I unearthed the truth about the perfect tradwife who was hurting her children behind closed doors

Last May, I sat in a Utah coffee shop with Chad Franke, the son of the infamous “momfluencer” turned convicted child abuser Ruby. Once regarded as “America’s mom”, Ruby and her family’s former counsellor Jodi Hildebrandt are now both serving up to 30 years in prison for aggravated child abuse on Ruby’s young children. “My mom would always tell me I’d end up in prison,” Chad says casually, then turns to look out the window. “Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it.”

Eight months earlier, Chad and his family had become headline news all across the US and beyond. Theirs was a dark tale of a spectacular fall from grace, with Ruby’s mugshot appearing on magazine front covers and branded a “Monster Mom” after her 12-year-old son was found in the haze of the Utah desert begging for food and water.

He was emaciated and covered in deep wounds, and would lead police to discover his youngest sister – mute and similarly malnourished – in a closet at the home of the family therapist. Medics later determined that the young boy would have died within two weeks had he not unlocked his own handcuffs and heroically sneaked out an unlocked door to get help. His actions undoubtedly saved his and his sister’s life.

Questions about what had happened behind the façade of this “perfect” Mormon family still remained unanswered, and Chad, his sister Shari and their dad Kevin were keen to give their first, detailed account of what really went on behind closed doors and when the cameras were turned off.

As we speak, I can see Chad turning events over in his head, still incredulous at what had happened. Our conversation that day marks the beginning of a long process that would uncover a series of unknown and remarkable details of a story many of us thought we knew.

For the next few months, I shuttled back and forth to Utah, partly to prepare for filming, but chiefly to spend time with Chad, Shari and Kevin (who was never charged with any crime). These many hours of “pre-interviews” would lay the groundwork for almost nine days of intense, filmed testimony for my miniseries Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.

There was only one question on my mind: how could a happy, religious, Mormon family that seemed to “have it all” end up in a world of horror and delusion; one in which some of them genuinely believed they were being visited by Satan himself? The question was simple. The answers were sometimes overwhelmingly complicated.

To help explain the road they’d each been down (and, I realised, were still travelling), the family handed me four dusty computer hard drives containing over 1,000 hours of raw, unseen footage filmed over almost a decade by Ruby, Kevin and sometimes the kids. It would be a remarkable archive for any family, but for the Frankes, it unlocked a story of how a family that had projected an image of perfection on social media could have masked a horrifying reality.

But although the crime of abuse was at its heart, this felt like much more than just a “true crime” story. Talking to Chad that day, it was clearly a complex family tragedy that they were all still struggling to comprehend. These family archives would help me understand not just the details of the crimes, but the extraordinary path that had led there.

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Much has been made of Ruby’s sometimes harsh parenting style, with online commentators pointing to times when Ruby withheld food from her children as punishment for minor transgressions, and once threatening to cut off the head of the youngest child’s most precious toy as hints at the dark heart of what was truly going on.

Unpicking it was going to be hard. It quickly became clear that there were so many forks in the road, so many choices, relationships and beliefs that each paved the way to a shocking end. Not least was the hard-wired Mormon culture of striving for perfection in life and showing this life to the world as a kind of missionary work. There was their belief in a “literal God and a literal Satan” that walked amongst them, and their faith in the imminent “Last Days”, beliefs that would be ultimately weaponised against them, and which the turmoil of the pandemic only seemed to confirm.

But there were also the unique personalities of Ruby, Kevin and their rogue counsellor Hildebrandt to consider too. They had aligned in a kind of folie à trois, propelling each other into delusions that would rip the family apart, and nearly kill some of them. So many illogical and neglectful decisions were made along the way, decisions that were seen by some family members as being not just rational but wholesome.

None of these elements alone could ever result in the abuse of children at the hands of their mother and her therapist in a remote and soulless desert mansion. But each one of them became a pivotal stepping stone that would lead them there. And among all these factors, perhaps the first perilous threshold they crossed was the decision to launch 8 Passengers, a YouTube “family vlogging” channel that quickly became a global hit.

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Starting in 2015, the Frankes became pioneers of a new generation of families that began posting regular, candid online videos about their seemingly ordinary, daily life. The channel quickly built an audience, with 2.5 million subscribers at their peak, with videos being posted daily and often getting over 50 million views. Suddenly, their six children – especially Shari and Chad – were at the vanguard of a new and growing generation who would come of age after a childhood of globally scrutinised and unrequested intimate online exposure.

Many young people right now are posing serious and difficult questions to their own parents about what choice they had been given, what consent they could ever have made, and what compensation they should receive from such a profitable enterprise. (Kevin admitted to earning up to $100,000 per month from YouTube ads alone, and additional sponsorships and brand deals could sometimes double that.) Isn’t this a type of child exploitation?

“At first, it was fun,” says Chad, “and I could use it”. Ruby was normally a strict and controlling figure in the household, tightly governing the kids’ access to games consoles, TVs and phones. But the camera could change that. For example, when Chad was about 14, he wanted to go with some friends to a theme park in nearby Salt Lake City, but knew that his mum would likely say no. But when he suggested that this day out could make a good online video, she didn’t just agree – she gave him the 8 Passengers company credit card to use. She knew a video wouldn’t just bring in income; all rides, food and candy would be “expenses” that were tax deductible.

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For Shari, now 22, the “on-camera Ruby” was often gentler and kinder than the one she knew when the camera wasn’t on. When filming, she recalls mum Ruby having a softness that could be both inauthentic but comforting, briefly turning her mother into a person who showed “something close to love”. “She was just a bit nicer with the camera on,” Shari tells me.

Her father Kevin initially seemed the least comfortable presence on camera. He tells me he was a “nerd” and not at all the “strong, even-keeled patriarch of the family” that Ruby wanted him to be. But being part of the narrative gave him license to perform with a strength of character that had eluded him in real life.

Within the unseen family archive is an excruciating moment where Ruby is urging Kevin to join her in an upbeat conversation on camera, only for him to withdraw and shut down, meekly saying that he just likes to “listen to Ruby talk”.

At these words, Ruby’s face drops into bitter and scathing disappointment and, seeing this disdain, Kevin quickly switches into character, faking a bright smile and talking confidently to viewers. It’s an unguarded moment that lasts a matter of seconds, but as a piece of observational footage, it is potent. It is both a vivid portrait of a marriage and also a jarring glimpse of how the camera was directing their lives.

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Within a year, the income from the channel began to rival Kevin’s salary as a tenured engineering professor at nearby Brigham Young University. The money may have been flowing to the parents, but the stars were the kids – particularly the two eldest, Chad and Shari. “All of that money came for one reason and one reason only,” Kevin tells me. “My kids.” And Ruby, he says, exploited that.

“Did you exploit it?” I ask him.

“Absolutely, I did.”

Aged just 11 and 13, the two siblings were quickly prioritised for content in the family channel. No domestic or family moment was deemed too personal to be exploited for content: teenage acne, bra shopping, bed wetting, even the onset of puberty or periods were all fair game.

Their home became “more a set than a house”, according to Shari, with enforced and regular cleaning, and the bulbs changed to a cold white to make the house more “camera ready”.

The success of 8 Passengers was staggering, but even when the channel was bringing them wealth and reputation, it was providing Ruby with something far deeper and more primal.

Kevin, Shari and Chad all say to me that Ruby would regularly refer to her own fervent desire to be seen as “the perfect mom”. Within the Mormon church, this aspiration is freighted with meaning. Congregations are taught that to get to the highest degree of glory in the eyes of God, they should strive for perfection, and it would be a form of missionary work if they were able to show the world how finessed and wholesome their lives were.

It’s probably no coincidence that Utah is both the capital of the Mormon church and has also been home to one of the highest proportions of family vloggers. For Ruby, what YouTube offered wasn’t material, but almost spiritual: it was the possibility that by showing the world her perfect family life, she could get closer to God. For her, it could literally mean heaven.

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The wealth that flowed into the family from their work on YouTube only served to cement this idea in both Kevin and Ruby that they were doing God’s work.

“I was raised on the idea of the cosmic vending machine,” Kevin says. “It’s this idea that I can do business with God. We believed that we were sharing Christianity with the whole world. And in return, God was blessing us.”

And so when big brands came calling, offering five-figure sums in return for scripted plugs for products, Kevin and Ruby saw it as further evidence of God rewarding them for their good works.

But Chad hated it: “When it came to brand deals and the sponsorships, it felt like a script, it felt like I was being controlled”. He began deliberately disrupting videos, pulling faces and veering off script, ruining footage and igniting the fury of Ruby and Kevin. As the months went by, his disruptive behaviour spilled out into his school and social life. He got expelled, and began sneaking off in the night and “making out with girls” behind his parents’ backs, all regarded as particularly sinful by his religious, conservative parents.

It was then that Ruby sought help from Jodi Hildebrandt, a counsellor who had previously been recommended by the Mormon church. Ruby hoped that her reputation for no-nonsense parenting advice could be the solution they needed to get the family and its YouTube channel back on track, but she was perhaps the very worst person they could have turned to.

For years, Hildebrandt had been building up a large therapy practice in Utah, recruiting her clients from the communities and congregations of the Mormon church and tailoring her unique form of robust relationship advice to their particular beliefs and anxieties.

The root of most problems, she would tell her clients, was almost always men – even their most fleeting lusts and desires were “addictions” that needed to be cured, often through the practice of “separation”, with husbands and fathers banished and ostracised from the family home for months and sometimes years at a time in order, she said, to purge them of sinful thoughts and lead them to a life of “truth”.

Within a few months of first meeting Chad, Jodi was having sessions with him twice a week. She quickly “scaled up”, convincing Ruby and Kevin that their marriage was in danger, their kids were on a path to destruction and only she and her system of intense therapy could rescue them.

She preached a strange form of therapy, all carefully coded with Mormon scripture to appeal to her clients. She presented a binary choice of living either “in truth” or “in distortion”, and only she seemed qualified to define what this really meant, with the criteria confusingly fluid. She promised that her teachings offered a chance to perfect one’s life on earth, which to members of the Mormon church was itself a gateway to heavenly glory.

By promising a shot at perfection, she was setting her clients an impossible task. But as a business model, it was a stroke of genius, as by proxy she was locking her clients into a potential lifetime of expensive therapy. What’s more, many Mormons believe both God and Satan are physical presences on Earth, and that any obstacle or hindrance on the path to goodness is likely engineered by Satan himself.

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And so like many of Jodi’s clients, Ruby and Kevin quickly became convinced they were embroiled in a cosmic battle with evil, and, more dangerously, saw any life imperfection as evidence of their own sin or evil forces. Those imperfections could be the most minor of transgressions, including those seen in her young children. For Ruby, bad behaviour or “talking back” would ultimately come to be seen as evidence that her children were possessed, and needed to be purged through punishment and pain.

Chad’s teenage antics were seen as inviting evil spirits into the house, and at age 17, he was evicted from the family home and sent to fend for himself in student housing. Kevin, too, was told to move out as punishment for his sin of “selfishness”. Remarkably, he agreed immediately to this “invitation” to move out, and lived alone for over a year with no contact with his wife or any of his children. Meanwhile, Hildebrandt and Ruby began to exert increasing control over the remaining four young children.

I interviewed Kevin on camera for four long days, pressing him on the choices he had made and what he understands of them now. At first, he was lofty and thoughtful, then defensive, then hostile. But as the hours ticked by, our conversations would usually end in him hunched and silent, almost physically unable to confront the role he had played, and only able to hold tightly to the love he still has for Ruby and the memories of better times. Many do not agree, but Kevin sees himself as a victim in this story, and the documentary’s audience will be wise enough to make up its own mind.

Many of the details of the abuse of the children that occurred during Kevin’s year-long absence have not been publicly disclosed, to protect their privacy and welfare. But some details were released after both Hildebrandt and Ruby pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. Increasingly isolated, the children aged 8 to 15 were pulled out of school but then left home alone for days.

In the summer of 2023, at least two of the children were moved down to Hildebrandt’s vast, luxury home 270 miles away in the desert of southern Utah. For months, they were rarely seen, until the youngest boy, 12, escaped and begged a neighbour to call the police. Police would later discover a lengthy and detailed journal in which Ruby had described what she thought was her battle to exorcise demons from her children, but was in fact grotesque evidence of the most distressing child abuse. They had been denied food and water, left in the desert sun for hours and days at a time, were locked in closets and shackled with handcuffs on wrists and feet. These are just some of the publicly available details. Reading the full journal left hardened prosecutors in tears.

The family that Hildebrandt fatefully crossed paths with in 2019 was already uniquely and profoundly vulnerable, and privately at war with itself in ways it couldn’t fully understand. They were already fertile ground for Hildebrandt’s unique brand of manipulation and malevolence. It was ultimately turning to her therapy which turned a questionable parenting choice of making family life into content for millions into a dangerous territory where a perfect mother ultimately came within days of killing her own children.

Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, produced by Passion Pictures, is now available on Hulu and Disney+