The Free Press
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.
From 2015 to 2020, Ruby Franke was one of the most popular momfluencers on the internet. Her channel, 8 Passengers, documented her daily life in Springville, Utah, as a wife, LDS church member, and mother of six children whose adorable toddler antics and adolescent growing pains made for compulsively shareable content. Slim and blonde with beautiful cheekbones and a pageant-queen smile, Ruby had a sixth sense for connecting with an audience, and at the height of her channel’s popularity, she had almost 2.5 million subscribers.
But these days, the video for which she is most famous is one of a very different kind. It’s bodycam footage from an interview with one of Franke’s underage sons, conducted on August 30, 2023—the same day police officers broke down the door of the Franke family home with a battering ram and Ruby was placed under arrest. The boy’s face has been obscured, but you can still see the rest of him—and unlike in the video of Shari and her eyebrow, the damage here is unmistakable. His body is emaciated; beneath a censor’s blur, purple discolorations can be seen encircling his wrists and ankles.
“Who put the ropes on you?” the police officer asks.
Several hours before this video was taken, this same boy had escaped through a window and walked to the house next door, where he rang the doorbell and asked his neighbors to call the police. He was visibly malnourished, and had open wounds. Ruby’s other children showed similar signs that they had suffered at the hands of their mother. (Their father, whom Ruby had kicked out of the house a year earlier, claimed he knew nothing about any of this.) She, along with her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, was charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse.
Shari, then a 20-year-old college student, had been estranged from her mother in the year leading up to the arrest. She arrived after the police did, smartphone in hand. When the officers breached the door, she snapped a photo and posted it to Instagram Stories with just one word as the caption: "Finally."
“This nightmare was born on social media—it should die there, too,” Shari writes in her new book, The House of My Mother. It is a harrowing read. The worst of Ruby’s abuses were inflicted on her youngest children; Shari, the oldest of the six, is in the unenviable position of having been spared the worst while also wondering if she could have done more to protect her siblings. Her tell-all account feels like an act of redress against Ruby, who emerges from it as cunning and cruel—bearing little resemblance to the devoted wife and mother she played on social media. (Since the arrest, Ruby has been the inspiration for both a 20/20 true crime special and a Lifetime original movie, titled “Mormon Mom Gone Wrong.”) It is also a reclamation. As a child, Shari was a supporting actor in her mother’s narrative; now, she is the narrator of her own story.
She is also not the only one. Twenty years after the dawn of the social web that spawned the first wave of mommy bloggers, the children who grew up on Instagram and YouTube are coming of age—and airing their grievances, sometimes in court.
Sometimes the exploited parties are also professional content creators, as with the 11 teens who recently sued the mother of another teenage YouTube star, alleging harassment, molestation, and abuse,” and that they weren’t compensated for their appearances on her daughter’s channel. But mostly, they’re just kids who object to having been made into minor celebrities when they were just trying to grow up, their milestones and meltdowns alike being served up for public consumption without their consent. In 2023, for instance, The Atlantic ran a piece about Caymi Barrett, who as a young adult has become an advocate for bolstering privacy laws because, as a child, her deeply private information would be shared on Facebook by her mom.
And then there’s the question of just who is watching this content. Last year, a blockbuster report from The New York Times revealed that child influencers on social media frequently attract the attention of pedophiles—some of whom pay parents for greater access to their kids, including by purchasing provocative photos, exclusive chat sessions, and even worn leotards or cheerleading uniforms.
A certain number of parents, suddenly and acutely aware that the public internet is, well, public, are conscientiously not posting pictures of their progeny online. Others are in denial. “Her numbers are so big,” one mother—who was continuing to manage her daughter’s social media accounts despite knowing the risks—told the NYT. “What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
Of course, just posting pictures of your children online—even if they eventually wish you hadn’t—isn’t the same thing as abuse, nor is managing the internet presence of a kid who has found success as an influencer. Ruby went down an unusually dark path. But she set out on that path the moment she invited millions of strangers into her home to watch her children grow up—posting the type of content which you can find today on the Instagram and Facebook accounts of parents everywhere.
Indeed, if the eyebrow-waxing story in the book seems like early evidence of Ruby's capacity for cruelty, that's only because she did become cruel; if she hadn't, it would be nothing but a crazy story, the kind you laugh about 20 years later. Every family has stories like this—or used to. Stories which we understood were not to be shared with outsiders; stories we remember through retelling rather than recording. "Thank God smartphones didn't exist back then," we say, laughing (because if there had been smartphones, we would not be laughing).
If the dawn of digital media made it possible to preserve our histories with a previously unimaginable level of detail and indelibility, it also changed the nature of what we choose to document. When the goal is going viral rather than making a memory, then the more shocking, heartbreaking, or outrageous the content, the better. And if life itself doesn’t supply enough moments like this, eventually—and particularly when there’s money involved—people will embellish, manipulate, and, eventually, manufacture them. At the start, you’re whipping out a camera to film your crying daughter. In the end, you might find yourself strategically positioning the camera in advance before you make her cry.
Ruby may have ended up a monster, but at the beginning, she was only following the incentives of an attention economy whose dynamics have not changed.
What has changed, perhaps, is that we are more aware that titillating horror stories can unfold behind the cheerful facade of the momfluencer, which has given rise to a minor moral panic that internet-famous parents are mistreating their kids. In one recent TikTok controversy, commenters seized on a video of the influencer’s son lifting his hands toward his face as her husband approached, and decided that the child had “flinched” and “looked terrified”—clear signs, they insisted, that the boy is a victim of domestic violence. But if the hunt to unmask the bad parents of the internet has gotten somewhat out of control—and it has—perhaps it was also inevitable: We know, after all, how easy it is for abusive parents like Ruby to hide in plain sight.
The original 8 Passengers channel was taken down in 2022, but a number of videos have been re-uploaded, and these days they tend to attract hate-watchers. Recently, someone commented under the re-uploaded version of “Shari, I’m So Sorry!”: “Who else is here after reading Shari’s book? I can't believe I used to watch them and think what a good mom.”
Certainly, the video makes for eerie viewing now. I must have watched it a dozen times while writing this piece, making eye contact with Ruby across time and space as she stares straight into the camera. I stared back, and I found myself wondering if there might have been something visibly evil about her, even then. A flash of the eyes, a curl of the lip, a sign of the darkness lurking behind the ring light.
Instead, I saw the kind of video I see every day—on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and every other platform where proud parents document their kids’ lives. Even knowing what eventually became of Ruby, in this moment she doesn’t look like a monster. Instead, I saw a mother, and a daughter, and a moment of adolescent angst that could have belonged to anyone, including me.
Except that there were no smartphones then. Thank God.
