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.
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 don’t know about families in minority sects, but this kind of thing is extremely rare among families in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It certainly happens as much as in any other demographic, but generally rarely. The Church does not tolerate the abuse of children and the actions of Franke will certainly result in excommunication (if it hasn’t already).
Would you care to make a wager on her excommunication? Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell were ex’d, but they were ex’d for apostasy, not for murdering children. Hildebrandt should be excommunicated for apostasy, but she likely has too much insider knowledge to safely kick out.
Moreover, I know that the shit Franke did (prior to Hildebrant’s involvement; Franke really went off the deep end once she connected to Hildebrant) would be seen on the spectrum of normal in Mormon households because that’s the same kind of household I was raised in, and my dad was a bishop. Twice. In two different wards. My mom, now in her 80s, still has the same attitudes about ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘sin’ that Franke does/did. The only difference is the question of degree.
Lol, that’s some wild conspiracy theory stuff right there 🤣
Wild conspiracy theories about the shit that goes on at the upper levels of the Mormon church has an unfortunate way of being proven true years and decades after the fact.
Many of the decisions that get made by upper levels tends to be about protecting the name and reputation of the church, which means hiding the piles of dirty laundry. Moreover, if you’ve been sending people to a particular therapist for decades for ‘sex addiction’, and Hildebrandt has clearly been favored for such, then it’s going to be really hard for them to turn around and say, no, we’ve been wrong about her this whole time, she’s been preaching apostasy for decades, oops, we dun fucked up.
Has the Mormon church said anything yet about whether or not Tim Ballard was excommunicated, despite his use of elder Ballard’s name and his own sex abuse of women? Or are they still keeping that one quiet?
Such as? There are many lies that are commonly spread about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members. Which ones are you referring to that have been “proven true”?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not issue public announcements when a member’s membership is withdrawn. The decision to do such is made at the stake level. People with some level of public prominence, such as Tim Ballard, are known to announce the withdrawal of their membership themselves, usually in order to garner additional support from their followers. The policies of the Church on this topic are not secret and can be found here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/32-repentance-and-membership-councils?lang=eng#title_number71
How about pretty much everything that Gerald and Sandra Tanner tried to publicize? Rock in a hat, treasure digging, JS Jr. criminal conviction, JS Jr. “polygamy” (calling it polygamy would be a stretch, since many of the women were already married), polygamy in general (it was being actively denied by people that were polygamysts, including JS Jr., apostles, and shit, even rank and file members were lied to until BY led the majority of Mormons to Utah), the end of polygamy with the first manifesto (in fact, it’s been demonstrated that there was at least one sanctioned polygamous marriage by the child of an apostle after the second manifesto), Ensign Peak & tithing funds being used for City Creek Mall (“oh, tithing didn’t pay for it, we just invested the tithing and then used the investment fund to pay for it…”), PoGP not being a translation at all (in recent years they’ve entirely de-ephasized it, but when I was in seminary they printed the Egyptian funerary text facsimile at the front of the book of Moses, and claimed that it was a translation; later it became the inspiration, and now…?), the Kinderhook plates, the temple endowment ceremony being ripped off from Free Masonry, direct church involvement in the prop 8 campaign in California, and on, and on, and on.
You can even look at Nelson’s, “saying Mormon is a victory for Satan”, and contrast it with Hinckley who championed the, “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign that ran for years. Nelson is claiming that his words are straight from god, so apparently Hinckley was being deceived by Satan when he green-lit a PR campaign…? Every prophet is a prophet until a new prophet says something that contradicts the old one, and then the old one was “speaking as a man”. But wait, weren’t we promised that god would never let a prophet mislead his people? Hmmm.
This is the pattern of the Mormon church. Everything is denied, until the evidence is so overwhelming, and then members are told that it was always this way, and if you didn’t know it’s not their fault.
They used to print notices of excommunication in Desert News. Literally. So this idea that “oh no, we can’t tell people about this, they need their privacy” is utter nonsense.
I’m going to assume that you’re a believing Mormon, because there really isn’t anyone else that defends their nonsense.
So, here’s your fundamental problem: the beliefs are un-falsifiable. That is, you study, you pray, you think that god gives you good feelings through the holy ghost that confirms that it’s true. If you don’t feel the good feelings, then you believe that you need to pray more, study more, etc., and you need to do this until you do get the ‘right’ answer. But here’s the problem: most religious converts report the same process, and the same feelings. People that have converted to Islam from atheism, people that have converted to Judaism from Christianity, and even people that become Buddhist report going through a similar process. When I was Mormon, I was taught that Satan could counterfeit the feelings from the holy spirit, and that people that thought they felt the spirit when it was telling them that Mormon doctrine was wrong were being deceived. And yet, how can you know that this is true? How can you know that you aren’t being deceived? The answer is that you don’t. You believe you aren’t being deceived, but you can’t know it. Moreover, I will bet every dollar that I have in my wallet right now that you’ve never put the same kind of effort into finding out the Truth of any other religion; you have almost certainly never attempted, for instance, to deeply study The Holy Books of Thelema under the tutalage of a scholar of the Ordo Templi Orientis to discover if Crowley was truly a prophet or not. Instead, you have assumed that your feeling are Truth.
As long as you remain convinced that the Mormon church is absolutely god’s One True Church™, you won’t be able to truly see and understand the near constant changes in doctrine and dogma for what they are.
I don’t think anything that you listed is a secret. And yes, I am an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m not sure your talking points are made in good faith (you sound like you have a massive chip on your shoulder) but I’ll try to address them anyway.
This is a mischaracterization about Latter-day Saint beliefs regarding contemporary prophets. Unlike most Christian sects, we believe in an open canon and that God actively communicates to humankind via a prophet today just as in biblical times. A prophet can say one thing and then another prophet can say something else, and both can still be speaking the word of God authoritatively.
It is not “utter nonsense”, it is the policy of the Church. Your logic is faulty, because it could be used to define any improvement in any organization or group as “utter nonsense”. One could just as easily say that because slavery was once legal in the United States, the emancipation proclamation is “utter nonsense”.
From where I stand, that is your fundamental problem. You sound like you feel personally affronted when someone has faith in something that you can’t observe with your natural senses. That’s okay, I get it. It’s not for you. Why spend so much energy arguing with an internet stranger whom you identify yourself as being obviously an adherent to such a faith?
I am comfortable with my faith and have no interest in forcing anyone to believe like I do. However, it sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder and are heavily prejudiced against religious people in general and Latter-day Saints in particular. I can’t envision a productive outcome to continuing this discussion, but should you have questions about my beliefs and are willing to listen with an open mind, my DMs are always open.
I wish you a joyous day.
My dude. Really? This is the classic Mormon gaslighting; “we’ve always known this”. No, this was actively hidden and concealed for centuries. For fuck sake, Fawn Brodie was excommunicated for publishing No Man Knows My History–officially it was apostasy–and now it’s acknowledged to be historically accurate. I was in for more than two decades, and have been out for more than three, and there’s a vast difference between what we were taught as being absolutely true and what was available for study when I was 20 compared to what there is now.
Yes. I do. I insist on things being factually true. I insist on honesty. I was raised to believe that honesty isn’t just telling the truth, but that it’s telling the whole truth, and not intentionally omitting truth or speaking things that are factually correct with the intent of leading a person to a false conclusion. That’s what I was taught by the Mormon church, and the Mormon church has never come even close to living up to what it teaches in that respect.
Yeah, no. That a bullshit rationalization that you need to tell yourself in order to be able to maintain your belief. God’s doctrine is supposed to be unchanging, and yet it changes continuously. The November 2015 policy was prophecy and the will of god, and then just a couple years later it wasn’t. Temple ceremonies are supposed to be directly from god, and yet those have changed massively over the years. Polygamy was supposed to be the everlasting covenant, but then it wasn’t. And let me be blunt: deviating from these points of doctrine was apostasy and violators were subject to excommunication and the revocation of their temple covenants. That means that for doctrine that changed with the whim of the prophet and apostles, the eternal salvation of people was taken away.
…Which is claimed to be doctrine and the will of god by the prophet, and then changes with the change in leadership.
…
There are a lot of things that you can’t observe directly with your natural sense. Tons of things. But you can prove their effects, and you can test them. You can form a hypothesis, you can test that hypothesis, and then you refine your hypothesis as necessary.
To be clear, if I discover that something I believe is not supported by facts, my belief changes. I follow where the evidence leads. I certainly have my own cognitive biases–that’s unavoidable–but I do my best to be honest with myself, and to question my own beliefs and biases. My views have changed radically over the last 30-odd years as I’ve evidence that has tested and contradicted my beliefs. But what would change your belief? Would any factual evidence change them?
Then you aren’t following the guidance of the prophet for every member to be a missionary.