As she faces the camera, Ruby Franke lowers her voice to a whisper. It’s as if you were there in the room with her, as if she were leaning in close to tell you her deepest, darkest secrets . . . or, perhaps, to reveal someone else’s.
“Shari’s crying,” she says, grimacing.
Shari is Ruby Franke's daughter. In this video, she's around 15 years old and, yes, crying, after her mother's attempt at an at-home waxing left her missing one half of one eyebrow. It's the kind of minor aesthetic catastrophe that would reduce any teenage girl to tears, the kind any mom might accidentally inflict on her daughter, and Ruby feels terrible about what she’s done.
Or at least, this is what she tells her audience, in the video she uploaded to YouTube in November 2018, where it immediately racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The title of the video is “Shari, I’m So Sorry.” But you’d be forgiven for wondering if her contrition is sincere. Today, Ruby is serving a multiyear prison sentence for child abuse, and this eyebrow-waxing mishap is now an anecdote in Shari’s memoir about her grim childhood, published earlier this month.
It’s a very different story from the one her mother told.
