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If you ever thought to yourself, hey, I want to live on Mars. This is where you're going to go. It's like living in the center of a giant crater on the surface of Mars. The entire town is pretty much sunken in, in the center. And surrounding the town, you have these massive, hard-edged mountains. It's not green. There's no trees on them. They're like this very beautiful shade of red. They're red rock mountains. It's beautiful.
until you keep looking at the pictures on google images because then you start getting freaked out there's something about it that feels like beyond the mountains There's just nothing. It's just desert. You cannot even find any shade, really, in Ivins, Utah. There's no trees. You go to your backyard, it's like a red canyon.
You feel like a little scorpion is about to crawl out into your house. And instead of trees, they have these green balls. Like think of like watermelons without the stripes. And they're pokey. They're cactuses. All over your lawn. That's it. It's a true desert. I don't even know if it gets that windy. Just think of a barren landscape, but it's beautiful. It looks so pure. It's like a unique kind of aesthetic that the locals love.
And there's only 10,000 locals in the small town of Ivins, Utah. You go to Ivins, Utah because you want to live peacefully. You want to live quietly. And more importantly, you want to live very privately. Especially if you pay for a $5 million house in Ivins, Utah, that typically means you want to be left alone. August 30th, 2023. In this very secluded, wealthy neighborhood, a 12-year-old boy crawls out the window of a $5.3 million house. He's dressed in this men's blue button-down dress shirt.
Like, you know, those dress shirts. But it's kind of swallowing him up. It looks like he took it from his older brother's closet. He has on a pair of shorts and a pair of socks. No shoes. His legs look... quite frail the way he walks is reminiscent of a baby giraffe that learned to walk not too long ago he's not stumbling it's not like he's so shaky but it just looks like he's either injured or very uncomfortable walking
It could be the duct tape that's wrapped tightly around his ankles. It even looks like underneath the duct tape, there's some sort of plastic saran wrap underneath. And he has this long... Very scorching hot walk ahead of him. He's just wearing socks. This is August 30th. No trees, no shade. You're looking at 100 degree weather. But because there's no shade, the pavement reaches about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
Put that into perspective. It would be like if you took a cast iron skillet, put it on the stovetop, kept it on high heat for five minutes, took it off and then put your foot directly onto it. That's what it feels like. And that is what this 12-year-old boy has just crawled out of the window to do. He has to walk in this weather with just socks to the neighbor's house.
This whole place, it's not a neighborhood in the traditional sense. I mean, it is a neighborhood, but they're filled with $5 million houses. The houses are really far apart. They're almost a few blocks apart, if you will. You don't pay $5 million in Ivan's Utah. to live on top of your neighbor. So the space in between each home feels at least like a few blocks and there's only three finished homes in this entire neighborhood so far, which means this little boy has two shots. Two chances.
And the duct tape around his ankles and wrists are not helping. The sun is probably melting the tape into his wounds. He's already dehydrated. He's been starved. Just two seconds out in that level of heat, he likely feels lightheaded. And just the friction...
from walking with socks on that type of pavement can instantly cause burns and blisters. The first house that he walks to, he quietly approaches the door and he takes a few steps towards the front. He sees the doorbell, reaches out, presses it, and he just waits. He's waiting by the front door, very politely even. He doesn't bang on it immediately. I mean, I would expect him to, considering this could be life or death for him. But this 12-year-old boy just waits very patiently.
He stands still for 40 seconds waiting for that door to open. He was so still that I actually thought I paused the footage. Eventually, he calmly knocks on the door and waits again. If there is nobody home... If they come back to get him, it is all over. This boy's condition is only getting worse and it's likely that the wounds are going to get infected very soon. So he waits and he's so still as if like...
If he were to move, the homeowner would be so scared they wouldn't open the door. But again, nobody answers, which means there's only one more house that he can try, and that's if he can even make it to the house. So he starts walking, and like I said, there are three finished homes in this neighborhood. One home that he's running from, one where nobody's home, they didn't answer the door, and now he just has the last one, the third house.
He walks up and he rings the doorbell. This woman's voice, it's like an automated message, starts telling him. Redacted can't come to the door right now, but if you'd like to leave a message, you can do it right now. He just stands there for a brief second because...
That means nowhere, there's nowhere else he can run. He has to go back to the house. I don't think he could run onto the main road. There's nobody around. And if they know that he's gotten out of the window, they're going to find him and it's just going to be that much worse for him. He waits for a brief second before turning around and you can see his shoulders slump visibly in the footage and his head is hanging and he starts walking away from the last home's front door. This is...
Like almost positively, the very last chance that he has at survival and it's gone. So he didn't leave a message. He just walked away. No, he did not. Yeah. He takes about 20 steps. He's about to... fully leave the front area of the house when the door clicks open. And this old man comes out. Yes? And this little boy is so calm. Hi, I was just wondering if you could do me two favors.
The little boy walks a little bit closer to the neighbor, but he's keeping his distance. And the neighbor, he kind of sounds like a grumpy old man. Well, what are they? Taking me to the nearest police station. Actually, it's just one favor. It's fine. It's likely by this point, the old neighbor spots the duct tape around his wrists and ankles. And he just looks so frail, like he hasn't had a real meal in weeks. And he says, what's going on, son? Have a seat here.
This is the starting point to all the secrets that start coming out of what was happening in that $5 million house in Ivins, Utah. Two children were being held captive in a giant safe room tied up with ropes. They had physical injuries that go deep down into the flesh, almost hitting the muscles and the bones. And then they would have cayenne pepper just poured into them. There's evidence of force.
starvation, forced to walk around in the desert barefoot, forced to sleep outside, authorities would later state, had it not been now, these kids might not have made it. The two kids that were being held captive and tormented are the kids of a famous YouTuber. a family vlogger who daily vlogged most of her life as a mother to six children. This is the case of Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt.
We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mingo to support the Biz Parents Foundation. They're a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting professional child performers and their rights. This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mingo's growing.
team and we would also like to thank you guys for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates as always full show notes are available at rotten mingle podcast.com today's case involves some very well-known names in the mommy blogger family blogger world, Ruby and Kevin Frankie, and then their six children, best known by their channel name, Eight Passengers. We're going to be using the names of the two eldest children. So you have Sherry, the eldest daughter.
and chat. They are legal age and have publicly spoken out about Ruby, but we will only be referring to the four youngest children as either their first initial or just vaguely the son, the daughter. regardless of if their info is already out there. Additionally, Sherry Frankie recently published a book that I read as research for this case and
I would recommend getting a copy or 10 just to show support for Sherry. The book is titled The House of My Mother. It is so well written and she's some help. It's very interesting. She somehow is able to put into words what she felt during these very extreme times of duress. And it was so strange because even though I've never gone through anything remotely similar, the way she words it...
I feel like I can relate. It's very emotionally impactful and I think it's a book that really makes you think and gives you pause about the world of family vlogging. She's also just a phenomenal writer but also a very impressive source of inspiration. for all.
please check that out. That's going to be in the show notes. But as for content warnings, there are quite a few graphic themes of CA as well as food restrictions and wilderness therapy camps. And second to last disclaimer, the Franks are part or were part of the...
LDS church. We are not here to discuss the church as a whole and the actions of the perpetrators should not be generalized as a representation of the religion itself. This is not an attack on the LDS faith or the church. Ruby Frankie just happens to be part of that church. And she sometimes happens to use the teachings to carry out her abuse. So with that being said, this is going to be a three-part series.
because of the renewed interest in this case with the new documentary that was released i received a ton of requests to cover the case and initially i was thinking okay i'm gonna keep it on the slimmer side considering how much coverage this case has gotten over the years
But the deeper that we kept getting into it, I mean, there's just no way to sum anything up. Even reading Sherry's book and researching this case, there's so much insight. And this case is an acting change for a lot of people. And for that reason, if you are... maybe one of the few people who haven't heard much about the case or haven't gotten a deep dive, this is going to be a three-part episode.
In part one, we're going to go through Ruby Frankie's YouTube career, the signs of abuse that a lot of netizens started picking up from the beginning, the evidence that she practically uploads straight to the internet herself. And how Ruby Frankie getting quote-unquote cancelled leads to her becoming more abusive and more extreme. And in part two, we're going to cover Jodi Hildeprant. This is Ruby's...
marriage counselor, her therapist turned cult leader, and all the lives that Jodi Hildebrandt has intentionally destroyed as a so-called porn therapist. Jodi Hildebrandt has other alleged victims to her abuse and was probably fighting to be the
world's worst marriage counselor. She would infiltrate marriages and instigate divorces. She would ruin people's lives. And the speculation is she might have a deep-rooted hatred for men. So in part two, we're also going to go over the alleged romantic relationship between ruby frankie and jody hildebrandt in part three we go through ruby and jody fully just
Jumping into cult territory. Ruby's lengthy journals detailing day by day of the torture that she's inflicting on her own children. And what Ruby's husband, Kevin, he's like a huge... point of conversation in all of this. He's the father of the six children. People are wondering what was he doing during all of this and why wasn't he charged? Really? Yes. So that's going to be in part three.
And with that being said, let's get started. It's called the rabbit stick room. It kind of looks like a back room. It's got that like nasty, dark navy carpet. There's a full fabric couch up against the wall on one side. And they've got those white circular plastic fans. And the lighting is just back rooms. It's abandoned office lighting. It's fluorescent. It makes everything look so depressing. Every single Friday.
The door to the rabbit stick room opens and a bunch of teenagers walk in. What's rabbit stick? That's just how they call it? Yeah, a rabbit stick. Okay. A bunch of teenagers walk in. They don't even know each other. These are not friends. They're not part of the same school. They're just random strangers that happen to be teenagers. They're all given a new set of clothes. And they're all just wearing similar things.
Go change into these clothes and take this time to say goodbye to life as you know it. Because from now on, life is about survival. The world is changing. Life is not going to be easy anymore. Do you think you have time to sit there and ponder about social media and play video games? You don't. Now it's about staying alive. It's about finding food out in the wild. I mean, there's no choice. You have to fend for yourself. And this is your.
life now all you get every single teenager just gets a backpack All their belongings are in this backpack. Whatever they need to survive in the Arizona wildlife, in the wilderness, if they lose something, if they lose that backpack, it's gone. Life's not fair. You don't get a replacement. How old are they? 12 to 17. The most important supplies are a giant piece of tarp in a sleeping bag. That's where you're going to sleep from now on. You don't get shelter. You don't get a tent.
The first week, they say it's a lot about processing the grief. You lost your family. You lost your friends. You lose good food. Just a warm, nice meal with a lot of carbs sounds amazing. Or even just music and books. You don't have... You don't have anywhere to put a heavy book in your backpack. You got to carry this backpack around with you everywhere. You're walking like five, 10 miles a day. You're going to bring books. You're going to bring a whole trilogy set.
And then the next phase hits. The teenagers start finding ways to survive, which typically means they go through a three-day fasting period because that's what life is like in the wilderness. Food is not a guarantee. Neither is toilet paper or comfort or really... anything. That lasts five to six weeks and probably for every single second of it, you feel like you're not going to make it.
This is the Anasazi wilderness therapy camp for teenagers. It feels like doomsday. It feels like the end of the world. These teenagers are thrown into the wilderness. They're forced to fend for themselves because they don't listen to their parents at home. The camp calls the teenagers young walkers. It's kind of creepy. So you will see a group of teenagers just walking in the desert. They have supervisors. They have camp counselors or shadows as they like to call them that you can go to.
I mean, you can't really go to them for anything because you're supposed to survive on your own. You just see them trekking 5, 10 miles per day. Some of these kids were kidnapped to be here. The wilderness camp, if they feel like you're not going to come willingly, consensually, your parents can sign a little slip and they will come kidnap you in the middle of the night. Some kids said, my parents told me we were going to Disneyland and now I'm eating a lizard.
because i'm starving wow so this is like you know remember the chinese case that we covered that parents will kidnap the kid throw them into like this concentration yes type of yeah this is that And there's so many of them in the United States. They go out into the wilderness in Arizona. And according to Anasazi, they quote, they live a primitive lifestyle and learn the skills and technologies of the ancient ones. Young walkers learn to cook their own meal.
Food packs are replenished weekly and they learn to build shelters to protect themselves from the elements. They may hike up to 10 miles in a day and seldom camp in the same place for more than two nights. If you are a teenager...
12 to 17 years old, and you struggle with any sort of... behavioral challenges this is what anasazi lists it as depression anxiety poor self-image low self-esteem substance abuse internet gaming technology addiction learning difficulties relational problems with family trauma abuse bipolar disorder disrespect authority peer
conflict legal troubles poor social skills immaturity lack of motivation if you mark any one of those you are more than welcome to join anasazi well you're not more than welcome your parents are more than welcome to sign you up and pay us money There is no way not a single person listening to this does not check off at least one of those boxes. I feel like I'm a full grown adult. I'm not even a teenager and I check off almost all of them.
It's basically a desperate cash grab targeted towards parents who don't know how to raise a teenager. And they decide the best solution in all of this is, what if we just don't raise them? what if we just send them into the wilderness for two months straight one netizen says
I was forced to go cold turkey on my alcohol addiction and I was terribly sick because of that. I wanted to self-exit and I desperately needed help. I told the therapist that's supposed to be part of our group that I needed more time with them because I was only getting 15 minutes of therapy per week. week that's part of the program they tell you you get a therapist they told me that the therapy was the hiking i was doing
They continue. In addition, there were two days that my group's only water source was from leftover, like a leftover cow trough just mixed with actual cow shit in the water supply. We drank it. By the end of my stay, I could barely walk. My last night, I laid down on a bunch of rocks and I couldn't sleep because the coyotes were just...
howling all night. It sounded like they were only a couple dozen feet away from me. I kept crying to the staff at night, telling them that I was so scared. They finally gave up and transported me to another treatment center. One review of Anasazi reads, I am begging you, do not send your teen here. This program is abusive, horrific, and sold as this amazing program that's going to straighten out your troubled teen with a strong focus on God.
not it's an excuse for sadistic unqualified people to abuse your teenagers i cannot put into words how twisted the people running and working this program are there is nothing helpful or positive about making teens hate themselves. One journalist who went to Anasazi says they saw a 16-year-old boy lunge lightning speed at a lizard to eat because food is rationed at Anasazi. They get a week's worth of food at a time.
And each day is rationed for only 2,000 calories per day for a growing teenager. Even for like a pretty sedentary lifestyle for a growing teenager, you need more than that. And you're just sitting at your computer. They're hiking 5-10 miles a day. If you eat up your food or someone steals your food, which seems to happen a lot, then you are just left to fend by eating wild plants, lizards, and bugs.
Anasazi becomes a huge topic for conversation on YouTube after a famous family vlogger decides that she's going to send her 14 year old son to Anasazi. And it's already bad enough that everyone on the internet sees comments from netizens talking about how bad their time was at Anasazi, how they wanted to self-exit after coming out, how they irreparably like just...
absolutely obliterated their relationship with their parents after being sent to Anasazi. They're reading all of this and this YouTuber is just... happily sending her son there. Netizens are outraged. They're confused. And the YouTuber's son's name is Chad. The worst part in all of this is after two months in the wilderness, Chad comes back home. And he's actually gained weight when he was out there. What? And he says on camera that he loved his experience, but a lot of netizens are confused.
What are his conditions at home and how are they worse than Anasazi? How did he gain 10 pounds hiking 10 miles a day in the wilderness? That doesn't make sense. Is it still running today, the program? Yes. This whole thing feels like doomsday for YouTuber Ruby Frankie. The whole world is falling apart. The apocalypse is coming. Everything is dying and it kind of all starts with Disneyland.
It's interesting. There's a lot of people who really want to be good at something. And then there's a lot of people who don't really care if they're good at something as long as you think that they are good at something. They all say the same thing. So it's very hard to differentiate who is who. actually wants to be good at it and who just wants to be seen to be good at it it is pretty clear ruby frankie just wants to be seen as a good mom
I don't know if she had any intention to actually be a good mom. Kevin says that in their religion, they're taught the only purpose in life is to become a parent. That's the goal. That's what everyone should strive to. But if everybody gets there... then how are you special? So Ruby's new mission is to be the perfect mom, but it's not...
just enough for all of her family members to be like, Ruby, you're such a good mom. For her to walk into church and they say, Ruby, I don't know how you do it with six kids. That's not good enough. She wants strangers at the mall to tell her that she's a good mom. maximize the amount of praise that she gets. So she needs a larger audience. And that is the birth of the YouTube channel, Eight Passengers.
Ruby is family vlogging. Now, side note, Kevin says the name of the channel is very symbolic. We were all in this vehicle together with our family, driving down this road called life. The first video ever uploaded is of Ruby standing around the kitchen island and she's got five kids with her. She's got the eldest daughter, Sherry.
Then she has the son, Chad. Then she has two daughters and another son. And there's a cake in front of her because it's a gender reveal. She's about to have her sixth and final kid. When was this? Long time ago? Yeah, this was years ago, like almost 10 years ago. Oh, wow. They cut into the sponge cake and the cake is pink. They're having a baby girl. They've got two sons and four girls.
And Ruby says, you know, the main purpose of this channel is I just want our channel to be a ray of sunshine in a world where people just criticize each other and make each other feel bad. And we're here to show that happy families are a reality. I love coming and doing little simple things with my family because it just makes all my worries go away. Just for a little bit. But it all falls apart at 2 in the morning. Chad, the eldest son, he wakes up the youngest son.
So there's two boys. The youngest son is probably what, like 10, probably like seven years old at this point. And he's like, wake up. We're going to Disneyland. It's a surprise. You gotta pack your stuff. And we gotta go. Get your sunglasses. Get your sun hat. Don't forget your sunscreen. Chad is telling the little boy. This is the same one that was walking in the neighborhood. The little boy? Yes.
So Chad is telling his little brother, come on, you gotta get all your stuff. And he's so excited. He starts packing all of his things, shoving them into a suitcase. He starts hauling them. like down the stairs. He's ready to go to Disney. This is going to be a family road trip. I mean, this is probably going to be the highlight of the whole year. And maybe it's even more convincing because the parents are YouTubers. YouTubers do crazy things all the time.
But the whole thing is a prank. It's like a relatively innocent prank. Chad is goofing around. They're not going to Disneyland. Oh, Chad is pranking the little brother. Yeah. Okay, and then the parents are recording this? No. The parents wake up in the middle of the night to the younger brother crying because he was so excited to go to Disneyland. And now Chad is in very big trouble. This is the start of Doomsday for Ruby Frankie.
Almost a year later, summer of 2020, Ruby is sitting up on the floor. She is leaned up against the wall with her son, Chad, and her other daughter on her other side. So she's in the middle. She's sandwiched and just vlogging. when chad just casually mentions he just says my bedroom was taken away for seven months and then you gave it back like a couple weeks ago and ruby just starts cheesing like she's got this big old gummy smile and she's i don't think our viewers know that
Yeah, I'm sleeping on a beanbag since October and they gave me my room back like two weeks ago. My phone's been taken since like December. I mean, I can give you the reason why I lost my bedroom or at least I think this is the reason. At least this is the reason that's been in my head. I mean, it's pretty funny, but now that I look back at it, I guess it's pretty depressing. And Ruby says, no, we never told our viewers. And Chad goes on to explain that I woke...
My brother up at two in the morning and I told him that we're going to Disneyland and he has to pack and he made his bed and all neatly. He packed all of his clothes in the suitcase and then he walked out the door and he's like all happy. He has his sunglasses on and Chad is kind of... smiling a little bit giggling a little bit while sharing the story because i mean it's truly an innocent prank between siblings and then also
He's in a vlog. So I would imagine he's not like, yeah, this is why I got my bedroom taken away. I don't know. But Ruby starts yelling. Do you think that's funny? If you think it's funny, then that was seven months ago. Maybe you need longer without a bedroom. And she's glaring at him like a little Karen. He says, no, it wasn't funny. Ruby explains, that's why the bedroom setup has been this way, with the younger son getting a bigger bedroom.
Then the older son, who's a teenager. And Chad has been... has been given a very small bedroom, but even that's been taken away. She says, quote, he didn't get anything. He was sleeping on the floor in the family room and he just got his bedroom back and that's because he's shown up consistently without bullying the kids.
Chad also hasn't had a flip phone, smartphone, any kind of phone, and it's been over a year. Then she turns the camera to her younger daughter. And we took her phone away in November, and you may never get your phone back. The younger daughter just responds, yeah, probably not. If I was to go back and redo anything in parenting, this is Ruby telling her viewers, it would be to not give the kids a phone.
On both sides of her, these are teenagers. They just look like they're forced to be here. And now Ruby is taunting them like, you're never going to get your phone back. It's just all sorts of weird. But the saddest part is, in the background, you can hear Chad saying, well, now I have no friends. And Ruby turns the camera to him and says, you can play with your friends. Chad is trying to explain, no, like, I don't have friends.
The younger daughter chimes in, I don't have friends either. Chad says he has a new summer goal because he doesn't have friends to hang out with and he doesn't have a phone and he might not even have a bedroom that he's just going to focus on becoming the best athlete that he can. He loves football. Ruby asks him, and how do you feel about not having any friends? Sucks, but I don't feel safe or accepted in any friend group, so... Well, that was really vulnerable for you to say that on camera.
And then she just skips over Chad's feelings and says, What I have seen as a parent, when you decide to take things away, you really do want your kids to have these things. And it's been so, so difficult to take a phone away, to take a bedroom away, to take iPads away, to take access away. It hurts me.
as much as it hurts my kids like feeling bad like I feel bad which Chad calls her out on that so then what do you mean you have no intention of giving our phones back I mean it doesn't seem like you feel that bad about it then And she just excuses her behavior. In this 18-minute vlog, three of her six kids express to Ruby Frankie that they feel sad and upset because they have no friends.
And I don't know, maybe I have too much religious trauma. But this reminds me of the Sunday school teachers that force you to open up about something you're insecure about. And then they tell you, thanks for being so vulnerable. And then turn around and condemn you to the deepest, darkest pits of hell. And then you're like, oh. What was that for? Why did I even say anything?
Interestingly enough, Ruby sees nothing wrong with this whole situation to the point where she's willing to post it online. Even her editor, which has probably seen some insane things come from this woman, they think this is going to be the highlight of the entire vlog. They can kind of edit around this bed conversation and highlight it as the focal point. Teenage son doesn't have a bedroom for seven months. Ruby uploads the final video, makes it live.
And all hell breaks loose. The comments are coming in full speed. I feel so bad for the kids. Her parenting is horrible. These parents are insane. Imagine insisting that your kids under 10 manage their electronics independently while you yourself literally...
can't put your phone away to stop filming even when your children are completely clearly uncomfortable being filmed and hide from the camera. Eight passengers? More like six prisoners. You've got to be kidding me. Ruby Frankie is a disgusting mother. Bitch, I hope you die in your sleep.
These are the comments. Hi, I just wanted to tell you that I hope you rot in hell. You're a disgrace to the LDS community. You should be excommunicated. You're a godless woman. And with these comments and with this video. Everything starts tanking. I mean, they say the descent into hell is gradual. This feels like a broken elevator just dropping to the ground full speed. And the only person inside is Ruby Frankie. This channel goes from making $1,600 a day in just ad revenue.
That's not including brand partnerships. That's just people clicking on her videos. She's making close to $600,000 a year on this YouTube channel. Their daily views drop by more than 50%. And the bulk of their earnings, they come from brand partnerships, which... She's pulling deals with like Clorox, Narwhal, Ruggable. This is like wholesome family vlog branding. None of them want to be associated with a mom who spends all of her energy scheming up.
cruel and unusual punishments for her kids so seeing as their business is going down ruby and kevin take
Probably the most ill-advised action that they could in this situation, which is allegedly mass delivering a bunch of cease and desist letters to creators that were talking about their parenting, like commentary channels. Listen, I don't know. Cease and desist, they just light a... big fire under my butt i get so excited like why do you want me why do you want me to shut up what did i say but the worst response that ruby has in this situation is she makes this
full length Instagram post about everything happening in 2020 with Black Lives Matter, the senseless murder of George Floyd. And she tells the world this is without even apologizing or even addressing the bed situation with her son chat. She, a white woman who relates, she says she relates to George Floyd's hardships.
Her condensed Instagram post reads, My heart hurts for being accused of abuse when my motives have always been love and real abuse actually occurs on a daily basis throughout the world. The bad part is, as much as everyone wants Ruby to feel the deepest depths of internet cancellation, technically it still impacts the entire family. Sherry, the eldest daughter, the author of the book, she says,
I think our numbers were like consistently declining and any engagement that we did have was negative. So before this... they had their fair share of haters that would nitpick. Oh, I don't think Kevin's interested in Ruby anymore. Oh, I think this kid is a brat. I think she spoils her kids. They would have these little hate comments here and there, but it was generally seen as a positive family vlog channel.
And now it's just like the floodgates to hell have opened. Chad says, we're basically canceled. Our views just like tanked. We lost like 90% of our income. And a lot of netizens say they saw this whole thing coming. They comment, I liked Ruby, but it was getting obvious that she's obsessed with making her YouTube channel work, the giveaways, the acting silly when she's never acted that way before.
Other commenters are flooding her channel. I get major narcissistic mother vibes from Ruby. She favors kids, controls food portions, what they can wear. She looks perfect on the outside, but I get major creepy vibes from her. Major unhappiness inside their... home. Another one is diagnosing through the screen, which
Kind of problematic, but also maybe they're not wrong. I don't know. You tell me. Ruby gives me parenting traits that are similar to the queen character profile for narcissistic personality disorder. She's obsessed with attention. She loves the compliments about her looks. She loves hearing... people say she's a great mother she loves hearing people say she's a great wife but she seems so freaking fake I can't stand it Ruby does not self-reflect she decides everybody is wrong
This is cancel culture. They're trying to harm her and her reputation. She brings up to the world. She starts doing these little interviews and she tells everybody.
chad has his room back and i posted him doing like a room tour a few weeks ago and look how happy he is which by the way people start flocking to that video of him redecorating his room because he just got it back but we didn't know that at the time and it's under a new level of scrutiny and they realize that his bedroom door is doorless like there's no door the door has been taken off the hinges providing zero privacy which just adds an entire canister of gasoline to the fire
The Frankies respond by saying Chad chose the beanbag when he didn't have a bedroom for seven months because he said it was the most comfortable. Not a great start to addressing the situation, but they continue. He also removed the door to his bedroom in an effort to be transparent and help regain his parents' trust. That's crazy.
Unless Chad was caught with a Breaking Bad level meth lab in his room, which he obviously wasn't, how desperate do you have to be to try and earn your parents' trust to be this extreme? And I say that with all disrespect towards the Frankie parents and sympathy for Chad. Ruby continues, the reason that we got canceled was because I was demonstrating, as I have done from day one, what a responsible mother looks like. What is the motive for the hate being thrown at me? I'm the antidote.
to these kids acting out, and they know it. Wow. Understandably, everything that they're saying only makes the situation worse and worse. And it makes Ruby and Kevin look like even worse parents than the initial video, if you can even believe it. When this inevitably backfires, Ruby just stays glued to her computer. Kevin admits, yeah, Ruby likely started the entire family YouTube channel for money, yes, but also because...
Like I said, she just wants to be praised for being a great mom. He says, and when she sets her mind to something, hell and earth combined could not stop her. And she was going to make her vlog bigger and better than everybody else's. The success is actually not very immediate. In fact, Ruby's siblings, they all have their own family YouTube channels. This is, I didn't even know they were all related. I didn't even know they existed, to be honest. But before marrying Kevin...
and becoming Ruby Frankie, Ruby was Ruby Griffith. She's got four younger siblings. She's the oldest. And there's her brother, Bo. He and his wife, Emily, have a vlog channel. They're not the famous ones in the family, I guess you could say, but they have a vlog channel. And then there's Bonnie. She's married with four kids and vlogs pretty much every single aspect of her entire life. And then after Bonnie, in birth order, is Julie.
who has five kids and a YouTube channel. And then Ellie is the youngest, and she has four kids, and they're actually one of the more successful ones. At their height, eight passengers was the most successful out of all the Griffith family members.
And then it was Ellie and Jared. Wait, so... Every single sibling. Five family channels and it's all just Ruby's and her family. Yes. So five family channels. Oh, but get this. Ruby's parents... have a channel called grandma and grandpa griffith so all of them how many followers does ruby frankie's channel have
2.6 at her height. And then the... Ellie and Jared had, I think, close to two, but they had their birth video. So I think Ellie struggled with IVF and she finally was able to give birth. That birth video had like... million views oh wow so i mean they do get views and initially ruby was not the one doing the best on youtube that is until they upload their very first viral video very straightforwardly titled Baby climbs out of crib and then...
They just start blowing up. It's on camera 24-7. Kevin Franke is a professor at BYU, and Ruby is a stay-at-home wife, and now she's vlogging now. Kevin says, whenever I came in through that door, Wherever Ruby was, the camera was. He remembers in the beginning she would force him to vlog and she would say to the camera, you guys are always asking us, can we hear your kids play more? Can you please sing more Christmas carols? We'd love to see your family play some Christmas music.
And she's just smiling at the camera, waiting for Kevin to say something. And she's smiling, but kind of like a teacher that's telling you for the 10th time that you should not stick that eraser up your nose. And she finally angrily turns to him, I'm waiting. But I'd like to share a conversation with you. I'm listening to you talk. I'm sorry. I'd like to hear Ruby talk. I'm cutting all of this out. Help me out here.
she keeps huffing and puffing and finally he tries to say um i don't know where you want me to come in okay start over again i'll help here i'll pick it up okay ruby ready So one of the traditions that we do in this family, and she's just so intense, not just about capturing all the moments, but making them absolutely perfect, even if it's fake. Nevertheless. In the beginning, it's kind of cute and fun.
Everybody's having a good time. All the kids are having a good time. They're making some YouTube money. They're buying a new van. They're getting a bigger house. And they would be on the highway in their billboard of a car. It's got the eight passengers bumper sticker. It's like a truck. Honestly, it's like a bus.
I mean, you got to fit eight of them. People would drive up on the side of the highway and start waving and freaking out because they're like, I watch you on YouTube. One comment reads, I think this family is refreshing. I enjoy it when Ruby tells stories. And I think Kevin is really... someone else comments Kevin is an intelligent mature and masculine vlogger I find him very attractive which is exactly what I would write
if i were kevin but i digress kevin would say it's all ruby you know people loved ruby's personality and it it attracted an audience quickly which i mean i guess it's fine It's all fun and games until $85 hits the bank account. Something flips a switch in that moment. Kevin says, shortly after the first paycheck landed on our account, it was like $85. It felt amazing. And that first paycheck flipped me 180 degrees and I wanted more. The Eight Passengers LLC was born. Wait, Kevin said that? Yeah.
He said, I got $85 and that I was ready to go all in. I guess he thought this was like some little hobby his wife was doing. And then he was like, $85? Okay, okay. So like you can actually make money. Yeah. It's not a scam. So then he made eight passengers, LLC. Sherry, the eldest daughter, the author of the book, writes, the kids were all employees. That is how we were referred to. Employees. From then on, if they were ever to go on a family trip to vlog, they would want the kids to act
like employees rather than, oh, we're just going on a family trip because now we can afford it. And we're just going to vlog here and there so that people can stay in the know. Kevin says, all of a sudden, it wasn't just enough to interact with Ruby. I had to interact. with the camera.
which maybe someone would feel sympathy for him, but he would also, in the same vein, turn around and yell at his kids. Kevin would start scolding them. Well, Chad is acting horrible today. The whole purpose that we're here is because of our jobs. And you guys are... acting like this is stupid. Basically saying, ready, set, action, like get it together. Kevin would later say, the kids started to complain about everything, like...
I'm bored. We don't want to film. We're so tired of doing this. It really began to concern Ruby. She would describe it as, Losing their light is a wild thing to say. Ruby is both not self-aware or... and dramatic kevin which don't don't get me started on kevin there's a lot of thoughts about this man that we will get to in part three but kevin says ruby would constantly remind him kevin
the camera is millions of people watching us she really just wanted kevin to be the perfect husband that's how it's described
He says, she wanted me to be the even-keeled but strong patriarch of the family, but I wasn't. I was a nerd through and through. Which is... Which is kind of... simply a pick me thing to say but when asked did you exploit the situation did you exploit the kids kevin responds in the new hulu documentary absolutely i did All of that money, all of that payment came from one reason and one reason only.
My kids. And we started watching the paychecks go from like $2,000 a month to $8,000 a month to $20,000 a month. And at our peak, 100 grand or more per month. When further questioned on whether or not he felt bad about it, Kevin just responds, not at the time. I was raised with the idea of the cosmic vending machine. It's this idea that I can bargain with or do business with God. We believe that we were sharing goodness, Christianity with the whole world. And in return, God was blessing us.
Sherry, the author of the book, and she's been very outspoken against family vloggers. She says, our entire schedule revolved around YouTube. And I think that's where I started to have some issues. We always had to keep the house clean. We changed our lights from this. warm shade to just like a bright fluorescent white. It felt more like a set than a house. All for $85.
And that's just the beginning. This is going to spiral into like millions and millions of dollars. And then they're going to hit a million subscribers. Even for that, Ruby is sitting in her car crying. She's in the driver's seat. The car is parked. She's tearfully telling the camera. It is so fitting to hit a million while I'm like trying to squeeze in all these little things that I'm gonna do to serve my family. Like...
My big thing has always been that mothers are powerful and it's not just the big things that the mothers do that make them powerful. Power comes in the little things. So thank you. But a lot of our viewers started feeling like the more Ruby grows, the less we like her. One comment reads, It came across very honest and I felt like I was watching a real mom and now she seems like she's afraid to show her disciplining them and uses this weird baby talk.
which side note there is the baby talk is wild every little thing that her kids would do she would go oh my gosh oh my goodness oh my gosh It just did not feel genuine. Not that those words or phrases can't be genuine. It just didn't feel natural. Some are even comparing Ruby with her sister's writing, I think Ruby really tries to be like Bonnie, her younger sister. Her personality was never as bubbly before. This, hi guys, oh my gosh, I can't wait.
seems really fake now to me and i want to add that i do think that bonnie's true personality is bubbly but not ruby's seems forced that's a comment Others thought Ruby's clearly pretending to be a great mom to make money as a family vlogger. You could just tell she hates being a mom. They comment, Ruby strikes me as the type of person who craves intellectual stimulation. With Kevin traveling so much,
I think she gets restless. I get the impression that she struggles with being a stay-at-home mom much more than her sisters. She strikes me as someone who would have been very career-driven if circumstances were different. I mean, that's not to say that I don't think that she loves being home with the kids. I'm just saying. Some would just say, I like the vlogs, I like the family. But it's kind of weird watching it because the mom seems like she's just...
One little huff, one little wind, one little blowing out the birthday candle wind push away from just having a full-blown mental breakdown. She always seems like she's about to lose her mind. Like super tense? Yeah. Ruby Frankie has always been kind of a doomsday prepper. There's vlogs of her showing off her massive freeze dried food stash. Are you guys ready to be a food prepper with me? No. Emergency prepper.
Are you guys ready to be an emergency prepper with me? Wait, what was that? She's like redoing it for the vlog Oh, and then she posted that? No, these are in the unedited clips that were handed over to the Hulu documentary i believe the family consented to about a thousand hours of footage oh wow
Okay, yeah, so Ruby Frankie she is preparing for doomsday, but nothing is preparing her for the doomsday That is her entire online career just going up in flames. People are pulling up old vlogs. They're like no Not only did she take away her son's bed. There's a vlog clip of Ruby standing in line at Chick-fil-A and she says, this is us waiting in line to eat at Chick-fil-A.
Because we're supporting marriage between man and woman. And here's the end of the line. And she shows a very long line. We support Chick-fil-A. Woohoo! one comment reads disgusting she was saying that was fun it's fun fighting against people's liberties when it doesn't affect you so this was during a boycott the family hit a new low and they can't do anything to redeem themselves in my eyes Wow. Eating at Chick-fil-A because marriage should be between a man and a woman? Go screw yourself, Ruby.
Other comments read, they're standing in line to support marriage between a man and a woman. Has that ever been threatened in any way ever? No, they're standing in line to hate. Pure and simple as that. There's another deleted clip that has been deleted and launched into space to be forgotten, but Kevin had gone on this business trip to Japan. Ruby says in the vlog that he lost so much weight in Japan because...
all he was offered to eat were raw dogs and horse. To which Kevin even comes home and says that he's so happy to be home because the food is not raw anymore. Japanese cuisine has plenty of cooked dishes. If an adult is too dense to seek those out when they're hungry, I think that's more of a reflection of their survival skills, or lack thereof, or just common sense.
But one comment reads, he has eaten that crap food Ruby makes for so long that when he's offered real proper food, he does not even realize it. So at this point, all of these old vlogs are getting dug up. People are just jumping on to all of, look at this, what I found, look at this timestamp. And Kevin says enough. He says about the sudden hate, which I don't even know if I can call it hate, if it's genuine concern.
Chad's well-being and just outrage at the parents actions but Kevin claims the hate is pushed by the algorithm he says quote all of a sudden the algorithm began to recognize oh this is a hot topic so everyone scrambles Ruby takes the But I think that she was unprepared for what was the torrent of pure hatred that came through the door.
Ruby was devastated. You have to remember, Ruby was America's mom. And then for her to be viewed as this abusive monster, it haunted her. We saw it as an innocent religious family that's being attacked unjustly.
by cancel culture and cancel culture is winning so this is like you're saying after 2020 like the whole saga begins oh yeah that's what's happening right now and then from 2020 it just starts spiraling like more vlog footage she makes new vlogs that are controversial old vlog footage starts going viral and she just becomes like a major topic of commentary channels
But it hasn't really entered into, oh, I mean, at this point, there were calls to CPS, but it hadn't entered into this huge territory of, wait, this feels like a genuine investigation that the authorities need to do. At least not yet. So by this point, Kevin says, Ruby was effectively America's mom. She would confide to me that she was meant to be some sort of instrument in the hand of God. She was meant for something bigger than herself.
I mean, I don't know. The comments are still rolling in and nobody is fond of America's mom. People start speculating on even Ruby's marriage with Kevin. Does anybody else get the impression lately that Kevin has kind of checked out? I always get the feeling that he would rather be at work. He seems like he loves his kids, but is just going through the motions of his marriage.
Another comment reads when Ruby was making quesadillas in a vlog Kevin was eating tortilla chips and she was trying to express a romanticized favorite situation of hers Him being there watching her cook a meal for the family. I don't know. He's just so cold and unresponsible. Not in like an intentionally mean way. It was just kind of funny and sad. Mostly sad.
Another spectator says as much as I find Kevin to be smart and sexy, I am repulsed by cheaters. And if there is one YouTube couple where I suspect someone is cheating, it's Kevin. He appears to love his kids but he just seems so checked out of his marriage. Kevin does tell Insider that after this whole bed saga, the vlog of Chad sharing that he doesn't have a bed, that all of this was quote,
A moment of vulnerability and a part of Chad's story of redemption that showed his victory over the challenges that he's faced over the last several years. He's saying this was supposed to be an uplifting moment that the internet twisted as abuse. which is like a crazy way to try and romanticize it there's a very controversial book called visions of glory there's a lot of religious fanatics and extremists who believe in it to put it simply it is a book talking about
how the world is going to end. And we all need to be ready. Doomsday is a coming. According to the book, this is how we're going to know. Biological warfare will start a devastating... plague, disease. It's going to be secretly engineered as a bioweapon and it's going to come in and just kill billions of people on a global scale. The US drinking water is going to be almost fully contaminated, making it...
absolutely, utterly undrinkable unless you want to grow a fifth arm. But of course, the government is never going to tell you that. They're never going to warn you of that. This is what's going to happen. And then in 2020, everybody who is a fan of this book starts flipping out. This book has a lot of people just hiding in their bunker, going full on food preparations mode. The book states that there's going to be a plague.
They think COVID. The book also states that there will be massive economic collapse before doomsday. Banks will shut down, factories will close, and global businesses will cease to operate, which a lot of countries and businesses did abide by lockdown rules and laws in 2020. So now a lot of people who read this book are thinking we're getting on two for two, right? The third thing is the book states that there will be a massive earthquake.
That's going to destroy much of the West Coast in the US. Now, side note, this book is quite controversial amongst those of the LDS faith with most being upset that the book has not been condemned by the church yet. If you're part of the LDS faith, you're probably going to come across this book. And because it's not condemned by the church, you might read it thinking it's supported by the church and these are messages of the LDS faith. But it's extremely, it's just very extreme.
And a lot of other cult leaders and convicted killers have read this book, allegedly, and really loved it, like Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow. A small select group of people believe every single word in this book as if this is a future-telling machine on a piece of paper. So with that being said, the book states that a massive earthquake will destroy the West Coast. In 2020...
Salt Lake City, the headquarters of the LDS church, if you will, had a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. Now there's COVID. Kevin, Ruby's husband, says it's 2020. Everyone's dying from COVID. There's an earthquake in Salt Lake City. And the protest? It just felt like the world was ending. He says he actually got excited because it felt like the second coming. Kevin says everybody else was going to burn, but we felt like we were on the right side of it.
which i mean i guess if you do some mental gymnastics right but other doomsday extremists say there's actually a missing element that's not in this book An electromagnetic pulse is going to wipe out all of electricity. There's going to be a huge, massive shutdown of technology. And it's going to happen gradually. Which maybe to Ruby...
That's what this feels like. A full-blown attack on the internet her entire life is collapsing in like a few months netizens are still going through back catalogs of vlogs downloading watching and time stamping every single strange thing that she's done making a list to call cps about ruby claims that there were like a thousand calls made to cps because of her if you go to school and you say teacher my dog ate my homework nobody's gonna believe you but this is probably worse
My mom threw my homework away and told me that I would have to pay cash to get my homework back, but I couldn't pay her cash to get my homework back because I don't have money. In one vlog, Ruby and Kevin are sitting at the dinner table with all six kids. Ruby pulls out a big trash bag and it looks like it's filled with binders and journals. Chad tries to grab for it saying, that's my homework. Ruby waits for every single kid to be quiet and states,
If you have something in the bag that you would like to get out, you can pay cash for it. So you learn the value of your items. Or you can give... Dad, I'll let you take the conversation from here. She points the camera at Kevin. Kevin thinks about it. Or you can do an equivalent value chore to get it back and whatever isn't claimed by the end of the day goes in the trash. Ruby decides her kids need to pay her.
to do their homework so that they can learn the value of their items. It's also worth noting that that's just crazy. Netizens are commenting, imagine showing this to your teacher. Another netizen points out something that's even more frustrating, which is, quote, you know, Ruby actually used to make her kids pay her if they got bad grades. So this is especially insidious. So they have to pay her to do the homework. But if they don't do the homework, they're going to get bad grades.
pay her anyway and on top of that she makes money by vlogging the entire thing another netizen writes I wouldn't just tell my teacher what happened if this video is posted I'm showing them Day in my life videos are like a YouTube starter pack, which Ruby does share her family schedule and it's...
It's rigorous. Sherry, the eldest daughter, wakes up at 5.30 in the morning to practice the piano. At 6 a.m., the rest of the kids get up and they do scripture time. Immediately after, they all have to practice their own musical instruments. The violin, the flute, the harp, everybody. practice and then it's chores and then you get ready for school.
To which one comment reads, I'm all for kids having chores and responsibilities, but that morning routine is ridiculous. There is no need for a seven-year-old to be out of bed at 6 a.m., read scripture, practice the falutes, sort and fold, put away the... laundry of a family of eight people, have breakfast, get ready for school, make lunch, make her bed, do 20 minutes of reading and then go to school all day. Even typing that out, I'm so exhausted.
And what does Ruby even do all day? All her chores are done before 8am by her own children. All she has to do is cook dinner. In one vlog clip, Ruby's little daughter, I would guesstimate... She's maybe around 4 at this point. She's hopping down the stairs. So these are all the vlog clips that are coming out now.
She's hopping down the stairs happily, but Ruby is shoving the vlog camera in her face, aggressively telling her, we are going to the movie, so go get on your shoes. Naturally, the first question someone has is, what movie? Yeah, one movie, right? But this is even stranger because the aggressive manner in which Ruby is talking about the movie, the message and the tone don't make sense. I would naturally feel like this is a setup.
I feel like you're punishing. Like, why are you yelling at me if we're going to the movies? So the little girl asks innocently, what is it? And Ruby's voice is so aggressive. Does it even matter? If someone asked me if I wanted to go to a movie, I wouldn't ask what it is. Run and go get your shoes or you're not going to go.
This is a vlog that she posted. This is not from the unedited footage from the Hulu documentary. Ruby's thin lips are set in an even thinner line and she just vlogs herself calling the babysitter in front of her kid to see if she can come and watch the... little girl because the punishment for asking which movie they're seeing is to just not be able to go watch the movie at all I know this sounds a little bit dramatic but the way that Ruby is doing this to her own child who is
very young, I think it feels emotionally terrorizing. And the whole time Ruby is on the phone with the babysitter, her daughter is just clinging to her leg, apologizing. And her voice is so small, she's like, sorry, sorry. Ruby gets off the phone, sets up the camera so that she can sit in front of it, and she's very disappointed because the babysitter is not available.
She says, Kevin, I'm not taking her unless she comes and gives me a huge apology. You come and give me a hug and you come and say you're sorry. I did. No, again, where I can pay attention. Ruby's sitting down and says, it was not very thankful of you. I was excited and told you to go get on your shoes and jacket to see a movie. And you should say, okay.
And be thankful and be grateful instead of saying, well, what movie? Well, I don't know. Let me think about it. That's not very grateful. And I'm not going to take a girl who's not very grateful. Can you show some more gratitude? Okay, give me a big hug. To which the comments are just ripping into Ruby, rightfully so. A huge apology for what? If somebody asked me if I wanted to go to the movie, I would ask what it is. That would be the very first question I ask.
To which another person writes, I think Ruby is obsessed with the feeling of empowerment and control that it gives her in the ability to manipulate her children's emotions based off of her own reactions. it's clear she's terrorizing her kids I think it's a very natural and part of the development process for kids to just be so messy I think they naturally make messes
But when the youngest daughter ends up experimenting with nail polish and evidently spilling some nail polish on the bath mat, it's not even a big deal. There's not even that much nail polish and it's on the bath mat. Ruby feels confused because... The little girl decides she needs to hide for 30 minutes because she's that scared of her mom. Ruby is confused by that action, the hiding? She's like, where is she? Where is she? Is she seriously hiding?
which I would just think that's alarming. Like, how does that not register in your mind? Hey, why are my kids hiding from me? Instead, Ruby vlogs it. She's been missing for 30 minutes. They finally find her under the bed where Ruby, quote, I guess if you want to call it playfully, but not really playfully, pulls her by the leg and drags her out. I mean, it doesn't look physically painful.
It's just visually a lot. She says, you're going to have to write I'm dead now because you're in so much trouble. Ruby says the little girl is going to go straight to bed. She will not be joining the family who are all going to go outside for cookies. I just don't understand that kind of parenting response. I think the appropriate response would be, hey, if you want to paint your nails next time, why don't you ask for help?
She's just trying to paint her nails. It's not like she was trying to smear it on the walls, which even then it's like, why were you trying to do that? Let's talk about it. The worst part is Ruby is vlogging herself cleaning the floors and she says all of the discipline takes place off camera.
But one of the consequences is she will not be getting her nails painted for a solid month. And that's like her favorite thing, which is to have me do her nails. Which I do think that sometimes kids teach themselves their own life lessons. Like in this case. The little girl is asked to apologize on the vlog again to Ruby. And the way that she processes her emotions despite Ruby's ass parenting is quite mature for her age.
But I just don't understand why she still needs punishment. It's very depressing. She's just explaining how she was very excited and then she hid because she got very scared because she made a mistake and she felt really bad. In another clip, the kids are told to stay home from school to keep the house clean.
So she's just vlogging them, just wiping down every baseboard, every window. I think if I were to hire a team of full-time professional cleaners, I don't think that they would be that thorough. It's just very bizarre. It's like she has six kids to have a full army of cleaning staff. But the second that they do anything that a kid normally does, such as...
leaving a pair of socks around. They're scolded so firmly on camera. Likely stricter punishment happening off camera. Sometimes they would even be forced to do push-ups because they left their sock outside.
So while Ruby is overly strict, she's not particularly attentive to her kids. She's vlogging in the kitchen when Chad, he's younger at this point. He's like 10, 11 in this clip. Ruby's talking about his football game, which Chad... loves football he's very good at football he wants to earn a scholarship one day this is how he wants to make a name for himself this is very important to him ruby says dad's taking you to your game right okay well i don't think i'm gonna go
Are you okay with that? Chad looks really sad and he just shrugs. It's fine. You never come. Don't say that. Our viewers are going to think that I never come to your games. Well, that's true. I go to your games. Yeah, one. And last season you only came to like two games. You're ratting me out. You're making me look bad. Chad looks genuinely sad. He...
has his arms crossed on the kitchen island table and he's just staring off into space. He looks like he's trying not to cry, but Ruby still has the camera pointed in that direction. He's in the frame of the vlog and she just starts goofing around with her younger son next to Chad.
not addressing how he feels, completely bulldozing his feelings. But also, do you have a job? Like, why can't you go to his game? Is that not your job? I don't understand. It's not like she's like, I have this important meeting and I need to go to put food on the table. I love you. I'm sorry.
Comments read, I felt so bad for Chad. Ruby didn't even seem to feel bad about missing his games. What else does she do that's so important that makes her miss something that is obviously important to her son? Other netizens feel bad for Chad in other ways. They comment, her kids must think she's a lunatic. She's always making them wait in the back of the car for like 30 minutes as she goes on these little monologues by herself to the camera.
They're just like in the back waiting patiently and Another valid point is Ruby always says that she's too busy all the time to support her kids But she forces Sherry and Chad the two eldest to take care of the rest of the four kids while they're still children. Side note, Ruby will even vlog the fact that her two youngest haven't even showered in like a week, just truly showcasing her great parenting skills. And people are...
Digging all of these up. Others have noticed in the timelines throughout the vlogs. Let's say she takes kid A to the dentist. And in this vlog, let's say it's November of 2023. The dentist is like, your kid has so many cavities. Like we got to really watch out for the cavities. Tone it down on the sugar. Make sure you're flossing. Make sure you're brushing your teeth. Like this isn't good. The next time they come to the dentist, now she's got nine cavities.
Like even more even more and again, I get it like kids will eat their snacks though Probably hide chocolates in their room and then you don't find them until it's melted into the mattress, but still it's Up to you as a parent to make sure that they're doing these things so that they don't get more cavities. It feels like she doesn't care to support or help her children. It's one thing if you keep trying and trying and trying and your child goes out of their way to keep getting.
cavities somehow, but that's not the case. It just feels like Ruby constantly gets upset that nobody is up to her standard, punishes them, but then gives her children zero support or resources to get better so that they can meet her standard. So for example, one of the younger daughters was failing math. It's like a...
It's been mentioned multiple times in the vlogs. Ruby clearly knows that this daughter is failing math, just like the cavities. She has no intention of helping or supporting her kids. She doesn't mention, I'm going to help you with your math homework. She doesn't mention, I'm going to get you a math tutor.
just nothing she just keeps bringing it up and like haha she's failing math on that daughter's birthday she gets gifted the maze runner book series she's so excited to read it she's been asking for this set for
I don't know how long, okay? She's been begging for these books and Ruby is letting her soak in the excitement of this. She's vlogging every second of it and then she turns the camera to herself and she's got this like... twisted smile on her face i hate to do this to you on your birthday but your math teacher has been telling us that you've been missing work and that you read all the time and you have an f in math side note
kevin the dad who's also a professor at a local college he's like in the back of the vlog and he seems shocked that his daughter is failing at math like how do you not know what's going on in your kids lives really yeah he's like what what does he teach Oh, geographical like soil or something. What? Okay. Yeah. Now Ruby continues, you can't just read till you catch up with your math.
It's like she waited to give her the present. Watch her get so excited until she's like, I want to go upstairs and read this right now. And then she's like, haha, jokes on you because you're failing math. You can't read it until you get your math.
grades up oh she took it away yeah that's crazy okay i it's so bizarre and i'm not here to judge anybody's parenting because i don't have children so i don't know what it's like to guide someone through academia but i would imagine it it would be better to be like hey maybe don't open it until we work on your math homework together but like why go through this whole torturous process
In another vlog, allegedly, I did not see this clip for myself, but one of Ruby's children, because this has been like deleted into the ether. One of Ruby's children has come up to Ruby to explain that she... Thought that there was a hole in the changing room that she went on to try on clothes. Yeah, I found this like this comment in the depths of a snark fora from like 2016. But she said there's a hole.
in the changing room. But not only that, she just felt like something popped out and touched her. Maybe it was a bug. Maybe it was a rat. Maybe it was nothing. But she was clearly freaked out. Ruby completely ignores her so that she can keep on vlogging. Just nothing. Doesn't care.
She's overly strict. She has weird punishments. She's not attentive. And also, she borderlines dystopian. In another vlog moment, Ruby tells Chad that there's no texting at the dinner table. They force him to hand over his phone, which happens to be a flip phone. They gave him a flip phone. So Kevin the father starts reading out Chad's text messages to the girl out loud. Not just for his family, which is already embarrassing enough, but for the entire vlog.
And this is, I'm assuming all of his friends are watching these vlogs. Yeah, that's freaking sick. And again, this would be all fun and games between friends that are of age. And it's like, okay, you know.
people do funny things on the internet he he ha ha it's a great tiktok as long as everybody thinks it's fun but the parent and son dynamic yeah and he was the son wasn't consenting no he was he was embarrassed yeah it's like grabbing your freaking journal and just start reading your diary like that's crazy
It's very dystopian that they're mad at their son for texting at the dinner table whilst they, the parents, are vlogging. Humiliating. Yeah, vlogging and humiliating. But it gets worse because Chad has a flip phone, which I think...
hypocritical parents are the worst. Ruby is putting Chad's entire life on the internet from the moment that he wakes up to the moment that he goes to sleep like five days a week. All of his personal information, his daily schedule, and even his thoughts, his text messages are up online.
Technology and the internet are so integrated into Ruby and consequentially Chad's life, yet he gets a flip phone. Ruby even jokes in the vlog, the only downside to giving your kids a flip phone is I swear I have to remember how to work it every time I go through it. Notably, it's also very strange that the kids' social media accounts are heavily monitored or they're not allowed to have one. Meanwhile, Ruby posts every single part of their business on social media.
She would even force Chad to smile for a thumbnail, which he clearly did not want to be a part of, and he tells her to her face, I hate smiling at a lens. Ruby does not care, as long as she gets her shot. In another video, Ruby is sitting right next to Chad. She's reading from her phone. Oh, this next one's really good. I think this was a partnership she's doing. I think it's like connecting parents with teens. She says...
The next one is really good. It says, do you think your teen's mental health is more important than school and grades? She turns to Chad and Chad looks like he would rather be on the surface of Mars. He looks very disinterested. Maybe also guarded because he probably knows whatever she's going to say next is going to be really hurtful. He just shrugs. And then she blows up. Chad, are you willing to help me out or not? You seem really distant.
Ruby, perhaps a moment of self-reflection and just asking yourself the simple question of why am I treating my kids terribly? And maybe you wouldn't have to waste so much breath wondering and asking, why do my kids seem distant? Why won't they vlog with me? Like, I don't understand. Get it together. Chad would later say, I purposely said the wrong lines. I purposely tried to make my mom as pissed as she possibly could be. I made things hard for her. I don't really know why.
One of the more egregious clips, though, is from when Chad's friend's father, so Chad's friend's father, tragically self-exits. And I'm sure the news shocked the entire community and Chad is just not doing well. Instead of Ruby spending time with Chad to make sure that he feels like he has support, to guide him through this very... difficult time of grief with all of these complicated emotions
Ruby just keeps vlogging every single person in the house as they're just bursting into tears. She's filming herself crying, talking to her children about it. She never comforts Chad. She would even vlog him laying just... less despondent on the bed. And she says, and I don't know why, what compelled her to even say this? She says, in situations like this, if you haven't been kind, you can feel a lot of regret. I don't know what she's insinuating.
if you haven't been kind you can feel a lot of regress so is that implying that she hasn't if she hasn't been kind to the deceased She would feel guilt. It sounds like she's saying that to Chad. And I just don't. What? Yeah. And I don't picture Chad being rude to his friend's dad. I think it's probably the very natural feeling of. I wonder if I could have done something or said something or maybe I could have noticed something. Right. But it was just bizarre.
Humiliation also becomes a big part of the vlogs. Ruby is holding the cameras. She's standing in the bathroom and she says, my daughter has been asking me all summer if she can shave her legs and armpits. Her daughter looks at her like she just betrayed her on camera. I never said that. I don't want to shave. You don't? No.
Side note, it has been discussed on the vlogs before that this specific daughter has been getting bullied in school. And I don't know, maybe I'm reaching, maybe I'm connecting dots that don't exist because I have a thing where I compulsively shaved my arms for years because I got made fun of for having hair on my... arms when I was younger and I wonder if in the hypothetical world
if she had been bullied for her body hair, her mother announcing it to the world that she has been asking and begging to shave it would only encourage the bullies. Because a big part of me getting bullied about my arm hair would be to act like it didn't bother me.
because then it's like now they know that you're insecure about it so she's like no i don't want to and even if that's not the case and i'm just crazy and i'm reaching why put this on the internet for all of your kids friends to see especially as a young teenager like that's a very complicated time but Ruby being her kid's very first bully she says you don't I think your armpits need to be shaved more than your legs do let me see and she just reaches into her daughter's shirt to
I guess, see her armpit hair to touch it? I don't know what we expect at this point. Ruby announces to her vlogs every time her kids pee the bed. She proudly says the way she handles it is, Aww! That's okay. Just sleep on the floor in the bathroom. There's also a lot of other humiliating titles in the Eight Passengers archive. Sherry even says that when you Google someone's name,
Like the next word that comes after it is typically like the most Googled. And she's saying this in a vlog. She says next to her name is always Sherry Frankie period. Because Ruby had vlogged her getting her first period. And it just seemed like she was uncomfortable. Other titles include At School Wet My Pants, Bra Shopping with the Brothers, First Time Shaving. It's like the kids are sick and throwing up Canon or Sony. The kids are buying their first training boss. Should we use Canon or Sony?
But one thing Ruby states repeatedly is that she will never discipline her kids on camera. That is reserved for off camera, which is bizarre because everything you put on camera, one bamboozled netizen writes, so she's going to film her daughter buying a train. Do you remember that trend that was going around where you get your dog's favorite stuffed animal or like your child's favorite stuffed animal and you just beat it?
I don't know why parents were filming themselves being their child's personal emotional terrorist, but it was like a trend briefly. I don't know if it was a big trend or if the trend was people reacting to the very select few weird people that did it. Where you grab your...
Child's favorite doll and just like punch it. Yes. It's like the kids reaction Yeah, it's like if we were to grab my niece's rabbit and then just started punching the rabbit in front of her and then vlogging her reaction It's like unhinged. I don't know why people were doing this This is the next level of that.
Ruby's youngest daughter is going through her scissor phase. My nieces are currently going through their scissor phase. They're told at school, you got to learn how to use safety scissors to cut shapes with scissors. You could be in the same room doing arts and crafts with them. You drop your piece of paper, you bend.
it down they've cut off half your hair it's just a thing they're safety scissors they don't get harmed it's not dangerous i mean don't leave them with it unsupervised but again scissor phase very real very normal Ruby's youngest daughter has taken scissors and cut a few things in the house that
probably wasn't supposed to cut. Ruby decides instead of being like, wow, why did I leave those scissors out? That could have been dangerous. Good thing she cut that rather than harming herself accidentally, even though they're safety scissors.
Ruby decides, no, the best course of action to take here is to grab the camera in one hand and shove it in this little girl's face, take her beloved stuffed cat on the other hand, hold it by the neck, and threaten her own daughter if you co- one more thing in the house look at me i'm going to take the scissors and i'm gonna cut its head off real not real cat right no her stuffed animal but like trauma when they're this young yeah that's like a real person in there
They're imagine that their stuffed animals are like a good source of comfort. I mean It's like their best friend. The girl looks genuinely stressed out. She looks like she's watching a hostage video because she is. She's four years old. This is her best friend. And her sweet, loving, caring, family-friendly mother just threatened to decapitate it.
In another Since Taken Down vlog from 2016, there's a clip where they're all packing to go somewhere. Ruby asks one of her young daughters what she packed in her bag, and the young daughter starts crying and getting nervous because she's scared that Ruby's not gonna let her take her comfort stuffy. netizens are commenting growing up with a narcissistic dad i used to cry
Every time I was nervous around him, even if it was for nothing, I can feel the little girl's anxiety. It makes me wonder if Ruby has an explosive temper behind closed doors or something. To make matters worse, netizens point out that Ruby looks surprised and confused that this is her daughter's favorite stuffy, which is so strange. It leaves netizens to question, does she not know her kids? Does she not tuck them in at night? That doesn't even make sense.
In another clip, one of the kids finally confesses that she spilled something in her backpack and therefore she ruined her backpack. It's unsalvageable. Which, the fact that you have to confess something like that to your parents is odd. The way that she's holding her backpack while Ruby is vlogging her, she looks terrified. Her face is blurred for her privacy, but... She keeps blinking and scrunching her nose and those seem like very intense anxious coping mechanisms for high anxiety.
While her daughter is clearly in distress, Ruby says, well the camera's rolling so I can't get that mad. It helps keep me under control. The child starts crying and Ruby has this weird, fake, sympathetic voice. Oh, honey, don't cry. Oh, honey, I'm not mad at you. I feel bad for you.
To which the comments now read, imagine a backpack feeling like it's the end of the world. This is so sad. It's not even a big deal. A simple accident and she's terrified of her own mother. Another one reads, her nervous ticks are heartbreaking. One of the most damning clips of Ruby, though, is of her in the car vlogging. She's wearing a bright yellow beanie. This is probably worse than the Chad Bed saga, or it's like right up there.
So all these other ones are coming out and I think that people are making videos on them. But unless you're really in the Frankie world, I don't know if they would have hit as many people of like, did you see what's going on? Because this is alarming. Ruby is wearing a bright yellow beanie. She holds up her phone. I just got a text message from youngest daughter's teacher, and she said that she did not pack a lunch today. And can I bring over a lunch to the school?
This happens quite often when you're having raising children because I know that her teacher is uncomfortable with her being hungry and not having a lunch. And it would ease her discomfort if I came to the school with a lunch. But I responded and I just said, she's responsible for making her lunches in the morning. And she's actually told me that she did pack a lunch. So the natural outcome is that she's just going to need to be hungry. And hopefully nobody gives her food.
steps in and gives her a lunch because then she's not going to learn from the natural outcome. My hope is that she will be hungry and come home and go, oh man, that was really painful being hungry all day. I will always make sure to have a lunch with me. The child in question that she's talking about is five years old. I don't even know a single five-year-old that packs their own lunch. I was in high school and my mom was helping me pack lunches.
The clip was a huge point of contention along with the Chad being bedless. I mean, there's something about these moms not giving their kids food, proper nutrition, and beds. Like, it's a prerequisite before you get put in jail. Ash Trevino needs to get advised. to get her kids a bed regardless i have never ever heard of a kid being responsible for packing their lunch at that age and like how vicious do you have to be to state out loud that you hope your child starves and nobody helps them.
Kevin and Ruby tried to justify what happened, saying the internet took them out of context once again, saying that the real reason that Ruby did not bring her daughter a lunch to the school is because the drive would take 45 minutes. By the time that Ruby would be there to drop off the food, the school day would be over. nobody said that in the clip the comments read and this is what she's voluntarily sharing on the internet imagine what she's doing behind closed doors
In another vlog clip that has been resurrected from the depths of the YouTube graveyards, Ruby is on the phone with her second youngest. Again, probably 8 years old at the time, if not younger. She tells him, I hate to tell you this honey, but unless you find a friend who's willing to share their food with you, I don't think you're going to be able to eat.
But if you're not responsible for your lunch and your lunch money, that's the natural consequence. And I'm really sorry you're learning this the hard way. I will have a wonderful yummy snack waiting for you when you get home. Just hang in there today and just make up your mind and you're going to be really careful to grab your stuff when you go to school next time. And maybe you have a good friend who will share half their sandwich with you.
That's all. I'm sorry. She hangs up and she tells the viewers while smiling he sounds like he was going to cry or something. In another seemingly innocent but not at all innocent vlog, Ruby is in the kitchen with her kids and she says, Sundays after church when we all just clean through the leftovers, it's like the highlight of my week. I love it so much.
One of the kids comes up to say, it is. Mom doesn't get mad at us for eating anything. She responds, that and the kids just open up like everyone's pretty relaxed. Probably because they're not starving. It's been a... Point of contention throughout the Frankie vlogs, that the kids never have enough food. When she vlogs the dinner table, it's never enough food. When she vlogs her grocery hauls, it's never enough food.
One comment reads everyone's relaxed because maybe they're not fighting for survival in their own home. Every single meal that Ruby shows online. is neither nutritious nor filling, and it does not appear that the kids have free access to food. The Frankies, even before all of this, the whole scandal, they had multiple instances where their own viewers were just up in arms about the fact that
they kind of starve their kids. Ruby would vlog what's for dinner or she would do the grocery hauls and there's no produce, no fruit, no meat. Anything of nutritional value in the hauls is just absent. Most of it is carb-filled junk. Yet Ruby is very unhappy. She complains the entire time at how expensive each trip to the grocery store has been, which most people agree. Groceries are expensive, but she's choosing these carb heavy, easily prepared meals.
that are probably selling at a premium at this point a lot of netizens are saying honestly produce might be cheaper so why are you not getting it one comment reads i am a bit stunned in ruby's video about their food supply she doesn't seem to feed the kids any vegetables Maybe tomatoes in the spaghetti sauce, but she seems to feed the kids carbs all day, every day. I was a bit surprised that vegetables were not seemingly a priority for the kids. Another netizen agrees. She feeds the kids crap.
All carbs, stuffed to fill the belly but not provide much nutrition, very light on the meat, and almost no fruits and veg. Or another comment reads, stop moaning about buying food for your family when you're basically making money off the backs of your kids. Her grocery hauls are pretty terrible. No vegetables, maybe a small bowl of fruit, little meat, and a whole heap of snacks.
definitely carb loads her meals with very little nutrition. All I see are tacos, like frozen tacos, bread rolls, cookies. Everything is beige and cheap. Even Ruby admits herself that she does not eat enough. She says, it's really painful to up my food budget, but I think it's necessary because I have to eat more. I'm going to eat more. I want to eat more. I don't really like being hungry.
It's just very strange that Ruby has such an unrelenting grip on wanting to control the food, the budget. She wants to be perceived as the perfect mom, but she cannot hide the fact that she's not. There's this Korean song called Like, Oma said she doesn't like black bean noodles. It's when... your mom doesn't have money so you eat the black bean noodles. Your mom tells you she doesn't like black bean noodles and later the singer goes and she's digging it out of the trash to eat it with rice.
The leftovers. But for Ruby, the mere thought... of upping the grocery budget to feed her kids would send her into cardiac arrest and this is clearly not a case of she can't afford it one comment reads her nacho night was just sad literally just two trays of chips cheese and leftover pulled pork maybe it would have been good
But how about some freaking fruits or vegetables or something substantial? And I saw one of Ruby's kids cramming a whole burrito thing into her mouth like she's desperate for food. Ruby is always saying cooking is her passion and she loves making recipe videos, but it sure doesn't show. There's like a whole compilation on TikTok filled with the kids faces. So for this video.
likely blur most of it, but you can hear Ruby's voice and it's just her threatening them with food. I'm going to tell you one more time and then you're going to lose the privilege to eat dinner. In a separate clip, she says, and my kids are literally starving. I hesitate to even say this because I'm going to sound like a mean barbarian. But I told the kids, I said, I'm not even going to let you eat breakfast until you get your chores done.
Here is a very non-comprehensive list of all the times that she's threatened her kids with starvation. Stop crying or I'm going to have you go upstairs and you won't have any breakfast. In another clip, she says, I'll buy an expensive cereal and say this needs to last us a whole week. And it's gone in an hour. The boundary is, I don't buy cereal anymore. And you get oatmeal. Until I believe the children will be boundaried with the cereal. The self-confidence.
of someone with such little common sense is terrifying. If your kids can eat what you think should last a week in an hour, then your portion size math is not adding up. There's a clip of Sherry, the eldest daughter and the New York Times bestseller. She says,
Our lunch is a little bit different than yesterday because Mondays and Fridays are 1900 calorie days. And then Tuesdays and Thursdays are 1700 calorie days. And then Saturday and Sunday and Wednesdays are 1500 calorie days. And today is 1700. Which the fact that Ruby has put out these arbitrary rotating calorie days, which by the way, none of these even provide enough calories for most active growing teenagers. It's just very sick.
many netizens are left wondering at this point, how is it even possible that she posted all these vlogs? One writes, I find it difficult to fathom that dinner's Ruby gets away with serving. Recently, one of her kids complained about having chicken noodle soup for dinner again, and it seems like they had it the night before. I took a good look at the table, and it was like a modest little bowl of soup.
was all that was served. There weren't any dishes to indicate bread or salad to be served along with the soup. Ruby just encouraged everyone to eat so they won't have soup again for the next dinner. The whole video blew my mind. Another comment reads, my question is, how are none of the teachers reporting this? Or another reads, so abuse is being broadcasted on YouTube in broad daylight? Using food as a form of punishment literally pisses me off to no end.
The irony in all of this is that Ruby prepares for the end of the world with freeze-dried food. She's obsessed with food prepping. I'm pretty impartial to doomsday prepping. What do I know about when the world is going to end? Emergency stock, highly recommend. Probably advisable. An entire food storage room with freeze-dried foods, 100 pounds of rice and orange juice mixed powder. It's kind of excessive. She has all of that. Yeah, and her kids are starving.
And because I'm just on a rant here, there's another vlog clip of Ruby telling her viewers that her youngest daughter is manipulating her into letting her stay home by saying that she's sick when she's not. She makes her out to be this little vindictive girl with big evil plans. of like a...
PSYOP takeover. She's a kid. She's a child. It is only when Ruby takes her temperature and realizes that she has a fever of 101 that she admits, okay, fine. She's not manipulating me. She says to the vlogs and I could hear her.
whimpering and crying. And then at four in the morning, she came in and got in bed with me and she was just whimpering. Don't you hate it when your kid is sick and they don't have a fever until the whining starts? I just thought the whining was because she was manipulating me. Not true, I guess. She's not feeling well. All of this...
had somewhat been circulating online. But again, it's not until the bed saga that all of these get dug up from the YouTube graves and they start recirculating. And speaking of the bed situation, a lot of netizens have problem with Ruby's bed buying tendencies. or lack thereof, very similar to Ash Trevino, she would just not get her kids the necessities when she can clearly afford to.
There would be moments in the vlogs where she expected her kids to be grateful. She would demand some sort of big response in exchange for purchasing them socks. Not like new fancy socks that all the kids are wearing that they really don't need, but like their current socks all have holes in them. Other netizens back in 2016 even felt it was odd that in the videos,
The kids would be gifted on their birthdays things like bedding. Sheets that they desperately need. Not like, ooh, this is the new anthropology sheet that I need. They don't have sheets. Birthday present? Some people were commenting, I noticed everyone seemed to be overly excited about getting pillows, which I found was odd. another comment reads i think parents are supposed to provide you with a bed sheets pillows etc independent of your birthday same goes for socks question mark
Another comment reads, the birthday presents were the last straw for me. Passing off a bed that one of her kids needed as a birthday gift is disgusting. You provide your children with a bed and bedding period. That's not a gift. The kids were also never seen having enough clothes. They would have about five total outfits each. And the problem is that Ruby was obsessed with...
Very distinct articles of clothing. So it's not like she would get a simple white shirt for her kids that you could wear maybe three times a week and everybody at school thinks, oh, maybe you have five white shirts. They're like very distinct. And they would be wearing the same outfit three, four times a week. Which is just... A lot of kids get bullied for stuff like that.
One comment reads, Ruby is constantly having to wash clothes seeing as all their kids only have about four full outfits and because she's continuously washing them, they start looking like just threads on the kids' bodies. Someone agrees writing, Ruby complains so much about the kids wearing down their clothes and in the same breath, she mentions how they only need a few outfits. What's going on?
And when the kids would get sick, Ruby, the maternal instinct just coursing through her veins, decides to quarantine the sick kid. So one of the sons was sick. I would say he looks like... five years old. She doesn't want the other kids to get sick. which I get it, fine, right? She grabs a whole duvet set, pillows, a blanket, and she puts him in the bathroom, on the floor. Okay, you know there's a regular bathroom where you have the sink and then you have the shower.
Then you open a small little closet door and then you just have the toilet. That's it. Just the toilet. She put him right next to the toilet in that tiny little closet room. The water closet. Okay. And he's sick. His whole face is red. Why? Like a punishment? No, because... Just quarantine the kid in the toilet? Yes. Okay.
I think like two-ish years ago, I went through a very rough round of hand, foot, mouth disease, which was passed on by my little niece. Every single nail and toenail fell off. I'm not even kidding. It's a household joke now. But even now, when our two nieces are sick,
everyone's just trying to make them feel better they're like bringing them the favorite soups they sleep with my sister when they're sick because they're not feeling well and they usually want to cuddle my sister Ruby makes them sleep in a toilet room But it's also the way that she's mentally raising them. One comment reads,
Those poor little girls have motherhood and subsequently being a housewife pushed on them from so early on. Save thinking about children for when you're not children yourselves. It's silly to think about that now. Another comment reads, I rarely comment anywhere anymore, but in their newest video, I was so glad when I heard Ruby say to Sherry, you could be a great teacher or a lawyer or engineer, et cetera, et cetera. But then Ruby goes on and says,
Most importantly, a good mother. I realize it's important to be a good mom in their culture, their religion, and even would have just been fine to include into the list, like, and a good mom. But most importantly... It is likely that it's because Ruby got married at 18. She had her first baby at 21 and she never really had her own life. And for whatever reason, she wants the same things for her kids. She prides herself in it. In a video, she says, I just want to tell you an example.
experience that I had an English class that you really can be and do anything you want. I was in an advanced English class so everyone who was in the class was ambitious and we had a college prep person talk to us and we went around the room.
And we had to stand up, say our name, and what we wanted to be when we grew up. And everyone that stood up said, lawyer, doctor, all these wonderful ambitious goals. And when it was my turn to stand up, I said I wanted to be a mother. And the lady said, said that's okay and what else do you want to be and I said a housewife I want to stay home and my teacher said Ruby
I would like to see you at the end of class. And he let me have it about how I was not being ambitious and how I was going to let my talents go and I was settling. And I think that day marked a time in my life where I said, you know what? Not only am I going to do it. And show him who's who, you know. I'm going to be good at it. I'm going to be a mom and a housewife. And I'm going to be a good mom.
And this is how good of a mom Ruby is. In a separate interview she shares a story where she has no sense of self-awareness of how cruel she is. She shares every little sinister story like it's a cute wholesome lesson. She says, a year ago, my daughter was saying her prayers. She was six years old at the time. She was saying her prayers and she said the cutest thing. I thought it was so cute and I started laughing. She said, dear heavenly father, please help me to survive.
And I just thought it was so cute it took me off guard and I just kind of giggled a little. That's not funny. That's alarming. She's six. She should be praying for an American Girl doll, not for basic survival. Which Chad already did in the wilderness when he went to Anasazi. He was praying for basic survival.
This was, again, before the bed incident. So now people are bringing this up again. When he was 14, he was sent to this wilderness camp. The whole Anasazi saga is a whole thing. The way that Ruby and Kevin are talking about Anasazi, you would think that for every teenager that goes... into the Arizona wilderness and breaks down into tears, they get paid a million dollars. The way they promote this wilderness camp is pathological.
They're talking about sending him. They're dropping him off. They're clearing out his room. They're redecorating his room. They're missing him. They're picking him up. They're seeing him again. They're reacting to him being back home. It's non-stop Anasazi vlogs. They're acting like family vloggers who just got pregnant again and they're just...
us with like 26 back-to-back titles which again this is just kind of bizarre when you really think about this is the context of a quote troubled teen therapy that they're sending chad to which is typically known to do a lot more harm than good. To which they talk about Anasazi a little strange. Kevin says, now you're probably wondering what the heck we're talking about.
Chad today has just entered the Anasazi Foundation Wilderness Therapy Program. He's going to spend the next 8 to 10 weeks living in the desert mountains of Arizona. So you're probably wondering, what did Chad do? Okay, well, we're not even going to entertain that stuff, but it's an accumulation of things over the years. Well before we started YouTubing or well before we got into social media.
And it's reached a point where Chad needs to develop some very basic maturity and skills that he's going to need as an adult. We know later that it stemmed from him getting expelled from school, and this was a recommendation from his new therapist, Jodi Hildebrandt, the Anasazi therapy program. But Ruby says in the vlog, this is like a reset.
Like a start over, like a do over, a fresh beginning. Kevin says, the idea with wilderness therapy is that you can survive with these peers in the wilderness with nothing more than the clothes on your back and a couple of field supplies. Then there's nothing in this world that you can't tackle.
Ruby says, they don't even sleep in tents. They sleep on the bare ground. So if the apocalypse ever comes and the zombies come to get us, we will be very grateful that Chad is trained. He's going to mature out there. He's going to have a lot of growth and a lot of time to think and really decide the quality.
of person he wants to become. I'm really proud of him. I'm really excited. They said it's like the real wilderness out there. There's snakes, there's bears, there's coyotes, cougars. Like it's the real deal. Kevin Butson. We want Chad to have some of those experiences. I think close encounters would be good for him.
He'll come home and be like, dude, I survived and there were bears. I can do anything. I'm not scared at all about that kind of stuff. What I lose sleep over is when kids start self-sabotaging their own efforts. That's the kind of stuff that really alarms me. She's basically saying, as a mom, I'm not scared about my son confronting a bear in the wilderness. I'm scared of self-sabotage. It's like the most bizarre fear. Kevin says, bottom line.
It's going to be a very long time before any of us see Chad. We'll hear from him weekly in the letters of the family. We will. We're excited to see how all of us, not just Chad, but how all of us are impacted and changed by this experience. The thing with Ruby is that she's a yapper. She's so good at talking in a way that makes it seem like she's an amazing mom, or at the very least, she's a mom trying her best. She says, Chad's on the trail.
But at home, we're also going to be on a trail. We're going to be walking alongside him and we're going to be making commitments for us to change and for us to try and become better parents for Chad and for our other kids. We've always believed in being honest with you guys.
We're not into playing with your emotions because I know you guys are really invested in our family and I feel a responsibility to be upfront with you and honest. You know, there are things that happen in your family that other people don't know about and it's the same with our family. There are things that happen in our family and you don't know. So just trust us that we're doing what's best.
When Chad gets back, Ruby makes Anasazi the only thing that he can talk about. She forces Chad to talk over and over about his experiences, which it doesn't appear like he had a great experience. Even if he did, I'm sure it's still a sore spot. that your parents just send you to fend for yourself for months, I would feel abandoned. They not only sent him, but they paid over $10,000 to send him. What? Yeah.
Some, the estimates, it seems like they probably paid around like 15,000, but it could go up to like $40,000. Some parents take out loans to send their kids to these crazy camps. wow how about like some vegetables yeah some pillows yeah some bedding and like maybe try talking to your kid yeah The worst part is, when Chad gets back, Ruby has this whole vlog dedicated to surprising him with his room and trying to make it homey. She covers the entire room in Anasazi memorabilia.
It's like a gift shop for the therapy program. I don't know why Ruby was adamant on that. One comment reads, I find it disturbing how focused Ruby was on filling Chad's room with Anasazi reminders. For all she knows, it could have been a really traumatic negative experience for him. He could have been so excited to come back to his home and have a proper bed only to discuss.
that his room has been turned into a mini Anasazi and constantly reminds him of it, it just feels like another way for her to control and brainwash him rather than a mother who cares about her son's interest.
Also, the fact that he gained 10 pounds while on this rigorous wilderness program was rubbing netizens rightfully the wrong way. He also states that when he got back, he had no clothes because, quote, just donated them all since then unseen footage of ruby filming vlogs has come out so it seems like i said the family has given over a thousand hours of unseen footage to the documentary makers and
There's some pretty terrifying stuff in the unedited footage. In one video, she's sitting at the bottom of her bed and she has the aura of a kindergarten teacher that I would not trust my hypothetical children around. Polite, but she seems incredibly unempathetic. There are about 53 Saturdays in a year. She lifts up a glass mason jar filled with marbles.
This jar is holding 100 marbles. Listen, I do struggle with spatial awareness, but it does look like 53 Saturdays and 53 marbles, but maybe it's 100. She repeats. This jar is holding 100... This jar is holding 100 marbles. Okay, so the last tip that I have for calendaring is remembering my last... I always ask myself on the weekend, is what I've scheduled... Hey! I'm still recording! Come on! Why am I hearing all this noise? Her husband responds from downstairs.
It's 1230 and we're trying to get ready for church, that's why. You see her turn off the camera, get up, or seemingly get up, and then get back down and turn on and she's smiling again. I am a busy mom with six children and I'm always on the go. In another vlog, this is obviously something she cuts out. She's in the kitchen talking about something when she just flips a switch. Hold on. Hold on. What was that look for? She's talking to one of her kids.
One of her kids says, sorry, I just got nervous. Don't give me a weird look. Just be yourself. That is myself. Well, then change it. In another clip, likely to show off how happy and picture-perfect Rupi is and how she is an admirable mom for at least on camera fulfilling her legal duties of taking care of her kids just doing the bare minimum on camera, not even behind the scenes, but on camera.
She wants all the kids to sit on the couch for a vlog. And I guess a few of them are not cooperating because they're children. And she screams at the husband, sit her down on the flipping couch. This has been going on for years nonstop. In another clip. Ruby is setting up the Christmas tree and Chad is helping her. He looks pretty miserable. But it's not like Ruby is actively trying to have a good time and bond with her son. She just blows up out of nowhere. Chad, I asked you to give me a night.
where it's enjoyable to be with you. Chad, take that look off your face and just be happy to be with us. But I'm not. Okay, you know what then? And then the camera turns off. Chad would later say, there were times that she blew up off camera. She would spank, whip, take the belt out and whip my butt, you know, pull down my pants, whip me.
In another unseen vlog clip, Chad is younger in the clip and he's sitting on the couch. Ruby is plopped down right next to him. Chad, it's your turn. Do you know where your name came from? Grandpa? Of course you know. Chad is nodding because he's like, I just answered. So I don't understand. And she says, Grandpa, so tell us who you're named after.
This is like a very confusing conversation. I just said, grandpa. Then you said, of course, you know, grandpa. So now I'm like, why are you asking me again? I'm so confused. He's confused. And he says, grandpa. And she looks agitated. Which grandpa? Okay, we're going to try this again. And you're going to be a little more talkative here. I am. I'm talking. I'm answering your questions.
She's silent for a moment, and the camera doesn't pick it up too well, but clearly there's someone talking or hanging out in a nearby room. Hey, if I hear one more word, get out! Then you hear... My voice is leaving me. Then you hear Kevin's voice off camera saying, get out and close the door. Ruby is looking at her kids with such disdain and disgust. And she turns to Chad. If I'm going to let you vlog.
I don't. And I'm going to spend all my time helping you. You're going to help me too. I don't know what to do. Be excited to tell them where your name came from, even if you have to fake it. Fake being happy, okay? I don't know if I can right now. I don't know why. It's just... Okay, well, I'm going to take a break.
In another clip, she's sitting in front of the camera. They're perfect for Easter. No, you are not entitled to talk while I'm recording. Sit back up there and be quiet. Go downstairs now, both of you. It's just like... By far one of the more alarming unedited clips to come out is Ruby is sitting at the dining table shoving her ring into the camera.
I imagine it's a new ring that she got a gift from Kevin. I don't know. Kevin is holding the camera. And Ruby's little daughter is trying to climb up onto the kitchen table. Maybe she's trying to grab food. Maybe she's trying to grab a snack. Maybe she just wants attention. Or maybe she's just four. Ruby reaches over, puts one hand on the back of the little girl's neck, the other hand to cover her mouth, but it's also covering her nose because...
She's four and Ruby's an adult. And by the force of grabbing her head, she forces her off the table and just yanks her down. And she tells Kevin, we're going to cut that out. You get down and be quiet. It isn't your turn to talk. Now sit. To the four-year-old? Yeah. And then Kevin just puts two fingers up in front of the lens. Like, now cut. Like scissors.
one netizen comment reads what i hate most about this is the smiles and laughter and bonding in the vlogs i hate it because it's manufactured manipulated and fake these kids were miserable and i hate that i found myself wanting to smile at the family's interactions at certain points because they
seemed like a normal, albeit strict household. That's the guise of evil this woman gave to everyone. She smiled and laughed while the kids were suffering and we didn't even know it until it was too late. So while all of this new footage is being drawn up, Chad says he remembers that they got this very expensive attorney and PR person involved and they suggested to Ruby that she apologize for all of these instances.
Kevin says Ruby's response to that was over my dead body. I'm not sorry. I'm saving my family. We're going to show the world what real parenting looks like. We're going to show the world what it's like to make impossibly tough decisions because you love your child. wow she said apologize over my dead body yeah yeah this is when ruby frankie goes off the deep end
Ruby's entire reaction to everything is you think I'm bad? Let me show you how bad I can be. Her parenting style very quickly goes from call cps to like i think we need swat teams like this is becoming extremely fanatic religion it's not even lds faith anymore it's just
Her religious views are going straight past normal faith to just full-blown extremist. It's not the same religion anymore. She's using it to exert power in the name of faith. She becomes obsessed with God and vlogging about God. She says this is literally the way that God intends.
our children to be raised up. This is what happens when things go awry. It brings us back to home base, which is I'm a child of God. I am at the center. That is where I'm centered. And so I've been brought back to base. And I decided that I was going to have more prayers to get through the day because I feel like I've been working really hard. She starts offering up advice to other moms. Yeah.
She starts making like full dedicated videos to offer up advice. And in one clip, she says, what I say is often really difficult for people to hear. And what I'm suggesting is that your woke child is a walking zombie. And you have the opportunity to wake that zombie up. But we are beyond band-aids. We are beyond putting a little bit of ointment on the wounds. We are beyond that. The title of the advice video is aggressively titled, You're Woke. child is a walking zombie.
I think it perplexed a lot of netizens because it seemed like in the beginning there was some traction of like, let's call CPS. She's reacting negatively to this. So maybe CPS is on her. Maybe they're calling her. Maybe they're visiting her home, which they did briefly. But then now, with this sudden shift, netizens feel more alarmed.
They're commenting. She's giving culty vibes. Gonna see Ruby on a true crime podcast. Wow, Ruby has completely gone off the rails. How has it come to this? What is this? You've gone off the deep end, Ruby. What is happening? I feel sick. Those poor kids. Who would ever take advice from this controlling woman? And people start freaking out. Neighbors also noticed that there were changes in the kids. They say around this point...
The kids had been pretty bubbly up until this but now they were very withdrawn and very seldomly seen out of the house. It almost seemed like there was no joy. One neighbor says we don't know what was wrong but there was something wrong. And then Ruby Frankie and Charli D'Amelio clash. What? Maybe not directly, but their whole worlds kind of clash.
Ruby is vlogging in the car and she looks very distraught. She explains that at the middle school where her daughter goes, the school organized this flash mob dance where the students would learn and perform a TikTok dance. Ruby says she thought... TikTok dance. Hmm. Well, what are the dance moves? Well, what songs are in this? She says her daughter told her one of the songs and she says, quote, and I looked it up. I looked up at the lyrics and it was straight up hardcore porn.
I was reading the lyrics quietly to myself as I was scrolling. It's all lustful. It's all suggestive. It's all seductive. It's all perverse. Nobody wants to look out for these kids. The teacher is being very selfish because she wants to be hip, up to date, cool doing TikToks, entertaining the school. She wants to be liked by these teens that are 12 and 13. So I'm going to go into that school.
I don't have an appointment, but I will sit in the office until I am seen. She vlogs about how she spoke with the assistant principal and they told her that they will relay the message to the principal and that maybe she can come in tomorrow to speak. it's hard to gauge at this point without knowing what song she's so incensed over but knowing what we know so far I'm not very inclined to ever take her side on anything the next vlog
Opens with her storming out of the school. She's spontaneously bursting into tears like an angry toddler that's not getting her. I am so upset. I'm so angry I could scream. She gets into the car and she's like sniffling sobbing. It's an inappropriately strong reaction. We sat down and I said, I have concerns about the TikTok dances. I said, my problem is the choice of songs. And she said, well, all the songs were approved by me. And I said, okay.
So you approve this song that has all these lyrics in it. She says, well, we're not singing and we're not dancing to those lyrics. It's just a portion of the song. She mentioned how the principal was talking about a grocery chain that recently used it in one of their commercials. Like a big, imagine Ralph's or Kroger. Like you would think that it's family friendly then. You know, and... Obviously, netizens were able to figure out what song had Ruby in tears. So distraught. It's Low by Flo Rida.
Shadi got them apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur. The whole club was looking at her. She hit the floor. Next thing you know, Shadi got low. But in the grocery store chain commercial, they just... keep replaying low low low because i guess like maybe discounts or something so i think that's the part that they were going to play at the school which
I don't know, I just feel like there's so much worse that a 12 year old could be exposed to, like starvation, not having a bed, a wilderness therapy camp, but Ruby decides this is the hill. that she's going to die on. She cries that the principal told her, well, that's moral for you. And it's not going to be moral for other parents, you know? And I said, it's what's moral according to God.
The principal explains that they're basically just using the low, low, low part, but Ruby is upset. Do you understand that you're compartmentalizing? You're taking an immoral song, but you're saying you're only going to take this section of it. They offer to not let Ruby's daughter participate, but Ruby doubles down. She says she told them, you're missing the whole point of why I'm here. I'm not here for anyone's comfort, including my daughter's. I'm not here to make her comfortable. Of course.
She can move classes, not because you said so, but because I said so. I'm the parent. As you, the principal, have these precious children and you're not protecting them. And she starts. Full on sobbing. You're introducing them to the world and you're saying it's okay. You're saying that you support this. In the end, you're not going to answer to me who is telling you that this is wrong. I said you will answer to what you brought into the school and you...
The principal tells her, I am 100% fine with the choice that I've made. And Ruby says, with giant tears streaming down her face, that she told the principal, well, that's sick. If I want to raise my children, I'm going to have to do it myself. I cannot count on their teachers. I cannot count on their principal. And I don't even like live in a really crazy city. I live in a quaint conservative city where people think they're safe.
She claims the principal is evil. She says she is evil for her to have a parent come straight at her and tell her how evil this is and she does nothing. Speaking of evil, Ruby later says in another video, this is a separate video, I'm scared to share this because knowing people these days, I don't know how they're going to respond. She goes on to talk about how she has six kids and she says, the two youngest are showing long patterns of selfishness.
They've been showing, through their choices, their unwillingness to repent, their unwillingness to feel sorrow over some pretty egregious choices that they've made. So Kevin and I have decided that we are going to give the gift of truth to them this Christmas.
going to give them the gift of boundaries. We are going to give them the gift of repentance. We let them know how deeply sorrowful we've been because the choices that they have been making and we told them that this year they are not going to be visited by Santa.
We've prepped them and let them know that Christmas morning, their four older siblings will be getting Christmas presents to open and they will be getting the gift of love from their dad and I. We want them to really have a visceral experience that hits them. She's out here admitting that childhood trauma is the goal.
She admits that she would even keep them home from school to force them to clean the entire house. But she says, I was really hoping that that would bring them pain. And it didn't. It wasn't painful for them. It was like, ugh. It hasn't affected them because they're so numb. So the more numb your child is, the greater the experience they need to wake them up. Kevin supports this message apparently because he also states,
The world has these definitions of what love and tenderness look like. I watch all these Christmas shows that I used to just love because I feel warm and fuzzy watching them. And this year I watched them and I'm like, oh, gross. Because warm and fuzzy in these shows is all...
Always about... the end and the kid just getting whatever they wanted the world has this message and society has bought into it hook line and sinker that love looks like commercialism love looks like your kid gets the big thing big boxes big red bows that's love if you love your children that's what you're gonna do okay
These are completely different topics. If you don't like the commercialization of Christmas, then don't get gifts for any of your kids or do homemade gifts or do something fun for each other. Why single out the two youngest kids who out of all the children probably... take Christmas the most seriously because of their age. Nobody told you to buy a Lamborghini even a small educational toy to open on Christmas morning would suffice. God forbid a child is happy.
One of the neighbor's kids and her parents came over to give the youngest daughter a gift. The other mom says, Ruby answered the door and my daughter said, Merry Christmas. Can you give this gift to the youngest daughter? She took it and then she closed the door and my daughter happened to see her later and she was so excited. She was like, did you get it? I picked that one just for you. And her face just dropped and she was like, I didn't get it. My mom made me throw it away.
So the two youngest were forced to watch all their siblings open presents and they got nothing. And this is when... Ruby ditches her entire eight passengers YouTube channel and starts strictly posting about being a quote mom of truth. She changes the channel name. When was this? This is in like 2021.
Oh, wow. 2022. Yeah. And we're going to get more into that in part two and three. But neighbors who are trying to closely monitor the situation, they start telling CPS. They start reporting Ruby because she's online saying things like children.
Little children are sexual beings. And when a child goes into their room and they do... order where there was once chaos they put their toys away and they pull their bed tight fluff up their pillow and they organize all their stuffed animals and dolls they put order to it and then they step back and they feel really good about it that is an act of being
sexual. A what? Yeah, to which someone comments, so that's called organizing? Hope that helps. I would say that's more than enough grounds to call CPS, but one CPS worker asks a neighbor, did you see any signs of physical abuse on the kids? The neighbor said, I said, no, I didn't. I didn't see any physical signs of abuse on the Frankie kids. The CPS worker just told me that they needed to see some physical evidence for them to be able to step in.
And the neighbor says in that moment, she wishes she had just lied to the government official, to the CPS worker. Yes, I saw signs of physical abuse because maybe that would have been able to stop what comes next. And that is it for part one of the Ruby Frankie case. In the second part, we will be talking about Jodi Hildebrandt. So stay tuned. Let me know your thoughts and make sure to check out Sherry's book. Stay safe, and I'll see you in the next one.