Disgraced Parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke Hired Private Investigator to Probe Angry Followers (Exclusive)
A private investigator hired by Ruby Franke and her husband tells PEOPLE the couple was harassed and threatened
Angry text messages from strangers. Spam emails for plastic surgeries. And then, in the middle of the night in 2020, someone — covering their face — rang the doorbell with a threatening message for the vlogging family of eight.
Ruby and Kevin Franke, who co-hosted the influential YouTube channel “8 Passengers,” documenting their strict parenting over their six kids in Utah, first came under fire in May 2020, after one of their children, Chad, said in a video that he had been made to sleep on a beanbag chair for seven months for pranking his younger brother into believing they were going to Disney World. Chad laughed, recalling how his brother, Russell, had packed a suitcase. In the video, Ruby threatened to take his bedroom away again.
The video angered some of their 2.5 million YouTube subscribers, who started a petition amassing some 17,000 signatures in support of a Child Protective Services investigation into alleged maltreatment by the parents, who they said, had taken away “basic necessities.”
Ruby and her daughter Eve were baking bread in the kitchen when social workers checked on the family that June, and they closed the investigation without substantiating the allegations.
But the family’s angry followers were not so easily reassured. As the threats escalated, Kevin called David Corrington, a private investigator and a retired special agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“I think what really threw it over the edge was this person showing up in the middle of the night ringing the doorbell,” Corrington tells PEOPLE in the latest issue, on newsstands Friday. “That starts getting a little more personal and scary with the children being in the house.” He said the couple hired him shortly after the incident.
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Corrington — who says he believed there were “several individuals that were targeting” the couple — said the family “definitely had some frustration that the police department was not doing enough.”
But many people continued to believe the Franke children were being mistreated. Over the years, calls to police and child protective services continued against the family.
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
Shari FrankeResponding to calls from a concerned neighbor and Shari, the couple’s estranged eldest daughter, the family racked up multiple visits from social workers, who did not substantiate any allegation until August.
“Basically what child protective services told us is we can’t do anything until somebody gets hurt,” the neighbor tells PEOPLE.
Then the couple’s youngest son, Russell, slipped out a window in a home where he was staying with his mother and younger sister, Eve, at family therapist Jodi Hildebrandt's home in Ivins, Utah, and rang the neighbor’s doorbell. Too small for his shorts and with sores pussing along his wrists and duct tape around his ankles, the sandy blond 12-year-old, asked the man to call 911.
“He says what’s happened to him is his fault,” the neighbor — his voice breaking — relayed to the emergency operator.
In search warrants, the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department alleges Russell was tied to the ground with ropes and that the women rubbed cayenne pepper and honey into his wounds. Russell and Eve were taken to a local hospital, treated for malnourishment and placed in foster care, along with their two teenage sisters, Abby and Julie. (Shari and Chad had already moved out.)
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By evening, Ruby and Jodi were arrested, each charged with six counts of aggravated felony child abuse. Held without bail at Washington County Purgatory Correctional Facility, neither has entered a plea. (Kevin was questioned by police but has not been charged. He had left the family home a year earlier, at the direction of Hildebrandt, according to his lawyer, Randy Kester.)
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
Kevin Franke (right) with lawyer, Randy Kester“It's unfortunate that it takes some of these extreme situations for the government to intervene,” Corrington said. “You certainly have to ask the question, why did this fall through the cracks in our system?”
Posting to Instagram Stories after her mother’s arrest, Shari shared a snap of the officers outside the family’s house, writing, “Finally.”
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