Mommy Vlogger Getting Cancel Cultured Into Prison For Abusing Her 'Possessed' Children

Ruby Franke may serve up to 30 years.

Ruby Franke at sentencing

Former mommy vlogger Ruby Franke once said, in one of her many, many mommy vlogs, that she would never accept being “canceled,” and anyone who didn’t like the way she treated her children just hated “responsibility.”

Yesterday, a judge sentenced Franke, who pleaded guilty to four counts of child abuse this past December, to one to 15 years for each count, to be served consecutively. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole will determine the exact amount of time she will serve, though it will not be more than 30 years as that is the maximum allowed for consecutive sentences in the state.

Some might say that’s a little more than “canceled.”

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Ruby Franke, like many Mormon ladies in Utah, had a family YouTube vlog documenting every day of her life with her husband and six children and dispensing parenting advice. It was called “8 Passengers” and it was hugely popular among the kinds of people who watch family vlogs. How huge? Two and a half million followers huge.

Then, one day, she bragged in a video about how her daughter Eve’s kindergarten teacher texted her to tell her that she didn’t have any lunch, and could Ruby please come bring her one, whereupon Ruby informed the teacher that it was Eve’s responsibility to pack her own lunch, and if she didn’t have any she would just have to go hungry. Ruby added that she hoped no one gave her daughter anything to eat.

This got a lot of traction outside her usual audience of family vlogger fans, from people who didn’t think it’s actually great parenting to starve children.

Not long after that, she recorded a video with her son Chad who revealed that, a month after he came home from a “wilderness camp” for troubled teens (which sounds a lot like that horrifying one Paris Hilton was sent to), he played a silly prank on his little brother, waking him up and telling him to pack his things because they were all going to Disneyland. His punishment? He wasn’t allowed to have a bed for the next seven months and had to sleep on a bean bag.

Ruby laughed and laughed the entire time like what she did was real cute.

This didn’t go over well with viewers, and eventually someone started a Change.org petition to demand that the Utah Department of Child and Family Services do a welfare check. They started calling as well, and eventually they checked on the Frankes and, well, didn’t do jack shit. While they didn’t do anything, 90 percent of Franke’s sponsors on her YouTube channel did. They left.

It was at this point that Franke started portraying herself as a Good Conservative Mom who was being canceled by Bad Liberals Who Hate Responsibility.

“The reason we got canceled was because I was demonstrating, as I have done from day one, what a responsible mother looks like,” she said in a 2021 interview with The Wrap. “And it scared the living bejesus out of these kids who do not want to be held accountable. So that is the motive for the hate being thrown at me. I’m the antidote to their acting out, and they know it.”

Yeah, either that or they figured — correctly — that if this is what this woman thought was okay to put on camera, that whatever was happening off-camera was 10 times worse, or at least had the potential to get there.

Eventually she abandoned family vlogging in favor of family counseling and joined forces with Jodi Hildebrandt, who was also charged in connection with this case. No one heard much about her until Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped Hildebrandt’s home (where he was staying) and ran to a neighbor for help, emaciated and covered in wounds and duct tape.

Police arrested Franke, and not for the crime of being a responsible mother.

Via New York Times:

From May to August 2023, Ms. Franke, a mother of six, created a “concentration camp-like setting” for two of her children, who were 9 and 11 at the time, Eric Clarke, the Washington County attorney, said during the sentencing hearing. She regularly denied them adequate food, water, entertainment and beds, and isolated them from others, he said.

Ms. Franke, 42, also forced her children to do physical tasks in extreme heat, without shoes, socks or water, Mr. Clarke said. They were forced to stand on hot concrete in the summer heat for hours and sometimes days at a time, he added, and were beaten and regularly bound by their hands and feet. The injuries were so severe that the children required hospitalization.

If you’re wondering where the duct tape came in, it is because Hildebrandt and Franke “treated” the areas from where they were handcuffed and legcuffed with “homeopathic remedies” and then wrapped them in duct tape.

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Franke later revealed in court that she also believed that her children were “possessed” and that extreme discipline was the only thing that could save them. this was a belief, she said, she got from Hildebrandt. Indeed, much of her court statement involved blaming Hildebrandt for more or less brainwashing her into believing that child abuse was what her kids needed.

Hildebrandt is her own kind of monster, so this would be believable if not for everything else Franke thought was a great idea before May of 2023. So much for all that accountability she once loved so much.

It is possible that if, instead of assuming Franke was being “cancel cultured” for “demonstrating … what a responsible mother looks like,” the police and DCFS actually took the complaints seriously in the first place, those kids never would have been hospitalized or otherwise further traumatized. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

[New York Times]