Daughter Of Child Abuser Ruby Franke Warns Against Vlogging

In her 21 years on Earth, Shari Franke has hardly known a life without a camera in her face. Her younger siblings, who became the center of one of the most publicized child abuse cases in the country last year, are the same.

All six Franke kids were the stars of the now-deleted popular YouTube vlog “8 Passengers.” The channel, manned by matriarch Ruby Franke, appeared to show the ins and outs of life as a devoted Mormon family. The daily videos featured hints of neglect and mistreatment, like when Ruby bragged about forcing her teenage son to sleep on a beanbag instead of a bed for months. Yet, the channel continually raked in views, likes, comments, and — most importantly —subscribers until Ruby was arrested and convicted of felony child abuse in 2023.

In her new tell-all book The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, Shari refuses to detail the exact horrors her siblings endured in the lead-up to Ruby’s imprisonment. Instead, she focuses on her difficult relationship with her mother. Much of the abuse Shari recounts was psychological, emotional, and physical — fueled by Ruby’s commitment to Jodi Hildebrandt’s radical parenting advice MLM.

The exploitation that came with vlogging, however, played a key role in the Franke family and Shari’s trauma.

“Our lives revolved around nonstop content creation — whether we liked it or not,” Shari wrote.

‘Commodifying from Cradle to College’

In 2023, I argued that children of vlog-obsessed parents would begin coming out of the woodwork with horrific stories of exploitation and abuse for profit, much like the beloved child actors of the ’90s and 2000s had. After all, the family-vlogging-to-child-abuse-conviction pipeline is not uncommon.

Less than a year later, Ruby and her business partner Hildebrandt (who, according to Shari, was also her lesbian lover) were arrested for their pattern of punishing two of Shari’s younger siblings with rigorous physical drills for hours in the Utah heat, starvation, and eventually by tying them up with duct tape and rope.

Shari, who largely cut ties with her mother in college, had some idea of the treatment her younger siblings faced based on her own experiences and observations, like when her mother denied some of her siblings Christmas gifts and forced them to watch everyone else open theirs. She even helped collect the evidence that put her mother behind bars.

While she doesn’t explicitly say it, one of the first red flags Shari recognized in her mother was when Ruby began filming her children and posting it on the internet.

Ruby’s channel started as an easy way to live out her calling as a stay-at-home wife and mom in good standing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her husband Kevin, who rarely objected to his wife’s plots even if they involved inflicting emotional damage on her children, went along with the scheme.

“In many ways, family vlogging is a very LDS-aligned pursuit, a natural extension of our traditional practices,” Shari explains in the book. “Vlogging offers a modern form of bearing testimony and keeping personal and family records, while simultaneously engaging in passive missionary work.”

It wasn’t long, however, before Ruby became a polished professional at “blurring the lines between intimate family moments and marketable content.”

“Ruby might claim her kids were always on board, but the truth is, we never really had a choice in the matter,” Shari claims.

Ruby’s aggressive attempt to monetize her family meant Shari rarely had a private moment off camera. Her mother had primed her to use every growing pain and milestone as content for the family channel. Eventually, with hopes of building up her bank account, Shari launched her own teen-themed vlog, which she says she regrets.

“The worst part? The internet ate it up,” Shari writes. “Everyone seemed to love what Ruby was posting. Which, of course, encouraged her to post more. She approached YouTube with the dedication of a start-up CEO, putting in long hours, day after day. She had done her homework and knew that in the Wild West of social media, consistency is king, you have to post regularly, which meant every little moment was mined for content. First steps, lost teeth, epic tantrums — you name it, Ruby filmed it, laser-focused on building her subscriber base, knowing vlogging was a numbers game. And Ruby had always been good with numbers.”

Shari wonders early in the book what the “lasting repercussions of growing up on camera without any say in the matter” look like but later determines that she and her siblings know exactly what the consequences can be.

“In a way, we represented the first true, damning proof of how badly things can go wrong in a social media-driven world where kids are content and content is king,” Shari writes.

Danger Zone

The Franke kids’ daily presence in videos viewed by millions didn’t simply sacrifice their privacy on the altar of profit. It also made them vulnerable to exploitation beyond the walls of their mother’s home.

In Shari’s case, an older married man who befriended her under the guise of an internship was able to further isolate her from her flailing family to coerce sexual favors. His obsession turned into tracking her location and texting her incessantly until a family friend helped her find the courage to cut off the relationship.

Shari openly commits to protecting her younger siblings’ privacy and safety the best she can amid the media firestorm surrounding Ruby’s 2024 sentencing and the case’s ongoing presence in the public eye. She took great care throughout her book not to name the younger children who felt the brunt of her mom’s criminal behavior and even made a public declaration on her Instagram shortly after its publication that “this is the end of me sharing my private life.”

“I knew I had to make a stand, somehow,” she writes. “Part of that would be saying no to the world’s desire for me to talk about my siblings, anywhere. Even in the pages of my own book. It is up to my brothers and sisters if they wish to share their story one day. But I’d be no better than Ruby if I detailed their experiences without their consent. They deserve to be given back the choice that had been stolen from them for so long.”

Like a cruel joke, however, justice for the Franke kids came with cameras, something Shari spent paragraphs lamenting.

Since the spotlight appears to be inevitable, Shari plans to use it to her advantage. In addition to penning her book and testifying in front of legislators, Shari is slated to appear alongside her brother Chad and father in the Hulu documentary “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.”

The Franke saga should be a canary in the coal mine for the family vlogging industry. Shari knows, however, that the vicious cycle that comes with videoing and publishing every moment of a child’s life, with all of its proven ethical and economic pitfalls, will inevitably continue as long as there is an audience for it.

“For content creators, news outlets, and true-crime documentarians alike, the rewards of this emotional economy can be seductive. And the digital and media landscape remains vast and full of promise — but it is also a wilderness, and I fear we have lost our way,” Shari warns.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.