Rotten Mango
Ruby Franke Vlogs Torture Of 6 Kids For YouTube Views - Exposed By All The New Deleted Footage
Tue, 11 Mar 2025
It’s the middle of the desert and the pavement is scorching hot. If you dare to step barefoot on it, it’s the equivalent of sticking your foot on a cast iron pan on high heat. Enough to cause instant blisters. But the 12 year old boy has no choice. He has once more chance to escape and he needs to make it to a neighbors house for safety. He crawls out the window and starts pacing. If nobody is home - that could be the end. There are only 3 homes in this part of the desert. The 1 he’s been locked up and tortured in.The 1 where nobody would answer the door.And 1 last chance. If he can make it there before they catch him. Or if the duct tape around his ankles don’t melt into him. August 30, 2023 - this little boys escape will kick start an investigation into one of the biggest family vloggers on YouTube. This is the case of Ruby Franke - the woman who has been vlogging herself abusing her 6 kids for years, and has locked away the two youngest in a windowless safe room - to be tortured. Full show notes at rottenmangopodcast.com
Chapter 1: What happened in Ivins, Utah on August 30, 2023?
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 a hundred 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 Ivins, 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.
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Chapter 2: Who is Ruby Franke and why is she controversial?
Well, what are they? Taking me to the nearest police station. actually it's just one favor is 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 five million dollar house in ivan's 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 forced 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 Frankie 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 RottenMangoPodcast.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 Chad. 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 somehow... 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.
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Chapter 3: How did Ruby Franke's YouTube career contribute to her downfall?
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 this 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, like 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. She wants to maximize the amount of praise that she gets. So she needs a larger audience.
And that is the birth of the YouTube channel, 8 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the allegations against Ruby Franke's parenting methods?
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. She is crazy. 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.
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 the murder of George Floyd. 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.
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Chapter 5: How did Ruby Franke's family vlogging affect her children?
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, deleting negative comment after negative comment after negative comment.
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.
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Chapter 6: What is the Anasazi Wilderness Therapy Camp and its impact?
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 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, a hundred 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 going to do to serve my family.
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 i like the way ruby acted towards the kids in her older vlogs 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.
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Chapter 7: How did the internet react to Ruby Franke's parenting style?
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. Hmm. 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 gonna 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 may be 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 timestamping 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.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of Ruby Franke's religious beliefs in her actions?
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 psy-op 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.
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