A fractured family

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/02/2025 (590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Abuse occurs in the shadows, or so we imagine. But Shari Franke’s first book, a memoir of growing up under her mother Ruby’s thumb, puts the lie to that notion.

The eldest child in a family of devout Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) members, Ruby’s Utah childhood was “less about play and more about responsibility,” as she was tasked with helping to raise her four siblings.

Keen to “begin fulfilling her divine purpose” as a mother, Ruby attended Utah State University primarily to husband hunt. As Shari explains, “Becoming a mother, in my faith, is a spiritual calling of the highest order.”

Three months after meeting Kevin Franke, a handsome, ambitious civil engineering student and LDS member with “a laid-back aura,” Ruby was married. When Shari arrived, she was “not just a baby but a woman’s ultimate power. Her divine right to mold a new soul in her own image.”

Ignorant of or indifferent to child development, Ruby’s molding included leaving Shari and her five siblings to “cry things out” and assaulting them: “One hint of displeasure on my face and whack! A smack on my arm, a flick to my lips, or a sharp tug on my ear,” Shari writes.

Plagued by anxiety-induced stomach aches and a relentless fear that a deomon “would materialize beside me in my bed, ready to steal my soul,” Shari begs her mother to leave a light on only to be told, “There are no demons in my house,” and left in the dark.

Once Ruby weans her final baby, she launches a YouTube vlog; dedicated to “encapsulating our family’s journey,” 8 Passengers debuted in January 2015. As Shari observes, “In many ways, family vlogging is a very LDS-aligned pursuit… (offering) a modern form of bearing testimony and keeping personal and family records, while… engaging in passive missionary work.”

Single-mindedly growing her audience, monetizing her content and portraying herself as an unimpeachable parent of perfect children, Ruby’s “relentless ambition, fuelled by a potent mixture of unresolved pain and narcissism, (became) the driving force of our existence,” writes Shari, who experienced depression and suicidal thoughts behind the scenes of her mother’s wildly popular vlog.

Shari’s brother Chad, who “seemed to delight in causing mischief and mayhem,” is increasingly viewed by Ruby and Kevin as “a malfunctioning robot… They were on a mission to find the perfect person to crack his code and rewire him to their liking.”

Enter Jodi Hildebrandt. If, as Shari writes, Ruby is “the most poisonous plant in our garden,” Hildebrandt is the master gardener. Creator of ConneXions, a cult-like “specialized coaching program” that rakes in big bucks, Hildebrandt enables Ruby’s toxic behaviour while shredding the Franke family fabric and scrambling each individual’s mind and spirit with her so-called “Truth” teachings.

In May 2020, when 8 Passengers’ 2+million subscribers learned Ruby had “removed Chad’s bedroom privileges as punishment for continued defiance” and that “he’d been sleeping on a beanbag on the basement floor” for seven months, “the internet went ballistic,” accusing Ruby of child abuse and unsubscribing en masse. Brands also fled, taking 90 per cent of the family’s income with them.

Fancying herself “a truthteller, a revolutionary parent,” as Shari writes, Ruby was incensed, calling her once-adoring fans “haters” and burrowing deeper into Hildebrandt’s twisted ConneXions world, alienating her extended family, “inviting” Kevin to leave the house and continuing to dominate the children.

While Shari physically escapes to Brigham Young University, her constant worry about her younger siblings and her father’s repeated failure “to step up and be the protector he was supposed to be” keeps her emotionally trapped in her mother’s house.

When she learns Ruby and Jodi have left the younger children alone for five days, Shari calls the Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) who send police to do a welfare check. They conclude that everyone was fine, leaving Shari feeling hopeless and desperate.

When the law finally catches up with Ruby and Jodi in 2023, they are charged with (and eventually convicted of) multiple counts of aggravated child abuse. As a detective explains to Shari, aggravated refers to “repeated acts of abuse over time, showing a pattern of cruelty… It can also include extreme neglect, confinement, or intentional infliction of serious physical harm on a child.”

Ruby attempts to depict herself as being “under Jodi’s spell,” but Shari points out that “evidence of her pre-existing abuse was… online, in the form of thirteen hundred 8 Passengers videos she’d made.”

Shari Franke’s wrenching account of life with her mother, and the attendant damage, demands that consumers of reality programming interrogate their viewing choices and the harm its manufacture may cause. As the author observes, “the line between authenticity and exploitation becomes dangerously blurred when children are involved… what does consent really look like when you’re a child, too afraid to say no?”

Jess Woolford reads and writes in Winnipeg and beyond.