‘Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke’ Delves Into an Abusive Nightmare

When YouTube sensation Ruby Franke was arrested in 2023 and charged with child abuse, casual observers of her content were shocked. The mother of six had amassed more than 2 million followers on her channel, 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of the Mormon mom, her husband, and their six kids. Now a new Hulu series, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, attempts to unpack how the upbeat, smiling supermom ended up in the Utah State Correctional Facility. But don’t call it true crime, Ruby’s estranged spouse, Kevin Franke, tells Vanity Fair.

“I know everyone expects this to be true crime, but I’ve watched true-crime documentaries, and this isn’t it,” he says. Director Olly Lambert agrees. “’I’ve never made, and would never make, just a true-crime thing,” says Lambert—even though he’s behind BBC documentaries such as Abused: The Untold Story, about the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile sex-abuse scandal.

It’s possible that the delicate needle-threading that project required—Lambert spoke to survivors of sexual assault for the very same network that had employed their abuser—came in handy when enlisting members of the Franke family for this three-part Hulu series, which will be released on the streamer Thursday, February 27. This is the first project about the case that Kevin and eldest children Shari Franke and Chad Franke have agreed to participate in, in large part because Lambert was able to gain their trust.

“One of the things that’s been so frustrating for me has been feeling silenced or muzzled—not being able to speak and having people make assumptions that just aren’t accurate,” Kevin says. “This is my ability to take control of my own story and speak it in my own words.”

But is Devil in the Family really Kevin’s story? That’s hard to say. According to daughter Shari Franke’s book, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, which was published last month, Kevin—a Brigham Young University professor and the youngest of seven children—was “the perpetual supporting actor to Ruby’s lead role in her epic production of ‘Ultimate Mother.’” He was frequently absent, she says; when he was there, he seemed checked out or downtrodden. And according to Shari, he didn’t slam on the brakes when the family’s wheels began to come off.

Just when that began to happen is also unclear. According to Shari’s book, life in the Franke’s Utah household was fairly par for the Mormon course before Ruby launched her YouTube channel in 2015—a move she didn’t make out of any spoken desire to become an influencer, at least not initially. According to journalist and podcaster Jo Piazza, the longstanding Mormon expectation of faith-spreading has moved beyond the physical world and into the online realm, making Utah a hotbed of so-called momfluencers whose spouses and kids star in family-focused vlogs. The idea, it seems, is that if people see these happy Mormon families across social media, they’ll be influenced to join the faith—just as they might be influenced to try an outfit from Shein or a new skin care regimen.

8 Passengers quickly became one of the genre’s biggest brands, with 2.5 million subscribers at its peak. Between YouTube ad revenue and brand deals, it was also big business, with Kevin saying in Devil in the Family that some months, it brought in over $100,000—dwarfing his salary as a college professor. The work was lucrative enough that it enabled the family to move to a new, larger home, which was outfitted “like a set,” Shari says in her book, with minimal decor and camera-bright lighting. Ruby, Shari, Chad, and the family’s younger four kids were a constant presence in the videos, while Kevin would frequently cameo (or be heard from behind the camera).

In her book, Shari describes her discomfort with living in public even as she admits that she eventually launched a channel of her own, abandoning it some years later. (Shari was not available to be interviewed for this story.) In Devil in the Family, we also see Chad balking at being filmed. Shari would say things like “pretend like you’re happy” or “act like you’re happy,” Chad tells Vanity Fair. “When my mom turned on the camera, there was a large difference between her just telling me to be myself, and then, you know, when we were doing a brand deal or working with a company—then I was to say exactly what the company would ask me to say.”

Shari and Chad’s complaints feel familiar to anyone who’s watched a child-performer exposé such as Quiet on Set. But there’s a crucial difference here. Unlike underage actors, children of influencers aren’t employed in a regulated, industry setting (or even a grossly dysfunctional one). They’re workers in the family business, with strong parental pressure to produce on cue. “The most common thing out here every day for my mom—and I’m not even kidding, this was, like, every five minutes—was ‘say that again,’” says Chad (who is now a successful influencer in his own right). “You know: ‘Now that the camera’s on, say that again.’”

Devil in the Family presents footage from the vlogs—including moments not made for YouTube—to bring home the divide between Ruby’s visage before and after a take, which is certainly unsettling. It’s made even worse when Kevin claims on-camera that he was unaware of any behind-the-scenes tensions, right after we see footage of Ruby berating one of their younger children in his presence.

As Devil in the Family proceeds, Kevin grows increasingly deer-in-the-headlights in interviews, especially when discussing Jodi Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt, a fellow Mormon, was the founder of a counseling business called ConneXions; she was introduced to the family as a counselor for Chad, whose conflicts with his mother had reached a breaking point. Soon, she was also counseling Shari and Kevin, while posting content with Ruby as her “sidekick” and eventual business partner.

As the pandemic and global social justice uprising came together in the early 2020s, Kevin says that—like many members of his faith—it seemed clear to him that the end of the world was near. Acknowledging that we were living in supernaturally disastrous times made it easier, he says, for him to believe that Hildebrandt was suddenly beset by demonic attacks so severe that she had to move into the Frankes’s home—as she did in 2021.

This all seems unbelievable from the outside (and Shari, in her book, also says she was skeptical). Yet Lambert defends Kevin’s inertia, saying, “We’ve met quite a lot of people who worked with Jodi, and it was a very common theme that Jodi really was gifted at seeing through people—reading them with such accuracy. But she used it to such bad ends, because she very quickly…what she would see is a way to exploit people. A way to manipulate them.”

Soon after Hildebrandt moved in, Kevin says that he was “invited to leave the house”—which he did, apparently unquestioningly. He continued to participate in online “men’s group” counseling sessions led by Hildebrandt, seemingly believing that he was somehow the root of some unspoken or unexplained family problem, but ceased all communication with his wife and kids.

By the time Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped Hildebrandt’s house, rang a neighbor’s doorbell, and asked him to call the police, Kevin hadn’t had contact with his family for over a year—unaware his two youngest children had been living at the 1.4-acre property. In the series, he’s not able to answer why he so willingly pulled away from his children, which makes Devil in the Family’s third-episode depiction of the abusive conditions his children suffered while in Ruby and Hildebrandt’s care all the more frustrating. In courtroom accounts, we hear Ruby say that she either believed—or was led by Hildebrandt to believe—that the children were possessed, prompting the adults to withhold food from the kids and force them to spend hours in the sun without protection, all an effort to drive the demons out. (Ruby and Hildebrandt both pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse, and were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.)

A court order sealed all records and proceedings related to the child welfare case in October, 2023, which certainly restricted how much Kevin or Devil in the Family can say about the case or the current disposition of the Frankes’s minor children. Kevin has become a vocal supporter of restrictions for family vloggers, but neither he nor Devil in the Family suggests that online fame causes what Lambert refers to as “the torture of children in the desert.”

Kevin filed for divorce from Ruby in November 2023, but even now he says he still loves her—and he balks at the idea that Ruby, or even Jodi, were truly malignant figures. “Everyone wants to put Ruby into the villain box,” Kevin says. “But what this series really demonstrates is that there is light and darkness inside every one of us.”

If so, then it’s Shari who might be this case’s brightest light. She’s the one who, even though she had just started college, was calling Child Protective Services and police out of fears for her younger siblings—even though Ruby had also cut her off. Meanwhile, Kevin stayed completely away.

That makes Kevin’s ultimate assessment of the series a curious one. Toward the end of our interview, he says that the show can be summed up this way: “Everybody sees some villain inside of them, and everybody sees some hero inside of them. So I think one of the themes is that the decisions we make every day will determine which one of those rises to the surface.” Given the passive role Devil in the Family shows Kevin played in his family’s tragedy, it’s still unclear which side he thinks triumphed inside him.