YouTuber Ruby Franke sentenced to prison for child abuse (2024)

“For the past four years, I have chosen to follow counsel and guidance that have led me to a dark delusion,” Franke said.

Hildebrandt, 54, received an identical sentence Tuesday. She and Franke pleaded guilty in December to four counts of child abuse each. The women’s sentences of one to 15 years per count will run consecutively. Utah law prohibits consecutive penalties from exceeding 30 years. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole will determine the duration of their sentences.

Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday evening.

In court, Franke’s attorney LaMar Winward said his client had been “indoctrinated” by Hildebrandt. Douglas Terry, who represented Hildebrandt, disputed that characterization, saying the former therapist “is not the person she has been portrayed to be.”

The cases drew national attention — and rippled across Utah’s conservative religious circles, in which the women were deeply entwined — after Franke and Hildebrandt, who had appeared together in parenting and life-coaching social media videos, were arrested and accused of abusing Franke’s youngest two children.

The two women were originally charged in August with six counts of aggravated child abuse each after Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped from a window at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah. According to arrest records, the son, who appeared “emaciated and malnourished,” escaped to a neighbor’s home and asked for food and water. Responding officers observed “deep lacerations from being tied up with rope” and duct tape around the boy’s extremities — prompting a search of Hildebrandt’s home, where police found Franke’s 10-year-old daughter in a similar state.

Months later, Franke and Hildebrandt reached a deal with the prosecution: guilty pleas in exchange for the removal of two of their six counts. Under the terms of the agreement, the women admitted to subjecting the children to treatment prosecutors described as tantamount to “physical torture” and “severe emotional harm” — regularly denying the children food, water and beds, and isolating them from others.

According to court documents, in one instance, Franke’s son’s head was held underwater. In another, Franke’s daughter was forced to repeatedly jump onto a cactus. The children were also forced to work and run outside, barefoot, under the scorching southern Utah heat — resulting in sunburns, “scabs, blisters, and sloughing skin,” court records state.

The plea agreement notes that the women described their treatment as acts of “love” to the children, who were told “these things were being done to [them] in order to help” them because they were “evil” and needed to “repent,” prosecutors wrote.

Franke, a mother of six, rose to prominence in the 2010s when she started a YouTube channel called “8 Passengers,” which focused on her family’s life in Springville, Utah. At its peak, the channel reached about 2.5 million viewers.

But concerns began to swirl before Franke’s arrest — particularly after her son Chad said in a 2020 video that he slept on a bean bag for months as a punishment, The Washington Post previously reported. In another widely criticized video, Franke said her daughter needed to go hungry after the 6-year-old had forgotten to pack her own food for school. The episodes led to a petition, signed by more than 17,800 people in 2020, that called for an investigation.

After Utah child protective services visited Franke’s home, she defended her parenting style to Business Insider, saying: “What people aren’t understanding is that we give our children choice in everything. We are teaching our children to be self-governing.”

By 2021, her YouTube channel had lost steam, The Post reported. It was removed from the platform a year later.

In 2022, Franke began working with “ConneXions,” an online self-improvement program that Hildebrandt founded in 2012. In a slew of reviews, participants criticized the program for promoting isolation and urging people to cut off family members or acquaintances who don’t abide by its teachings. The two also began posting under their “Moms of Truth” social media page, which was met with similar criticism for their parenting advice.

YouTube shut down the ConneXions channel shortly after Franke and Hildebrandt were arrested, Business Insider reported.

After Franke’s arrest, the mommy blogger’s eldest daughter wrote on Instagram that she was “so glad justice is being served,” The Post previously reported. Franke’s sisters Ellie Mecham, Bonnie Hoellein and Julie Deru, also parenting influencers, posted a joint statement on their Instagram accounts saying Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s arrests “needed to happen.”

Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke (R) agreed at Franke’s sentencing Tuesday.

“Had the older of the children not had the courage to run away and ask a neighbor to call the police, heaven only knows how much longer he could have survived in that situation,” Clarke said.

Shortly after Franke’s sentencing, Hildebrandt appeared in court, where she said she loved Franke’s children and hoped they could heal “physically and emotionally.”

However, Judge John Walton — who presided over both hearings — referenced Hildebrandt’s career as a licensed therapist, saying that adults with such specialized training “are supposed to protect children.”

“You didn’t do that in this case,” he said. “In this case, you terrorized children.”

Kim Bellware and Kelsey Ables contributed to this report.