The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
Religion as the basis for the justification of the suffering of children…
Is reason alone to avoid it.
My heart aches for the 12-year old boy and his siblings. I feel so bad for them. I hope they are getting the care they need.
And zero self reflection. They never point their hyper-critical eyes towards a mirror.
Oh they do, but their flaws are human foibles, not being posessed by a demon.
They’re self-centered pieces of shit that use double standards.
*hypocritical
Their actions have been condemned by other Mormon parenting bloggers who say they misrepresented their community and the religion
Oh bullshit. These religious zealots get together every fucking week at church and pretend they didn’t know this abuse was happening? Mormons are a cult and should be treated as such.
That’s not how it works…
For anyone that’s interested in a deep dive into what kind of shit was going on here, John Dehlin has covered this pretty extensively on his Mormon Stories podcast. Episodes 1805, 1807, 1808, 1809 (removed due to threat of a lawsuit for defamation; you’d have to find an archived copy. Adam Steed is a difficult interviewee in many ways, unless you are already deeply, intimately aware of Mormonism; his thoughts are often very jumbled and he has a hard time expressing things in a linear fashion), 1817, 1817, 1825 (tangentially; it’s about “Visions of Glory”), 1826, 1844, 1865, 1869, and 1873. It’s also tangentially related the the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell murder cases, in that the beliefs of Jodi Hildebrant and Ruby Franke were both heavily influenced by the same apocalyptic book, “Visions of Glory”.
Keep in mind that the episodes I just listed comprise roughly around 30 hours of listening. About half of them are long-form interviews. Unless you have an an interest in cults, religious indoctrination, apocalyptic beliefs, this is probably not going to be your thing. And unless you were raised Mormon–or have listened to the other 5400 hours or so of podcasts that John Dehlin has done–it’s probably going to be a little hard to follow what’s going on.
A very, very short version is that, while Franke was always borderline abusive as a mom (and that’s pretty par for the course in Mormon families, TBH), Hildebrandt is an incredibly charismatic, persuasive psychopath that used a version of Mormon theology to induce her to be far, far worse than she would have otherwise been. If Hildebrandt had been male–because you must be male to have real power in the Mormon church–she almost certainly would have ended up leading a fundamentalist cult.
EDIT When I say that Franke was borderline abusive, I mean that she was borderline before she met Jodi Hildebrandt. Once Hildebrandt attached herself to Franke, Franke’s behavior became overtly, obviously abusive. In my opinion, Franke was always vulnerable to acting in that way, but Hildebrant was who convinced her that abuse was appropriate and moral.
I guess “religious extremism” is accurate, but this is batshit insanity as well. There is something very, very wrong in this woman’s brain, and it requires treatment. While she rots in prison of course.
There are many, many Christians who abuse their kids under the guise of godliness. Ever heard of “To Train Up a Child”? It’s a whole book about how to properly abuse your child to turn them into a mindless, obedient slave. They start hitting them as infants for showing curiosity. There are popular Christian influencers who have openly spoken about the ways they “discipline” their kids - one said her husband “doesn’t know his own strength” with their kids. Aka he’s beaten the shit out of them more than once. Sure, Ruby Franke turned it up to 11, but she and her husband routinely abused their children and were public about it for years, and plenty of people saw no problem with it and continued to consume their content.
I’d argue it’s not mental illness, it’s the natural consequence of practicing a branch of Christianity that doesn’t see children as people, just little trophies who aren’t meant to have any personality, needs, or wants. They’re supposed to parrot everything their parents believe and otherwise not be seen or heard.
Your argument is good, and your views have merit. Which is super fucking depressing.
What?
This is par for the course.
Pretty much every Abrahmic offshoot was started by someone who was completely insane.
According to their own history, it all kicked off with Abraham killing family members because a voice in his head told him that anyone doubting the voice needs murdered.
He was violent and insane and now literally billions and billions of people worship the voice he invented, and legitimately believe that if a voice in their head shows up telling them to do horrible shit, it’s probably cool because maybe it’s just God again.
There is absolutely nothing surprising when a person who not only believes those fairy tales, but come from a family they may have spent thousands of years believing them, starts thinking theyre the next “special one”.
Sure, most people dont actually believe in their own religions. But they pretend it’s real, and then the really crazy ones do shit like this.
Being shocked this keeps happening is like asking why your car runs out of gas when you never put gas in it until after the tanks dry
This is the rational result of what they’re doing.
You’d often finds that religious extremists prefer to prey on the mentally unwell. They’re more susceptible to abuse and easier to turn into abusers themselves. Then the chain repeats and the abuse self-replicates, propagating the abuse. Very sane and well adjusted individuals can be made to be really cruel and destructive via religious abuse.
The bitterest part?
- “Do not harm little children” - Church of Satan
- “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.” - The Satanic Temple
Are you getting the picture? People who claim themselves to side with Satan are more eager to show compassion than people who claim to fight against a devil. It immediately reminds me what my grandma used to say, that “Protestants love the devil so much that they talk about him nonstop”. (Not that the Catholic church is any better, I know.)
[I’m not Satanist, regardless of my nickname, by the way.]
typical religious nut, dont let them fool you in to thinking that this person is an outlier
These children deserve better. I cried when I watched the little girl inside the closet and the cops giving a pizza to her.
I would adopt that little girl and raise her as my own. She deserves a better life.
The father is currently fighting for custody. The situation is complicated, but Hildebrandt would wedge herself between couples, encourage wives to sever communications with the husbands, and convince them to force the husbands to move out of their joint home. Often because the husbands were ‘sex addicts’ (e.g., might have masturbated once or twice, of looked at pornography). Franke’s husband probably had no idea what was going on with Hildebrant. He did file for divorce within a few weeks of the arrest.
Wasn’t there a phone call with the wife that was recorded and he was saying things to help her. Like this line is recorded.
I haven’t heard of that. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t, just that I haven’t heard of it. If so, I’d be curious about the circumstances, and what his rationale is. Having heard interviews with several men that had marriages ruined by Hildebrandt, my tendency is to place less blame on Franke’s husband. But that could be entirely wrong; I just don’t know.
It was the very first phone call together. She was saying something like it’s a witch hunt and he kept reminding her this line is recorded and a ton of “… I know, I know”.
I went and listened it again and it sorta sounds like a damaged husband .
He forgot the famous aphorism, “feed a demon, starve an evangelist”
Sounds like we really need a “priest hunter” profession again so we can squash religion once and for all.
People wonder why I’m so against religion, well folks, here is an easy example of why the delusional need to wake the fuck up.
I’m on board. I’ve been looking to make a career change.
“Why don’t you take a seat right over there, pastor?”
“Why? You’re a little too old to be an altar boy”
What the actual fuck? These women are sick. There’s a deeper reason (like
some mental illnesses orsociopathy) for why these women did these things, and their motivations should be examined. If we know more about such things, we can hopefully protect against other people with such behavior in the future.Sure, we can blame religion, but what if religion didn’t exist? Would people like these women not exist either, or would they use another excuse for their behavior?
Until a mental health issue has been concretely determined, I believe it’s somewhat irresponsible to toss the idea around that it’s the underlying root cause for this obscene behavior.
Religion, like other dogmas, has historically empowered and continues to empower a lot of otherwise mentally healthy people to feel okay doing plenty of fucked up shit, simply because religion said it’s okay to do it.
Ever heard of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment? Many “normal” people will do terrible things if simply given permission.
That experiment was recently shown to be a lie, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication
But I think you’re right that people go along with a lot simply because of religious doctrine. There are plenty of cases of failed “exorcisms”
I mean, religions are fucked in all kinds of ways and can certainly fuck up their followers in a systemic way but in this instance I’m not sure Mormonism is teaching emaciation of children, more like they were attributing their fucked up impulses to religion.
If religion didn’t exist, a lot of this bullshit wouldn’t happen. Some still would, but a good portion wouldn’t happen.
I keep saying this, but the issue are the people that watch these videos. If they didn’t have followers they wouldn’t be where they are or could do what they do. (But in this case, maybe even without all the money they still would have abused those poor kids)
Franke 100% would have been doing this even without being a YouTuber. What she was doing on 8 Passengers is not all that extreme in Mormon circles, and I don’t mean just the deeply conservative ones. Yes, she went a little farther than most Mormons would be comfortable with, but the core ideas? They entirely understand where she was coming from. The commonly cited example is her refusing to bring lunch to a child (6yo?) that forgot it, saying that it’s ‘personal responsibility’; many Mormons would argue that it’s a little too young to expect a 6yo to be fully responsible like that, but if a 10yo child forgot? Or an 8yo? No problem.
Yup. An eight year old is plenty old enough to accept baptism and a lifetime of church membership and begin taking accountability for their own sins!
8yo children are clearly old enough to evaluate the truth claims and to be able to engage in the serious biblical scholarship that you need to be able to make sense of the Book of Mormon, as well as being old enough to know the historical context of JS Jr. and his actions. So, uh… (Obvious sarcasm is obvious.)
I don’t think society understands the scale of ignorance and evil of other humans that walk among us. I used to always say it’s 50/50. But I think it’s more like 75/25 and decent people with respect for life are the minority. It feels like it’s game over for humanity.
Left to their own devices, a very strong majority of people default to being “good” people (I generally consider “good” is self sacrifice for the good is the many, and similar thinking and behavior - “evil” is selfish actions and ‘the end justify the means’). However, people are unfortunately not left to their own devices due to algorithms, echo chambers, propaganda, etc.
And evil is far easier to spread than good is…
“I will not feed a demon” says Youtuber – is a fun headline.
Whole lot of irony in that one sentence.
Irony?
She’s the demon.
Let me guess… Mormons?
Gotta love religion
