[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Ruby Franke‘s oldest daughter Shari Franke is speaking out.
In a new memoir, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, published on Tuesday, the 21-year-old detailed the years of abuse she and her siblings faced at the hands of their mother.
As Perezcious readers know, Ruby first gained fame for running the Mormon mom vlog 8 Passengers on YouTube. She later teamed up with her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt to make content for the life coach’s service ConneXions Classroom and their Moms of Truth Instagram account. Jodi also moved in with the Franke family for some time.
Related: Ruby Franke’s Daughter BLASTS ‘Trash’ Lifetime Movie About Abuse Scandal
At first, the family’s social media page quickly gained millions of followers, but over time, people started to second-guess the matriarch’s harsh parenting. And it all came to a head in September 2023 when Ruby’s then-12-year-old son Russell escaped the home and ran to a neighbor for help. His 10-year-old sister Eve was then found to be malnourished and Ruby was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse.
For Shari and her siblings, this legal justice was a long, long time coming. In her new book, she recalled being raised by a woman who never looked out for them properly, writing:
“She was an adult who had made a conscious choice to inflict unspeakable harm upon those she was meant to protect.”
Things first went downhill for Shari in 2015 when the YouTube page was created. As a pre-teen at the time, Shari didn’t like having her adolescence chronicled for all to see, especially since she didn’t have control over what was posted — and nothing was off limits. When she was 13, her mother accidentally waxed off half of one of Shari’s eyebrows — then shared it using an unflattering image of Shari crying as the thumbnail. Shari noted:
“Our lives … revolved around nonstop content creation, whether we liked it or not. You couldn’t sneeze without it being immortalized from multiple angles. Puberty is brutal enough, let alone with an audience.”
But, of course, things were much worse off-camera. When Shari was 11, Ruby began implementing disciplinary techniques from West Point military academy, Shari explained:
“Punishments … took on a more elaborate, almost theatrical quality. These often involved grand gestures or prolonged periods of deprivation, all designed to make us truly ‘feel’ the weight of our transgressions.”
For example, when her brother Chad, around 9 at the time, didn’t put away his laundry, he was forced to run around the block five times. When he didn’t clear the table, he and Shari both had to do push-ups. Physical abuse was very common, and Shari claimed she remembered being hit as young as 9. She continued:
“Ruby’s hand would often find its way to my face, a sharp sting of displeasure delivered with precision. Her slaps were calibrated — never hard enough to leave visible bruises, at least to me, but always sufficient to instill fear … In her twisted logic, she was molding obedience, sculpting compliance with each stinging blow.”
Jeez.
In 2021, the author escaped to Brigham Young University, but that’s around the time that the internet started to question Ruby’s behavior — especially as she posted videos withholding food from her kids, sending them to wilderness camps, and even banning them from their bedrooms for months at a time! Petitions were created, but it wasn’t until that fateful 2023 fall day that change really occurred.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like Ruby has really realized the depths of her abuse. In fact, Shari claimed her mother doesn’t even think she did anything wrong, she penned:
“In her mind, she wasn’t a controversial figure being held accountable; she was a martyr, crucified for her unwavering dedication to tough love.”
Shari also doesn’t have anything nice to say about her father Kevin, who was not charged with anything. He has argued that he knew nothing about the abuse and wasn’t living with the child amid a separation from Ruby before the legal scandal broke out — but if the violence had been going on as long as Shari claims, it’s hard to imagine how that could be true. With this in mind, Shari said of him:
“[He was] another person who … turned their back when I needed them most.”
He filed for divorce from Ruby months after the arrest and is fighting for custody of his four minor children, Abby, Julie, Russell, and Eve, ages 11 to 17. They are currently in the care of the Division of Child and Family Services. Meanwhile, Chad, now 19, is going to real estate school, according to his Instagram, and Shari is still studying comparative politics at BYU. She’s also engaged and plans to prioritize her privacy moving forward, she said on the ‘gram late last month:
“For me, this is the end of me sharing my private life. I’ve had my voice and agency taken for so long, and now, I’m putting my foot down. I’m not going to talk about my wedding, future husband, or future kids. I’ll continue to advocate for kids who didn’t have a voice (so you’ll still be seeing me, don’t worry) but this is closure for me. I’m moving on with my life, and that’s true freedom and joy.”
We can understand her desire for privacy, especially after everything she’s been through! This book could not have been easy to write, but hopefully having her full story out there helps Shari process and move on from this traumatic childhood.
If you have sincere cause to suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org.
[Image via Moms of Truth/Shari Franke/Instagram]
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