For those who may be unfamiliar, Shari Franke is the eldest child of former YouTube vlogging parents Ruby and Kevin Franke. She grew up being the eldest of 6 children in a devout Mormon household in Utah, where everything the family did was dictated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From the time Shari was 13 to the time she was 17, she took on a starring role in her family’s vlogging channel called 8 Passengers (in reference to the two parents and the six children), which was primarily run by her mother Ruby. What seemed to give off the illusion of a wholesome, righteous Mormon family that just happened to share their lives on the internet would soon begin to unravel as Ruby started to show her true colors.
Ruby Franke always prided herself on her “tough love” style of parenting, showing the punishments she would give to her children for not following her rules and marketing it as just what she had to do in order to get her kids to comply. However, the line between tough love and actual abuse got blurred when more instances of her harsh punishments were revealed to the YouTube audience. The most notable of these instances was when her eldest son Chad revealed that Ruby had been punishing him by taking away his bedroom and forcing him to sleep on a beanbag for seven months. Another one was when Ruby revealed how her youngest child, at the time five, forgot to pack a lunch for school that day, and when the teacher called Ruby saying how she was uncomfortable with the young girl going hungry, Ruby replied that her punishment for not packing a lunch was that she was going to have to go hungry for the day. These two incidents in particular led to the social cancellation of Ruby Franke and many companies pulling out of their sponsorships with the 8 Passengers channel. It was at this time that Ruby decided to shift her focus from family vlogging to “mental fitness coaching” with the company ConneXions, where she met a woman named Jodi Hildebrandt.
Fast forward to August of 2023, Ruby and Jodi were arrested on counts of aggravated child abuse after Ruby’s two youngest children were found by police in Jodi’s house in Ivans, Utah, emaciated and with severe wounds on their bodies. The women had been abusing the children for over a year, forcing them to do physical labor in the dangerous summer heat and punishing them under the guise that the children were demonic and needed to be abused so that they could learn their lesson. They are now serving a sentence in a Utah prison for their crimes. Coming back to Shari, all of these events prompted her to write a book about her experience growing up with Ruby as a mother entitled The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, and what she reveals is simply appalling.
my takeaways from the book
I made the decision to purchase the audiobook version on Spotify, which I would definitely recommend if you prefer audiobooks as your method of consuming literature. The book is entirely narrated by Shari, and the way she reads it is incredibly eloquent. She writes about being the daughter of Ruby Franke, detailing how at just the tender age of five, she already felt as though her mother didn’t like her very much. She talks about instances in which Ruby would be physically abusive towards her, whether that was a slap across the mouth or slamming her hands down onto Shari’s hands when she was practicing the piano. From a very young age, Shari describes the feeling of always walking on eggshells with Ruby so as to not suffer the wrath of her words, which was simply heartbreaking to listen to.
One account that was one of my biggest takeaways was when she goes on to describe the moments when her parents started vlogging the lives of her and her siblings in one of the (I predict there will be many) cases, that display the detriments of filming your children and putting them on the Internet for millions to watch. Shari describes essentially not being able to live a normal life as any teenager should, as there was always a camera in her face everywhere she turned. She talks about how Ruby would film, what should be private family moments, such as Shari going bra shopping or getting sick and having to go to the doctor, and how violated she felt when these moments were being made public.
Because of accounts like this, I am staunchly against family vlogging and the entire concept of putting your children online to be monetized. When you’re a child, you have no idea what the ramifications are of your entire life being filmed and put on the Internet. When something is put on the Internet, it stays there forever, no matter how much you try and get rid of it. You cannot control who is watching your child, opening them up to a dangerous world of people who will watch them and have ulterior motives. Your first priority as a parent should be to protect your child, and when you open them up to this world of dangerous people by filming their most intimate moments every day of their lives, then you’re actively not protecting them.
My second biggest takeaway comes when Shari describes the moment that Jodi Hildebrandt entered her family’s lives, and how she worked to destroy them with Ruby by her side. If you want more context on Jodi’s background and ConneXions, I highly recommend reading the book, but essentially Jodi based her entire brand on helping people combat what she referred to as “distortion” and “distorted thinking.” Shari describes how Jodi used her background and label as a psychologist to manipulate her clients and break up families, which is exactly what happened to the Franke family when their father Kevin was told by Jodi and Ruby to leave in order to “work on himself.” In short, isolating the family from each other gave her and Ruby the avenue to take the two youngest kids, move them into Jodi’s house in Ivans, and brutally torture them while telling them that they deserved it.
Shari acknowledges that many look at Ruby and wonder, “what went wrong?”, acting as if she was just a wholesome mommy vlogger one day, and then a cold-blooded child abuser the next. Many in the media tried to spin the story as Jodi manipulating Ruby into becoming a monster, but Shari confirms that Ruby has always been like this. She always felt some sort of resentment towards her children, punishing them for not displaying perfect obedience since they were very little. The second that Jodi entered the picture only gave Ruby an avenue to abuse her children even further. Jodi essentially just gave Ruby permission to act as brutally as she wanted if it meant removing “Satanic influence” from her children’s souls. Now, the children are safe, the women are incarcerated at a Utah prison, and Shari has gotten the opportunity to share her story after being silenced by her mother for so long. Justice is being served, as the children are finally free from the house of their mother, Ruby Franke.