The Truth About Ruby Franke: Excerpts From Her Diary
Infamous co-host Natalie Robehmed on Mormon Mommy vlogger Ruby Franke
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
Listen now to all 6 episodes of Infamous: The Truth About Ruby Franke (Apple, Spotify)
If you follow true crime closely, you may have heard about Ruby Franke, the Mormon mommy vlogger who abused her children. In Infamous: The Truth about Ruby Franke, we covered how the strict parenting style Ruby displayed on her YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, escalated when she met the twisted Utah therapist Jodi Hildebrandt. The pair were eventually each sentenced to up to 30 years for child abuse.
This disturbing story grabbed attention when it broke back in 2023, but one of the aspects most coverage missed was Ruby’s religious justification for her actions. Ruby and Jodi were both devoted members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But as my reporting with Vanessa Grigoriadis and Julia Case-Levine uncovered, Jodi and Ruby’s faith actually became more extreme than the Church. In fact, Ruby and Jodi started having religious visions (about meeting Satan, or riding a pet lion named Charles in heaven), and Ruby came to believe she was saving her children by abusing them.
The single most revealing piece of evidence – the element that really helped me understand Ruby’s motivations – was her diary. The Utah government released a redacted version along with a slew of documents related to the case. The contents are highly upsetting.
Across 60 pages, Ruby details the months she and two of her children spent living with Jodi in Ivins, Utah, leading up to her arrest. Ruby’s writing makes clear she believed she was intervening against the devil, who she thought was acting through her children.
Ruby’s retaliation against this perceived evil was to force punishments on her children, including fasting, exercising, standing in the sun, and eventually tying them up.
In one particularly disturbing entry from July 11th, 2023, Ruby, writes of her child: “R was told to stand in the sun with his sun hat. He is defiant. ‘No.’ l tell him a couple more times. R or should I say his demon stays in the shade. I push R into the sun. R comes back. I come back with a cactus poker. When I poke his back to get in the sun, R, doesn’t even flinch. He is in a trance & doesn’t appear to feel anything. Jodi taps him on the cheek to wake him up.”
The entries gradually get more and more deranged. Jodi is referred to as “G-Jo” throughout the diary, which perhaps stands for Grandma Jo. We see Ruby and Jodi hatching a plan to purchase property in Arizona.
“If you can engage a weak minded soul in a physical activity of obedience you can begin to break the bond satan made w/ the weak. Physically stop the acting out behaviors & begin physically doing good. Farm work. Lifting boxes. Exerting energy. Exercises. Jump rope. Milking cows. Weeding a garden. Digging trenches. Satan cannot be where there is good.”
Perhaps the most affecting entry is from July 15th, 2023, when one of the children, listed as R, runs away. Jodi writes about going to sleep with him next to her, only to wake up and find that he’d disappeared. The pair jump in their cars and go in search of him.
Through all of this, Ruby’s religiosity rings out. According to her journal entries, she firmly believed what she was doing was God’s will, with the best intentions for her children at heart.
We requested an interview with Ruby, which her lawyer did not grant, sending a statement instead. "Our client is currently involved in additional legal cases and is not permitted to speak regarding her criminal case. She is committed to serving her sentence and doing introspection so that she can heal and support her family in the healing process. Ruby's story is a cautionary tale to those seeking professional therapeutic advice. It is critical that the advice come from a licensed professional and one that encourages connectedness and not isolation.”
Whether or not Ruby should be absolved for her actions, as her attorney suggests, this story is one of the most disturbing instances of religious radicalism I’ve seen, in which a woman primed for violence bumps up against a power-hungry cultish therapist. It’s a cautionary tale for believers and nonbelievers alike.
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