Latest news with #DevilintheFamily:TheFallofRubyFranke
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Family-Vlogger Documentary Trend Magnifies a Serious Societal Problem
Recent documentaries like Hulu's Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke and Netflix's Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing should have society — or at least social media — shook. Both projects shine a spotlight on abuses of minors in the hugely popular family-vlogging space. Behind the shiny-happy presentation of children, tweens and teens is a mostly-unregulated environment that can bend (if not completely breaks) child labor laws, enable online predators and create unknown damage to the psyche of developing brains. Instagram and YouTube are where most of these parents offend, two activists featured in Bad Influence, which examines troubling behind-the-scenes behavior of adults involved with Piper Rockelle's popular YouTube channel, mainly her 'momager' Tiffany Smith, told The Hollywood Reporter. Though YouTube gets the most play in the documentaries (and for good reason: the 20-year-old site with 20 billion videos gets the largest share of TV viewership of any media company, including Disney), Instagram may be the more potentially-dangerous platform, both experts said, as it allows an account's followers to pay for walled content — with some restrictions. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Hazbin Hotel' Offshoot 'Helluva Boss' Gets Prime Video Run, Two-Season Renewal $8.9B in YouTube Ads Help Power Alphabet to Hugely Profitable Quarter On YouTube's 20th Anniversary, the Platform Says Over 20 Billion Videos Have Been Uploaded Chris McCarty, the founder of Quit Clicking Kids, said it is 'particularly concerning when you have exclusive content of kids that is behind a paywall — the implications of that are pretty serious.' In a separate conversation with THR, Sarah Adams, the founder of Kids Are Not Content who goes by on social media, called Instagram 'particularly bad because … there's a lot of predators on there.' Meta, the parent company of Instagram, says it takes child safety very seriously, and has also been improving safeguards already in place. A policy implemented in April 2024 made it so that Instagram accounts run by adults that 'primarily post content of children' cannot offer subscriptions, receive gifts or receive badges (both are Instagram currency), a spokesperson told THR. Users as young as 13 can create their own accounts, but minor-created accounts have never had a monetization option available to them. Children under 13 are allowed to have a 'presence' on Instagram, but the account must be 'actively managed by a parent or manager, who is responsible for the account's content, privacy settings and interactions with others.' Instagram uses 'technology to prevent potentially suspicious adults from interacting with teen accounts, and with accounts that predominantly feature minors,' the company said. From just October-December 2024, Instagram removed two million pieces of child-exploitation content from Instagram, over 99 percent of which was found proactively before being reported. The platform's introduction of 'Teen Accounts' in September 2024 added more privacy and messaging restrictions, the spokesperson said. (Anyone under 18 is automatically enrolled in a Teen Account, though 16- and 17-year-olds can then opt out; kids under 16 need a parent's permission to opt out of a Teen Account.) Like Instagram, 13-year-olds can set up their own YouTube channel; children under 13 can have a 'supervised' channel linked to a parent's channel. Unlike Instagram, there are no paywalls on YouTube channels. 'We want creators to have fun and be creative, but they must also follow our Community Guidelines, Creator Responsibility policies and applicable laws,' YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told THR. 'If we see that a creator's on- and/or off-platform behavior is harmful to the wider YouTube community we take swift action.' Swift action here included a 2022 indefinite suspension of monetization on Piper Rockelle's channel for off-platform behavior. And in August 2023, the month Franke was arrested (and later pled guilty to) child abuse charges, YouTube terminated two channels linked to her. 'YouTube developed a set of quality principles to help guide YouTube's kids and family creators,' Bullwinkle continued. 'These principles were developed in partnership with child development specialists, and are based on extensive research.' McCarty's and Adams' respective websites are considered sister sites in the fight against the exploitation of children on social media. They share a similar cause — one we should all share, frankly — but approach the problem differently. McCarty, a 20-year-old Political Science and Chinese double-major honors student at the University of Washington (Seattle), became appalled by the lack of accountability in the space after reading about Myka and James Stauffer, married midwest family vloggers who shared the process of adopting a two-year-old special needs child from China with their substantial YouTube audience. Two-and-a-half years later, they essentially gave the child back, citing an inability to meet all of his needs. The swift online backlash is chronicled in HBO documentary series An Update on Our Family. Then 17, McCarty began cold-calling and cold-emailing Washington state legislators, pushing a homemade policy to combat such exploitative 'sharenting' (a term first coined in the Wall Street Journal in 2010). LOL, teenagers, right? Except this teenager's optimism and passion (mixed with, yes, some healthy naiveté) worked. 'I wasn't expecting anyone to take me up on that,' McCarty said, 'but they did!' Though McCarty's bill was first introduced in Washington state (as HB 2032), it was first picked up in Illinois (SB 1782), where it received bipartisan, unanimous support. Other states (and that bipartisan, unanimous support) followed, including California (SB764), arguably the most important state for all of this. McCarty's lobbying efforts there coincided with the release of the Demi Lovato cautionary-documentary Child Star, which featured McCarty. 'I don't know how the universe worked out that way, but it did,' McCarty said. 'There's this really great photo of [Lovato] being there at the bill-signing with Gov. Gavin Newsom. It was really a satisfying moment to look at that and think, 'Oh, I helped put those two people together in that room.'' McCarty's bill has two primary components: 1) It ensures a percentage of revenue (at least 15 percent, similar to Hollywood's Coogan Law) earned from a minor's participation in social-media videos is set aside for them, and 2) It allows the child performer to request the deletion of content featuring them as a minor when they come of age. As kids, 'they couldn't consent to it,' McCarty argues. Most — but not all — local lawmakers agree on that second piece. Even if YouTube already does. 'YouTube has supported efforts to compensate kids who appear in YouTube content and provide a pathway to remove content made when they were a minor (YouTube already does this voluntarily),' Bullwinkle said. Don't freak out on us here, normal parents who share normal stuff about their kids in a normal way on social media: McCarty's bill only applies to accounts where a minor is featured in 30 percent of the posted videos within the past 30 days and those videos are generating at least 10 cents in revenue per view. As cute as your kids are in their Christmas morning videos, they're probably not get-you-paid cute. McCarty's bill is a great start, but it cannot completely protect kids from parental exploitation in the space. What it can do those is enforce protections on the components of sharenting that are measurable. The government is very interested in how much income one brings in (Meta and YouTube-parent Alphabet are publicly-traded companies; they'll comply), and it is also not debatable as to when a child becomes an adult — 18, in most countries. Unfortunately, unlike a film and TV set, that's about where the protections for vlogging must feasibly end. (Not that protections for children on film and TV sets have been perfected: ID's Quiet on Set showed us that there is still a lot of room for improvement even within the Hollywood studio system.) McCarty wishes the bill could 'require set teachers or regulated work hours,' but neither McCarty or Adams see how that can be enforced when the filming in question is done among family, by family and often within the family home. 'I think it would be very difficult to get into the homes and monitor how much these kids are working,' Adams, said. 'Some [family vloggers] would argue that [the kids] are not working — they're just filming their life.' And that argument would be nonsense in the cases we're discussing: scaled-up, monetized family vlogs. 'Trust me, these kids are acting. They know when the camera is on that they have to perform, they have to say something cute. Who knows what that's doing to their psyche as they develop a sense of self and always have to feel like they're in performance mode?' Adams said. 'But when it comes to regulating, like the labor kids, or like the schooling hours, I think it would be extremely difficult on a state or federal level.' So instead, Adams, 39, is more interested in shifting the culture of sharenting than the laws against it. Her approach is a pragmatic one (perhaps that comes to us all with age, for better or for worse). 'If I can help parents look through a different lens at this — in the way they share their kids, in the way they consume content online — then that's what I can offer,' she said. Best of The Hollywood Reporter How the Warner Brothers Got Their Film Business Started Meet the World Builders: Hollywood's Top Physical Production Executives of 2023 Men in Blazers, Hollywood's Favorite Soccer Podcast, Aims for a Global Empire
New York Times
02-04-2025
- New York Times
Their Influencer Parents Used Them as Content. Are They Being Used Again Now?
In the video, we see a boy walk up a shaded front patio in Ivins, Utah. He is 12 but appears younger; his thighs are sticks, his knees knobby. After ringing the doorbell, he retreats toward the street, and by the time the door opens, he is almost out of view, swallowed up in sunlight. 'I was wondering if you could do two favors?' he asks. 'Taking me to the nearest police station? Well, actually, just one's fine.' Before the Washington County Attorney's Office released this August 2023 doorbell-camera footage to the press, it blurred the boy's face — an unsurprising choice, as the video depicts a minor who was the victim of a crime. But the boy's identity was already well known online. Fans had been watching him and his five siblings since he was a toddler on '8 Passengers,' the YouTube channel of his mother, Ruby Franke, which at its height had more than two million subscribers and brought in as much as $100,000 a month. His escape from a house owned by Jodi Hildebrandt — a counselor and life coach whose teachings Franke subscribed to — made national news. Franke and Hildebrandt had abused Franke's two youngest children, denying them food and water and binding them with rope; each was charged with six counts of felony aggravated child abuse and, six months later, sent to prison for up to 30 years. The Hulu documentary 'Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke' recounts this story, but it is striking that viewers never see Franke's younger son's face or hear his name. Whenever the boy appears in footage filmed by Franke and her husband at the time, Kevin, his face is blurred; if anyone says his name, not only is the audio censored, but mouths are blurred to prevent lip reading. The documentary similarly conceals the identities of the three other Franke children who are still minors. The only Franke children whose identities are not protected are the two oldest — Shari, 22, and Chad, 20 — who appear in interviews as well as videos and outtakes from the channel. 'Devil in the Family' is the second docuseries this year to adopt this approach. The other is HBO's 'An Update on Our Family,' about Myka and James Stauffer, an Ohio couple whose YouTube channels once had about one million subscribers. The Stauffers' viewership grew substantially in 2016 and 2017, as they posted a 27-video series detailing their adoption of a toddler from China, whom they renamed Huxley. Huxley soon became the channel's main character; the Stauffers even featured him in sponsored content, like a spot for Dreft baby detergent. But in May 2020, fans turned on the Stauffers when they revealed that they had dissolved Huxley's adoption because of their difficulty in managing his developmental disabilities. In 'An Update on Our Family,' every child's face is blurred. Huxley is altered even further: In a clip where Myka shares images of the boy at an orphanage in China, scribbled rotoscoping animation covers his face and body. He remains penciled out through the rest of the series — a visual echo of the way the Stauffers' own channels began to make videos of Huxley private before the couple announced that he was no longer their son. (He has since been adopted by another family.) The blurring is a gesture at restitution: In concealing the identities of these children, the documentarians are attempting the ex post facto application of a privacy that was stripped away long ago. But the gesture feels shallow. The Frankes and the Stauffers invited viewers into their children's most personal moments, from tantrums to puberty milestones; they grabbed attention with a mirage of idealized family life and profited handsomely. The documentaries expose the dark realities behind that mirage, with a similar goal. Ruby Franke and Myka Stauffer uploaded plenty of talking-head content narrating their lives, but what really drew viewers was their children. '8 Passengers' first went viral with a 2015 video titled 'BABY climbs out of crib!!!' depicting the youngest Franke child — the girl who would later be found emaciated in a closet — rappelling out of a lime green crib. The Frankes incorporated 8 Passengers Productions L.L.C. soon after. For seven years, their children's lives were ruled by feeding the YouTube algorithm. The documentary shows Ruby telling the children that they'll get $10 for each video they 'help with'; over footage of girls with blurred faces cleaning mirrors and baseboards, Shari explains how the home 'felt more like a set than a house.' 'An Update on Our Family' tries to think through the ethical dilemmas of monetizing someone's childhood this way. Toward the end, the journalist Stephanie McNeal, who wrote about the Stauffers for BuzzFeed News, talks about how such scandals might have prompted a broader discussion about family vlogging. Instead, she says, 'people just yelled about the Stauffers on the internet and sent death threats — which, OK, but that didn't help any other children. Let's put some laws into place. How can we make this safe for kids?' According to Shari Franke, you can't. 'I want to be clear that there is never, ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame,' she told the Utah Senate in testimony last October. 'There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger.' Three months later, Doug Owens, a Democrat who represents Salt Lake County, introduced a bill in the Utah House of Representatives that would establish protections for the children of content creators, requiring that parents who earn $150,000 a year or more from social media featuring their minor child set aside 15 percent of the child's earnings in a trust for the child to access upon turning 18. The legislation also includes a provision that children can have content featuring them removed from the internet when they reach adulthood — a step well beyond blurring their faces. Similar legislation has been signed into law in California and Illinois, but its introduction in Utah was significant: As Shari Franke explained in her testimony, the state is a hotbed of family content creation. In February, Kevin Franke also testified in support of the bill — though his remarks, too, suggested that it did not go far enough. 'Vlogging my family, putting my children into public social media, was wrong, and I regret it every day,' he said. He also read a statement from his 16-year-old daughter, detailing her experience of growing up on YouTube. 'You're selling your life, your privacy, your body and stories to the entire world,' she wrote. 'And as a child, you're involuntarily giving up all of that. You're selling your childhood.' The bill passed, and it was signed into law on March 25. 'Devil in the Family' has nothing to say about such legislation, or the broader ethical hazards of family influencing; it is focused on Ruby Franke's individual acts of evil, collecting behind-the-scenes footage of how poorly she treated her children. For years, people turned to this channel, and others, for intimate glimpses into how other families lived; they became invested in the daily lives of the children they watched growing up onscreen. Those children's faces might be blurred this time, but they still serve as content: People want to know what happened to them. The blurs and scribbles of 'An Update on Our Family,' too, hint that the team behind the series struggled with how to tell Huxley's story without doing much the same thing his adoptive parents did. The attempt to excise all these children from footage already watched by millions suggests a queasy truth: We shouldn't have seen them in the first place.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Two Cautionary Tales for the Family Vlogger
In 2018, when YouTube's official Instagram account posted a Mother's Day tribute, the vlogger Ruby Franke was front and center. Over the years, 8 Passengers—the YouTube channel where Franke documented life with her husband, Kevin, and their six children—had amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers and generated upwards of $100,000 in monthly income at its peak. In some ways, she was a vision of modern motherhood: photogenic, committed, successful. But six years after her Mother's Day shout-out, Franke's image had crumbled. In February 2024, she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to at least four years in prison after both pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse following the discovery that they had been starving, beating, and physically restraining Ruby's two youngest children. The influencer exposé is now a true-crime subgenre unto itself, and Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke—a new Hulu docuseries about the Frankes released at the end of February—is not the first public account of this one family's ordeal. But the show is also one of two new documentaries that explore how the creator economy encouraged family vloggers to perform an ideal of perfect American motherhood, sometimes to the detriment of their children's well-being. Their channels thrived by peddling maternal relatability, wrapped in palatable aesthetics, and helped usher in an era of digital culture promising that other women could earn money and praise just by turning a camera on their everyday lives. This social-media shift had tangible real-life effects: Not only did many unconsenting minors have their childhoods broadcast to the whole world, but their mothers also helped entrench—or, some might say, re-entrench—a broader view of the nuclear family as not just a worthy pursuit but a moral cause. Watching old clips from 8 Passengers, it's easy to see that Franke was selling a lifestyle, not just monetizing random family footage. Devil in the Family frames Franke's approach to motherhood and vlogging as a vehicle for her core mandate: evangelism, both religious and cultural. The documentary suggests that the vlogger—who is Mormon—saw her family's success as a reflection of God's satisfaction. But these same religious principles were also distorted to justify poor treatment of the Franke children. Early in the series, Kevin recalls Ruby remarking that the kids were 'losing their light' when they complained about constantly being filmed for YouTube—evidence of a spiritual malaise, not simple dissatisfaction with the work of always being on camera. Even before the gorier details of Franke's conduct were made public, her parenting had drawn scrutiny from once-devoted followers. In one pivotal instance, 8 Passengers received a deluge of disapproving comments after Chad, the Frankes' then-teenage son, revealed that his mother had been punishing him by forcing him to sleep in their basement for seven months, on a beanbag chair. 'We saw it as an innocent religious family that's being attacked unjustly by cancel culture, and cancel culture is winning,' Kevin says of the critiques in the doc, one of many moments in which he alludes to his and his wife's belief that 8 Passengers was a vital beacon of traditional values. Some of the documentary's most uncomfortable asides are those in which he appears to still be enamored with Ruby, even after she asked him to move out and cut off contact with the family, and after her abuse of their children had come to light. The dissonance is jarring to witness, especially in the final episode, which includes extensive descriptions (and some disturbing images) of the physical abuse that the two youngest children suffered. But part of 8 Passengers' appeal had always come from Ruby's no-nonsense views on child-rearing. Her emphasis on discipline was as central to the channel's appeal as the light-flooded home where the Frankes filmed. Ruby modeled strategies for how other parents might stamp out concerning behavior they witnessed in their own children, casting school-age rebellion as a matter of grave importance to the health of the family. On 8 Passengers, she mocked or castigated her children for infractions as minor as failing to wake up on time for preschool, forgetting to pack their own lunch for school, or inquiring which movie the family would be going to see. The intensity of her approach escalated after Ruby shut down the Frankes' original channel and began making parenting-advice content with Jodi: 'Your woke child is a walking zombie,' Ruby says in one clip from Moms of Truth, a social-media group they started after 8 Passengers, imploring parents to assert control over the wicked forces taking hold of their kids. In this framing, children are not autonomous individuals worthy of respect, but future standard-bearers of their parents' values—which means that the greatest sign of a mother's success is producing obedient children. That view has tremendous societal implications: Researchers have found that the values survey respondents prioritize in their parenting often correlate with those they prioritize in their politics. [Read: How parents of child influencers package their kids' lives for Instagram] In Devil in the Family, two of the Franke children speak for themselves. Shari and Chad, now ages 21 and 20, discuss the psychological toll of having their adolescent years mined for content. Their commentary is striking, in part because it defies the idea that children tend to be eager collaborators in their parents' blogging business. The entire infrastructure of family vlogging relies on the labor of minors, but their participation has only recently been recognized as work. Although family vloggers have been making a living online for more than a decade, Chad and Shari are among the first children of influencers to comment publicly as adults. (The younger children, who are still minors, are not interviewed, and their faces are blurred out in the old footage.) The two relay how their mother's desire to project blissful domesticity had strained the family well before news of her abuses turned the internet against her. These remarks echo some of the criticism in Shari's new memoir, The House of My Mother, which challenges the notion that parent-child relationships are unbreakable bonds. Shari's disinterest in rekindling a relationship with her mother, and her insistence on referring to her parents by their first names, pushes back against the expectation that children express unconditional gratitude for the parents who raised them. This cultural belief leaves children particularly vulnerable to abuse at home, the memoir suggests, because it reinforces a hierarchy in which parents hold absolute power. The events detailed in An Update on Our Family, a recent HBO documentary inspired by a New York magazine article, are less straightforward than the Frankes' story. But the dynamics that propelled Myka Stauffer, another controversial 'momfluencer,' to social-media fame share some connective tissue with the Frankes' early vlogging days. Though the Stauffers were subject to a sheriff's-office investigation after viewers called to report suspicions of child endangerment, authorities found no evidence that the couple had committed any crimes. Instead, their predicament illustrated something more difficult to pinpoint as an obvious moral failing—the tragic dilemma of parents who'd taken on more than they could handle, seemingly motivated at least partly by the promise of a large following. Not long into their own social-media careers, Myka and her husband, James, realized that viewers responded enthusiastically to the reveal of a new child, the ultimate proof of a couple's stability and closeness. When the Stauffers recorded their path to adopting a young boy from China with special needs, their subscriber count grew exponentially. Once the child arrived in the United States, the Ohio couple made him a fixture of their channel, documenting him alongside their three biological children. That included their sponsored content, such as a baby-detergent ad in which Myka claimed that the product helped her bond with the 3-year-old—whom the Stauffers had renamed 'Huxley'—because 'I can still feel like I'm snuggling that brand-new baby, and I get that baby scent that I never got from my son.' The Stauffers visibly struggled with Huxley's developmental needs, tearfully describing his diagnoses for the camera. Still, they assured viewers that they were steadfast in their commitment, because to reject him would have been to deny God's will for their life. Followers praised the couple for their ostensibly selfless, Christlike decision to give a foreign child a chance at a better life, and the Stauffers leaned into the idea that God had chosen them to adopt Huxley in a show of faith. But the Stauffers seemingly failed to deliver on the ideals that had helped attract roughly 1 million subscribers to their various accounts: An Update on Our Family takes its name from the title of the last video that Myka and James uploaded to their joint YouTube channel, in which the two 30-somethings admitted to their subscribers that they had placed Huxley with a new family that was better suited to the child's needs. In a written statement, Myka denied having adopted Huxley for financial gain: 'While we did receive a small portion of money from videos featuring Huxley and his journey, every penny and much more went back into his care,' she said. The dizzying montage of social-media reactions to this decision, which is presented in the documentary, shows how angrily viewers responded. And the storm of vitriol that followed the Stauffers' joint decision was directed almost entirely at Myka, just as Ruby Franke, before the extent of her abuse came to light, bore the brunt of public critique for her parenting style. In each case, part of what enabled the husbands to bypass the overwhelming criticism hurled at their wives is the widespread notion that fathers are less responsible for child-rearing than mothers are. The image that Ruby and Myka sold to their viewers relied on the veneration of motherly authority—the idea that the domestic sphere is where women hold court and exert quiet control. Years after the dramatic crescendos of the women's controversies, family vlogging no longer has the same uncomplicated, aspirational allure it once did. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the work of balancing motherhood with professional demands has become significantly more difficult for a lot of American women, making some types of lifestyle blogging feel less like cheerful entertainment or useful resources and more like optimized artifice. Of course, the Stauffers' and the Frankes' extreme experiences don't represent the average vlogger's. But as family bloggers begin to speak up about moving away from states with laws intended to protect their children, the medium's tricky ethical and economic considerations are becoming more transparent to viewers. For many women who rose to prominence by turning their children into stars, saying goodbye to the profits—and the power—may still be even harder than logging off. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Two Cautionary Tales for the Family Vlogger
In 2018, when YouTube's official Instagram account posted a Mother's Day tribute, the vlogger Ruby Franke was front and center. Over the years, 8 Passengers—the YouTube channel where Franke documented life with her husband, Kevin, and their six children—had amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers and generated upwards of $100,000 in monthly income at its peak. In some ways, she was a vision of modern motherhood: photogenic, committed, successful. But six years after her Mother's Day shout-out, Franke's image had crumbled. In February 2024, she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to at least four years in prison after both pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse following the discovery that they had been starving, beating, and physically restraining Ruby's two youngest children. The influencer exposé is now a true-crime subgenre unto itself, and Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke— a new Hulu docuseries about the Frankes released at the end of February—is not the first public account of this one family's ordeal. But the show is also one of two new documentaries that explore how the creator economy encouraged family vloggers to perform an ideal of perfect American motherhood, sometimes to the detriment of their children's well-being. Their channels thrived by peddling maternal relatability, wrapped in palatable aesthetics, and helped usher in an era of digital culture promising that other women could earn money and praise just by turning a camera on their everyday lives. This social-media shift had tangible real-life effects: Not only did many unconsenting minors have their childhoods broadcast to the whole world, but their mothers also helped entrench—or, some might say, re-entrench—a broader view of the nuclear family as not just a worthy pursuit but a moral cause. Watching old clips from 8 Passengers, it's easy to see that Franke was selling a lifestyle, not just monetizing random family footage. Devil in the Family frames Franke's approach to motherhood and vlogging as a vehicle for her core mandate: evangelism, both religious and cultural. The documentary suggests that the vlogger—who is Mormon—saw her family's success as a reflection of God's satisfaction. But these same religious principles were also distorted to justify poor treatment of the Franke children. Early in the series, Kevin recalls Ruby remarking that the kids were 'losing their light' when they complained about constantly being filmed for YouTube—evidence of a spiritual malaise, not simple dissatisfaction with the work of always being on camera. Even before the gorier details of Franke's conduct were made public, her parenting had drawn scrutiny from once-devoted followers. In one pivotal instance, 8 Passengers received a deluge of disapproving comments after Chad, the Frankes' then-teenage son, revealed that his mother had been punishing him by forcing him to sleep in their basement for seven months, on a beanbag chair. 'We saw it as an innocent religious family that's being attacked unjustly by cancel culture, and cancel culture is winning,' Kevin says of the critiques in the doc, one of many moments in which he alludes to his and his wife's belief that 8 Passengers was a vital beacon of traditional values. Some of the documentary's most uncomfortable asides are those in which he appears to still be enamored with Ruby, even after she asked him to move out and cut off contact with the family, and after her abuse of their children had come to light. The dissonance is jarring to witness, especially in the final episode, which includes extensive descriptions (and some disturbing images) of the physical abuse that the two youngest children suffered. But part of 8 Passengers' appeal had always come from Ruby's no-nonsense views on child-rearing. Her emphasis on discipline was as central to the channel's appeal as the light-flooded home where the Frankes filmed. Ruby modeled strategies for how other parents might stamp out concerning behavior they witnessed in their own children, casting school-age rebellion as a matter of grave importance to the health of the family. On 8 Passengers, she mocked or castigated her children for infractions as minor as failing to wake up on time for preschool, forgetting to pack their own lunch for school, or inquiring which movie the family would be going to see. The intensity of her approach escalated after Ruby shut down the Frankes' original channel and began making parenting-advice content with Jodi: 'Your woke child is a walking zombie,' Ruby says in one clip from Moms of Truth, a social-media group they started after 8 Passengers, imploring parents to assert control over the wicked forces taking hold of their kids. In this framing, children are not autonomous individuals worthy of respect, but future standard-bearers of their parents' values—which means that the greatest sign of a mother's success is producing obedient children. That view has tremendous societal implications: Researchers have found that the values survey respondents prioritize in their parenting often correlate with those they prioritize in their politics. In Devil in the Family, two of the Franke children speak for themselves. Shari and Chad, now ages 21 and 20, discuss the psychological toll of having their adolescent years mined for content. Their commentary is striking, in part because it defies the idea that children tend to be eager collaborators in their parents' blogging business. The entire infrastructure of family vlogging relies on the labor of minors, but their participation has only recently been recognized as work. Although family vloggers have been making a living online for more than a decade, Chad and Shari are among the first children of influencers to comment publicly as adults. (The younger children, who are still minors, are not interviewed, and their faces are blurred out in the old footage.) The two relay how their mother's desire to project blissful domesticity had strained the family well before news of her abuses turned the internet against her. These remarks echo some of the criticism in Shari's new memoir, The House of My Mother, which challenges the notion that parent-child relationships are unbreakable bonds. Shari's disinterest in rekindling a relationship with her mother, and her insistence on referring to her parents by their first names, pushes back against the expectation that children express unconditional gratitude for the parents who raised them. This cultural belief leaves children particularly vulnerable to abuse at home, the memoir suggests, because it reinforces a hierarchy in which parents hold absolute power. The events detailed in An Update on Our Family, a recent HBO documentary inspired by a New York magazine article, are less straightforward than the Frankes' story. But the dynamics that propelled Myka Stauffer, another controversial 'momfluencer,' to social-media fame share some connective tissue with the Frankes' early vlogging days. Though the Stauffers were subject to a sheriff's-office investigation after viewers called to report suspicions of child endangerment, authorities found no evidence that the couple had committed any crimes. Instead, their predicament illustrated something more difficult to pinpoint as an obvious moral failing—the tragic dilemma of parents who'd taken on more than they could handle, seemingly motivated at least partly by the promise of a large following. Not long into their own social-media careers, Myka and her husband, James, realized that viewers responded enthusiastically to the reveal of a new child, the ultimate proof of a couple's stability and closeness. When the Stauffers recorded their path to adopting a young boy from China with special needs, their subscriber count grew exponentially. Once the child arrived in the United States, the Ohio couple made him a fixture of their channel, documenting him alongside their three biological children. That included their sponsored content, such as a baby-detergent ad in which Myka claimed that the product helped her bond with the 3-year-old—whom the Stauffers had renamed 'Huxley'—because 'I can still feel like I'm snuggling that brand-new baby, and I get that baby scent that I never got from my son.' The Stauffers visibly struggled with Huxley's developmental needs, tearfully describing his diagnoses for the camera. Still, they assured viewers that they were steadfast in their commitment, because to reject him would have been to deny God's will for their life. Followers praised the couple for their ostensibly selfless, Christlike decision to give a foreign child a chance at a better life, and the Stauffers leaned into the idea that God had chosen them to adopt Huxley in a show of faith. But the Stauffers seemingly failed to deliver on the ideals that had helped attract roughly 1 million subscribers to their various accounts: An Update on Our Family takes its name from the title of the last video that Myka and James uploaded to their joint YouTube channel, in which the two 30-somethings admitted to their subscribers that they had placed Huxley with a new family that was better suited to the child's needs. In a written statement, Myka denied having adopted Huxley for financial gain: 'While we did receive a small portion of money from videos featuring Huxley and his journey, every penny and much more went back into his care,' she said. The dizzying montage of social-media reactions to this decision, which is presented in the documentary, shows how angrily viewers responded. And the storm of vitriol that followed the Stauffers' joint decision was directed almost entirely at Myka, just as Ruby Franke, before the extent of her abuse came to light, bore the brunt of public critique for her parenting style. In each case, part of what enabled the husbands to bypass the overwhelming criticism hurled at their wives is the widespread notion that fathers are less responsible for child-rearing than mothers are. The image that Ruby and Myka sold to their viewers relied on the veneration of motherly authority—the idea that the domestic sphere is where women hold court and exert quiet control. Years after the dramatic crescendos of the women's controversies, family vlogging no longer has the same uncomplicated, aspirational allure it once did. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the work of balancing motherhood with professional demands has become significantly more difficult for a lot of American women, making some types of lifestyle blogging feel less like cheerful entertainment or useful resources and more like optimized artifice. Of course, the Stauffers' and the Frankes' extreme experiences don't represent the average vlogger's. But as family bloggers begin to speak up about moving away from states with laws intended to protect their children, the medium's tricky ethical and economic considerations are becoming more transparent to viewers. For many women who rose to prominence by turning their children into stars, saying goodbye to the profits—and the power—may still be even harder than logging off.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Convicted YouTuber Ruby Franke finalizes divorce from husband Kevin after child abuse sentencing
YouTube family vlogger and convicted child abuser Ruby Franke and her husband Kevin Franke have finalized their divorce after 25 years of marriage. Last year, Ruby and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. The two women were accused of trying to convince Ruby's two youngest children that they were evil, possessed by demons, and needed to be punished. Now, as Kevin and his family continue to recover from the ordeal, Utah District Judge Roger Griffin has signed the Franke's divorce decree, effective March 20. According to KSL-TV Utah, Kevin originally filed for divorce three months after Ruby's arrest in August 2023. Based on a previous order, Kevin has sole custody of his and Ruby's four minor children, whom Ruby was ordered to not contact per the 4th District Juvenile Court. Kevin also agreed to 'consider any child support payments owed to him by Ruby Franke already paid.' The couple also share 20-year-old son Chad and 22-year-old daughter Shari. The divorce agreement clarifies that aside from the $85,000 Ruby withdrew from accounts following her separation from Kevin in 2022, all other financial assets in her name — including their former shared home in Springville, Utah — will be reallocated to Kevin. Last month, leading up to the release of the three-part docuseries on Hulu called Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, Kevin revealed where he stood with Ruby in an interview with People. 'The last letter that I received from her from prison was maybe in March or April of last year,' Kevin told the publication about Ruby, who is currently serving her sentence at the Utah State Correctional Facility. 'And then I requested the Department of Corrections to ask her to stop writing me. I didn't want to hear anymore. I didn't like what she was saying.' Kevin refused to reveal what Ruby wrote to him. 'I'm not going to share,' he told People. 'That's between her and me. But it just didn't feel right and it didn't feel good, and I'm very angry. I'm still very angry.' During the documentary — which was released on February 27— Kevin discussed what the relationship was like between his now ex-wife and her business partner. At one point, Hildebrandt had moved in with Ruby and Kevin because she was experiencing 'demonic night terrors.' Kevin recalled Ruby telling him the two of them were the only people who could 'get rid of the evil spirits' in Hildebrandt. 'I would place my hands on her head and command the demons to depart,' Kevin said. 'And I would state every name of Jesus Christ that I could possibly think of. And those evil spirits were very reactive to those names.' Ruby and Hildebrandt eventually began asking Kevin to leave the room so they could continue the process without him. This evolved into Ruby checking on her business partner at night because that was when Hildebrandt said 'the possessions were the worst.' 'And then one day Ruby said, 'I'm just going to stay up there and stay with her. She needs a friend, and maybe if I'm in there with her, these things will leave her alone,'' Kevin said. He admitted that they didn't know the 'extent' of Ruby and Hildebrandt's actions when they were alone together. However, when Shari was deliberately asked by someone off-camera whether or not her mother and Hildebrandt were 'lovers' her response was: 'I mean, I have my opinions.' When asked what her opinions were, she said, 'I do think that they were.'
