying in the shade. She describes punishing him by pushing him into the sun and poking him with a cactus stem and interpreting his lack of reaction as a trance. She writes about refusing to give food because she will not feed his demon and she describes her children as weak-minded and manipulative. She records shaving her daughter's head so that she can't distract herself with her hair and cutting more off after the child dared to expect that a two-day fast might end. She writes about holding her hand tightly over her son's nose and mouth after his head was pushed into water, but she frames it as help. In her telling, the devil was lying to the boy by making him believe that she was hurting him. What she was really doing, she insists on the page. Was giving him oxygen, helping him breathe. She writes that stripping a child's world down to beans, rice, and hard work would be considered abuse, but then immediately answers her own thought. It is not abuse, she writes. She wrote, it's necessary for the prideful child. Ruby Franke knew exactly what the world would call what she was doing. She named it herself in her writing, even if she overrode it with doctrine. That is not a woman who could not see. That's a woman who saw and had been given a machine for unseeing by choice. So on the night that her son ran away at one in the morning from the patio where he had been made to sleep, he left a message spelled out in pebbles saying he would call from jail. He was a boy trying to get arrested because jail meant air conditioning and air conditioning meant relief. His mother found him on an unfamiliar road, brought him back, and wrote in her journal that the devil wanted her in prison and her children dead. Every cry for water was a manipulative ploy. Every escaped attempt was Satan's strategy. Every visible injury was a lie the devil was telling. The journal was the complete record of a mother's lack of empathy being systematically rerouted. The signals were still coming in. Hunger, screaming, wounds, a child begging for a different family. She recorded all of it, and every single signal was captured by the framework and converted into evidence as a need for more punishment. The children were not hurt by a woman who felt nothing. The children were hurt by a woman who felt everything and had been taught that her feelings were the distortion. And that is what Jodi did to Ruby and what Ruby brought back to her children, torture. On the morning of August 30th, 2023, Ruby's 12-year-old son climbed out of a window of Jodi Hildebrand's house and knocked on a neighbor's door. He asked for water. And then, with so much bravery, he asked for someone to call the police. The neighbors saw the duct tape, the wounds, the bones showing through the boy's skin. So he immediately made the 911 call. And everything that had been sealed inside that house for a year came pouring out. Officers found the nine-year-old girl still inside, severely malnourished. Body camera footage released later shows police gently asking her to come out of the closet. She was described as petrified. Both women were arrested that day. Ruby was held without bail because of the severity of the children's injuries. Four of the Franke children went into the care of the Division of Child and Family Services. And then came a piece of evidence that tells you where Ruby's mind actually was. 24 hours after her whole world ended, in a recorded call with Kevin the day after her arrest, Ruby called the case a witch hunt. She said the devil had been after her for years. She said the abuse had been exaggerated. And she said something that deserves to be quoted in every psychological classroom in the country. Because it's a closed belief system speaking in its own pure voice. She told her husband that adults have a hard time understanding that children can be full of evil and what it takes to fight it. Her son had just escaped starvation and rope restraints. Her daughter had just been carried out of a closet, malnourished. And Ruby Franke's explanation to the father of those children was that the world simply did not understand the war that she had been fighting. And two months later from jail, she sent her estranged parents a postcard. In it, by their account, she offered a tender apology and described her arrest as a mighty wake-up call, a huge blessing. Even her gratitude arrived in the language of doctrine. Even the handcuffs became part of God's plan. Like Hildebrandt, Ruby never went to trial. On December 18, 2023, she pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse, with two counts dropped in the agreement. She agreed to testify against Hildebrand if needed, and prosecutors agreed to remain neutral at her future parole hearings. Her attorneys made their theory of the case explicit. Jodi Hildebrand, they argued, had distorted Ruby's sense of morality and influenced her into abuse. But remember, that abuse started before Jodi entered her life. Either way, nine days later, Hildebrand entered her own plea, and on February 20th, 2024, both women stood before the judge for sentencing. A judge in that moment who would call it one of the worst child abuse cases his office had ever seen. And then he made a sharp line between the two defendants, between Jodi and Judy. And a line that mattered. With Hildebrandt, he said, she had shown little to no remorse, repeatedly casting herself as the victim and the children as the perpetrators. He called her a significant threat to the community. But with Ruby in his assessment appearing willing to accept responsibility when it was her turn to speak, he noted her change and her difference in her emotional capacity to understand what had been done. And in that moment, Ruby had told the court that her charges were just, that they offered safety to her family and accountability to the public. The judge sentenced both women identically. Four consecutive terms of 1 to 15 years, the maximum available, capped at 30 years total under Utah law, with a minimum of four years before parole eligibility. Both women are serving their sentences at the Utah Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, housed in separate sections away from each other. Their first paroles are scheduled for December of 2026. Before those hearings, the board has ordered both women to complete cognitive behavioral therapy and a full mental health evaluation. Sometime around January 2027, The board will either set a release date, schedule another hearing, or order them to serve the full 30 years. That decision is now less than six months away. So now we return to the question this episode opened with. How does a mother do this? No formal forensic evaluation of Ruby Franke has been released, and no diagnosis was entered into the record. So what we have is a behavioral profile. But her profile is unusually rich. Because almost no offender in modern true crime has documented her own psychology this thoroughly. There are years of video, a handwritten journal, recorded calls, and her daughter has a memoir. And the picture that emerges is not the picture of a sadist. It's the picture of a textbook case of what psychologist Albert Bandura calls moral disengagement. Bandura spent decades studying how ordinary people commit extraordinary cruelty, and he identified the specific cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. And Ruby's journal reads like a demonstration of nearly all of them. Moral justification, because the abuse was not abuse. It was repentance, salvation, spiritual warfare, the highest possible moral framing wrapped around the lowest possible act, euphemistic labeling, starvation became fasting, Torture became correction. Suffocation was giving her son oxygen. The language did not describe the acts. The language replaced them. Dehumanization, the most dangerous mechanism of all. Ruby's journal stops referring to her son as her son. It refers to his demon. Once the body is redefined as a vessel for something evil, harming the body is reframed as rescuing the soul. Bandura found that dehumanization is the single strongest predictor of escalating cruelty because it removes the final break, recognition. And then there's displacement of responsibility. God required it. Jodi confirmed it. Ruby was only the instrument. And underneath all of it, the engine from her child was still running. The socially prescribed perfectionism that could not tolerate a failing child because a failing child meant a failing mother. The foreclosed identity that had no capacity to question the script, only to escalate it. And there's one more dynamic that has to be named, and it's the relationship itself. Older psychiatric literature called it the madness of two. Modern clinicians described it as a shared delusional dynamic inside an isolated high-control relationship, a dominant partnership with a fixed belief system, a dependent partner in crisis, stripped of outside contact, who gradually adopts the dominant partner's reality as her own. Every element was present. Ruby came to Jodi with her identity collapsing. Jodi supplied absolute certainty. The relationship deepened, and by Shari's account, into romantic and physical territory that both women publicly condemned in others, and the isolation was total. Husband removed, parents cut off, sisters alienated, oldest children disowned. By the summer of 2023, the only voice left in Ruby Franke's world was the voice that told her. That the children were possessed. Her parents said that she was so deeply brainwashed that they could not recognize her. Her attorneys built her defense on distorted morality. And the Netflix documentary released in December of 2025 include prison recordings showing Ruby beginning to distance herself from Hildebrandt. And the filmmaker suspects the separation is partly genuine, but also partly self-preservation ahead of parole. But here's where we have to be careful, because there's a version of this story that lets Ruby off the hook, and the evidence does not support it. Shari's memoir is unambiguous at this point. Ruby was hitting her children before Jodie Hildebrandt ever entered their lives, as I stated before. The cruelty was not installed by Connexians. The perfectionism, the conditional love, the rage at imperfect children, all of it predated Jodie by more than a decade. What Jodie supplied was the permission structure, the theology that took a punishing mother and told her that punishment was holy the framework that took every flicker of guilt. And reclassified it as distortion. Ruby Franke was not made by Jodi Hildebrandt. Jodi completed her. Which brings us to the other issue in the room, the camera. For eight years, a billion views worth of people watched Ruby Franke Parent. The withheld Christmas was public. Viewers raised alarms as early as 2020. There was a petition. Authorities were contacted. Neighbors and Shari herself called for welfare checks. The system had years of warning. And Kevin himself told the Utah lawmakers exactly how easy it is to defeat the entire system. All you have to do is keep the children isolated and ignore the caseworker calls. Don't answer the door. That was basically it. And it worked until a 12-year-old climbed out a window. All while the family was vlogging in this horrible industry with children. Unpaid employees of a business built on their most vulnerable moments. Shari has written about the guilt of having exploited her own siblings for views. Because exploitation was the family's blueprint. She has since fought for legislation in Utah to protect child influencers. And refused all profit framed on her family's story. And told the world she wanted her memoir to be the last word so that she could take back her privacy. The children of eight passengers are the first generation to grow up as content. The law is only now catching up to what it has done to them. Ruby Franke had every warning system a person can have. Parents who saw the change. Sisters who dreaded her new teachings. A daughter who looked into her eyes. After a welfare call and told her that she never hated her. She had only ever been afraid of her. A husband, a community, two and a half million strangers, some of whom were begging someone to intervene. Every one of those voices were outside the system, and the system's first function was to discredit outside voices. And that's the lesson that you should take from this. Coercive control does not hurt its victims. It converts its recruits. And the recruits, most at risk, are not weak or foolish. They are certain. They are the ones raised to believe doubt is dangerous. The image is worth everything. And somewhere there exists a script which, if followed perfectly, guarantees a righteous life. At least that's what was said. Ruby spent 40 years looking for that script. Jodi handed it to her. And two children nearly died because their mother followed it to the letter. Today, Kevin has full custody of the four youngest children. Ruby and Kevin are fully divorced as of March 2025, and he remarried in December of that year. Shari is engaged, published, and by her own account, genuinely healing. The younger children are growing up away from every camera, and Ruby sits in her cell, reportedly taking college courses, but also reportedly crying the days away in letters that no one answers, and waiting for this hearing in December. Remember, the board will be asking whether she's still dangerous, but we should all be asking a different question. Whether the woman in that cell has finally met her own children, not the demons she invented, not the content she produced, the children. Because until she does, that script is still running. Okay. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions, and I'm your host, Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind. Hey, it's Kaitlyn, and if you stayed this long, a big thank you. And if you could do one more thing and like and subscribe every time you listen to GBRLIFE Transmissions, That would mean the world, and it would really help GBRLIFE transmissions grow. Also, don't forget to check out the reviews, blogs, and so much more on gbrlife.com. Can't wait to see you there!