The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
Religion as the basis for the justification of the suffering of children…
Is reason alone to avoid it.
My heart aches for the 12-year old boy and his siblings. I feel so bad for them. I hope they are getting the care they need.
And zero self reflection. They never point their hyper-critical eyes towards a mirror.
Oh they do, but their flaws are human foibles, not being posessed by a demon.
They’re self-centered pieces of shit that use double standards.
Friendly reminder to everyone that the rest of the world has signed on the United Nation’s Connvention on the Rights of the Child; the US doesn’t like that it could prevent children from being spanked, because God wants us to spank our children (spare the rod, spoil the child).
Religion is often a basis for the suffering of children.
The boy later told investigators that Hildebrandt had used rope to bind his arms and his feet to weights on the ground. She used a mixture of cayenne pepper and honey to dress his wounds, according to the police report.
In handwritten journal entries also released Friday, Franke chronicles months of daily abuse that included starving her son and 9-year-old daughter, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and isolating them from the outside world. The women often made the kids sleep on hard floors and sometimes locked them in a concrete bunker in Hildebrandt’s basement.
In a July 2023 entry titled “Big day for evil,” she describes holding the boy’s head under water and closing off his mouth and nose with her hands.
Body camera video shows officers entering Hildebrandt’s house and detaining her on the couch while others scour the winding hallways in search of the young girl. They quickly discover a child with a buzzcut sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty closet. After hours of sitting with the girl and feeding her pizza, police coax her out.
Wtf, i can’t imagine being raised like this 😭
For anyone that’s interested in a deep dive into what kind of shit was going on here, John Dehlin has covered this pretty extensively on his Mormon Stories podcast. Episodes 1805, 1807, 1808, 1809 (removed due to threat of a lawsuit for defamation; you’d have to find an archived copy. Adam Steed is a difficult interviewee in many ways, unless you are already deeply, intimately aware of Mormonism; his thoughts are often very jumbled and he has a hard time expressing things in a linear fashion), 1817, 1817, 1825 (tangentially; it’s about “Visions of Glory”), 1826, 1844, 1865, 1869, and 1873. It’s also tangentially related the the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell murder cases, in that the beliefs of Jodi Hildebrant and Ruby Franke were both heavily influenced by the same apocalyptic book, “Visions of Glory”.
Keep in mind that the episodes I just listed comprise roughly around 30 hours of listening. About half of them are long-form interviews. Unless you have an an interest in cults, religious indoctrination, apocalyptic beliefs, this is probably not going to be your thing. And unless you were raised Mormon–or have listened to the other 5400 hours or so of podcasts that John Dehlin has done–it’s probably going to be a little hard to follow what’s going on.
A very, very short version is that, while Franke was always borderline abusive as a mom (and that’s pretty par for the course in Mormon families, TBH), Hildebrandt is an incredibly charismatic, persuasive psychopath that used a version of Mormon theology to induce her to be far, far worse than she would have otherwise been. If Hildebrandt had been male–because you must be male to have real power in the Mormon church–she almost certainly would have ended up leading a fundamentalist cult.
I guess “religious extremism” is accurate, but this is batshit insanity as well. There is something very, very wrong in this woman’s brain, and it requires treatment. While she rots in prison of course.
What?
This is par for the course.
Pretty much every Abrahmic offshoot was started by someone who was completely insane.
According to their own history, it all kicked off with Abraham killing family members because a voice in his head told him that anyone doubting the voice needs murdered.
He was violent and insane and now literally billions and billions of people worship the voice he invented, and legitimately believe that if a voice in their head shows up telling them to do horrible shit, it’s probably cool because maybe it’s just God again.
There is absolutely nothing surprising when a person who not only believes those fairy tales, but come from a family they may have spent thousands of years believing them, starts thinking theyre the next “special one”.
Sure, most people dont actually believe in their own religions. But they pretend it’s real, and then the really crazy ones do shit like this.
Being shocked this keeps happening is like asking why your car runs out of gas when you never put gas in it until after the tanks dry
This is the rational result of what they’re doing.
There are many, many Christians who abuse their kids under the guise of godliness. Ever heard of “To Train Up a Child”? It’s a whole book about how to properly abuse your child to turn them into a mindless, obedient slave. They start hitting them as infants for showing curiosity. There are popular Christian influencers who have openly spoken about the ways they “discipline” their kids - one said her husband “doesn’t know his own strength” with their kids. Aka he’s beaten the shit out of them more than once. Sure, Ruby Franke turned it up to 11, but she and her husband routinely abused their children and were public about it for years, and plenty of people saw no problem with it and continued to consume their content.
I’d argue it’s not mental illness, it’s the natural consequence of practicing a branch of Christianity that doesn’t see children as people, just little trophies who aren’t meant to have any personality, needs, or wants. They’re supposed to parrot everything their parents believe and otherwise not be seen or heard.
Your argument is good, and your views have merit. Which is super fucking depressing.
You’d often finds that religious extremists prefer to prey on the mentally unwell. They’re more susceptible to abuse and easier to turn into abusers themselves. Then the chain repeats and the abuse self-replicates, propagating the abuse. Very sane and well adjusted individuals can be made to be really cruel and destructive via religious abuse.
Her business partner (and co-defendant) is described as a “mental health counselor.” I’m sure she’s fine.
/s
Which is why I don’t trust any shrink that’s religious. You can’t claim to be mentally sound when you hold that delusion in your mind.
I keep saying this, but the issue are the people that watch these videos. If they didn’t have followers they wouldn’t be where they are or could do what they do. (But in this case, maybe even without all the money they still would have abused those poor kids)
Franke 100% would have been doing this even without being a YouTuber. What she was doing on 8 Passengers is not all that extreme in Mormon circles, and I don’t mean just the deeply conservative ones. Yes, she went a little farther than most Mormons would be comfortable with, but the core ideas? They entirely understand where she was coming from. The commonly cited example is her refusing to bring lunch to a child (6yo?) that forgot it, saying that it’s ‘personal responsibility’; many Mormons would argue that it’s a little too young to expect a 6yo to be fully responsible like that, but if a 10yo child forgot? Or an 8yo? No problem.
I don’t think society understands the scale of ignorance and evil of other humans that walk among us. I used to always say it’s 50/50. But I think it’s more like 75/25 and decent people with respect for life are the minority. It feels like it’s game over for humanity.
its the opposite. most people are genuinely decent folk. the world is actually getting safer despite what you see and hear because we now see and hear so much more than we used to. its a confirmation bias.
at some point we will realize that religion itself is a cancer. like most cancers, it has a strong benign composition with many deadly streaks.
just like with benign cancers, it must be excised and treated as the mental health problem it is.
Unfortunately too late I think. It’s metastasized.
He forgot the famous aphorism, “feed a demon, starve an evangelist”
Gotta love religion
