Growing up watching 8 Passengers on YouTube, it was a reasonable reaction to feel appalled and disgusted as the truth came out about its matriarch Ruby Franke. Behind the scenes of her carefully crafted videos, the always meticulously put-together woman turned out to be abusing and manipulating her young children.
On Feb. 27, 2025, Hulu, Disney+ and AppleTV released a docuseries about the crimes committed on Ruby Franke’s children by her and her counterpart Jodi Hildebrandt titled “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.” The three-episode series brings viewers through the rise of the 8 Passengers channel and the Franke family to its fall in 2021 and eventually to the abuse of her children.
On Jan. 7, 2025, prior to the release of Hulu’s docuseries, the oldest Franke child spoke up regarding her childhood in her memoir titled “The House of My Mother.” Shari Franke unveiled details about her childhood that were cut from the many YouTube videos posted over the years.
“Abundance,” the first episode, starts the series with introducing Ruby Franke’s husband Kevin Franke, the two oldest Franke children, former friends of the family and members of their community. Although each had a different introduction to Ruby Franke, many began by saying how much she loved being a mother. The channel’s earlier vlogs in 2015 would suggest the same. The family would be seen making breakfast together, dancing with each other and playing games: the typical family vlogging channel. As the kids grew, so did the channel. Amassing over 2.5 million subscribers and millions of views per video at its peak, the channel became a household name.
Although the 8 Passengers led the family vlogging scene for years, they would soon find out that their rise in popularity was to end, and extremely fast. In June of 2020, the channel published a vlog titled “Chad Had To Sleep On A Bean Bag.” In the vlog, the oldest son Chad was to tell viewers why he had to sleep on a bean bag chair rather than his bed. In the video, he revealed that he had been sleeping on the bean bag for months in the family’s basement. The explanation for this was that he had pranked his younger brother into thinking that they were going to take a trip to Disneyland. This bean bag incident started an outcry in the YouTube community, with many commenters highlighting the cruelty of their parenting. The 8 Passengers channel never recovered after the truth came out.
Episode two, “Distortion,” went deeper into detail about how Kevin and Chad were banished from their home by Hildebrant in order to strengthen the marriage of the two parents. Hildebrant at this point had moved into the Franke home and taken over Shari’s bedroom because she had been “possessed.” In “The House of My Mother,” Shari goes deeper into detail about how she had a couple of hours to clean out her belongings from her room before Hildebrandt arrived. Later that summer, she would be moving to the dorms at Brigham Young University where her father worked as a professor. In the meantime, she was forced to live in the basement.
Finishing off the trilogy, “Truth” went into detail about the abuse that the two youngest Franke children experienced at the home of Hildebrant. “The House of My Mother” gave good insight into the tragic day in which the two youngest Franke children escaped, but it wasn’t the same as seeing the actual footage of the emaciated kids. The footage brought actual tears to our eyes as it finally set in that the woman we had spent critical years of our youths watching had truly done these ghastly things to her children. Even worse, the happy smiling children in the videos had suffered all of this abuse and trauma over the years, and many viewers were oblivious to it.
Reading the memoir opened our eyes to how Shari felt it was her duty to keep her younger siblings safe, despite being disowned. At a crucial part in the memoir, she locates Chad, who she hadn’t seen in months. Her brother then turned her away, even though she had brought him a bag full of his favorite snacks as a peace offering. Shari hadn’t seen any of her siblings in over a year, and seeing her brother should have been a triumphant moment. In the documentary, we see that Shari and Chad were always as thick as thieves as children, but once their mother met Hildebrant, they no longer got along.
Currently, the future is bright for the Franke family. As Ruby Franke remains in prison, Shari proposed a bill to the Utah legislature that would guarantee that influencers who use their children in their content would be required to put 15% of the income made on their videos into a trust. This comes from the fact that none of the Franke children received any of the money that their parents made from their channel, despite the fact that at one point, the family was making $100,000 a month on their channel.
In August of 2023, Illinois became the first state to pass a law that protected the financials of children in content creation. California and Minnesota followed suit shortly after. In some states, such as Missouri, the law has been proposed but has not yet been implemented.
The four youngest Franke children are safe, and the two oldest are constantly advocating against child influencing. Despite the family’s past, it seems that the Franke family is ready to continue on with their lives behind the camera.
