When YouTube sensation Ruby Franke was arrested in 2023 and charged with child abuse, casual observers of her content were shocked. The mother of six
When YouTube sensation Ruby Franke was arrested in 2023 and charged with child abuse, casual observers of her content were shocked. The mother of six had amassed more than 2 million followers on her channel, 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of the Mormon mom, her husband, and their six kids. Now a modern Hulu series, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, attempts to unpack how the upbeat, smiling supermom ended up in the Utah State Correctional Facility. But don’t call it true crime, Ruby’s estranged spouse, Kevin Franke, tells Vanity Fair.
“I know everyone expects this to be true crime, but I’ve watched true-crime documentaries, and this isn’t it,” he says. Director Olly Lambert agrees. “’I’ve never made, and would never make, just a true-crime thing,” says Lambert—even though he’s behind BBC documentaries such as Abused: The Untold Story, about the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile sex-abuse scandal.
It’s possible that the exquisite needle-threading that project required—Lambert spoke to survivors of sexual assault for the very same network that had employed their abuser—came in handy when enlisting members of the Franke family for this three-part Hulu series, which will be released on the streamer Thursday, February 27. This is the first project about the case that Kevin and eldest children Shari Franke and Chad Franke have agreed to participate in, in immense part because Lambert was able to gain their trust.
“One of the things that’s been so frustrating for me has been feeling silenced or muzzled—not being able to speak and having people make assumptions that just aren’t accurate,” Kevin says. “This is my ability to take control of my own story and speak it in my own words.”
But is Devil in the Family really Kevin’s story? That’s demanding to say. According to daughter Shari Franke’s book, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, which was published last month, Kevin—a Brigham Young University professor and the youngest of seven children—was “the perpetual supporting actor to Ruby’s lead role in her epic production of ‘Ultimate Mother.’” He was frequently absent, she says; when he was there, he seemed checked out or downtrodden. And according to Shari, he didn’t slam on the brakes when the family’s wheels began to come off.
Just when that began to happen is also unclear. According to Shari’s book, life in the Franke’s Utah household was fairly par for the Mormon course before Ruby launched her YouTube channel in 2015—a move she didn’t make out of any spoken desire to become an influencer, at least not initially. According to journalist and podcaster Jo Piazza, the longstanding Mormon expectation of faith-spreading has moved beyond the physical world and into the online realm, making Utah a hotbed of so-called momfluencers whose spouses and kids star in family-focused vlogs. The idea, it seems, is that if people see these elated Mormon families across social media, they’ll be influenced to join the faith—just as they might be influenced to try an outfit from Shein or a modern skin care regimen.
8 Passengers quickly became one of the genre’s biggest brands, with 2.5 million subscribers at its peak. Between YouTube ad revenue and brand deals, it was also huge business, with Kevin saying in Devil in the Family that some months, it brought in over $100,000—dwarfing his salary as a college professor. The work was lucrative enough that it enabled the family to move to a modern, larger home, which was outfitted “like a set,” Shari says in her book, with minimal decor and camera-bright lighting. Ruby, Shari, Chad, and the family’s younger four kids were a constant presence in the videos, while Kevin would frequently cameo (or be heard from behind the camera).
In her book, Shari describes her discomfort with living in public even as she admits that she eventually launched a channel of her own, abandoning it some years later. (Shari was not available to be interviewed for this story.) In Devil in the Family, we also see Chad balking at being filmed. Shari would say things like “pretend like you’re happy” or “act like you’re happy,” Chad tells Vanity Fair. “When my mom turned on the camera, there was a large difference between her just telling me to be myself, and then, you know, when we were doing a brand deal or working with a company—then I was to say exactly what the company would ask me to say.”
Shari and Chad’s complaints feel familiar to anyone who’s watched a child-performer exposé such as Quiet on Set. But there’s a crucial difference here. Unlike underage actors, children of influencers aren’t employed in a regulated, industry setting (or even a grossly dysfunctional one). They’re workers in the family business, with mighty parental pressure to produce on cue. “The most common thing out here every day for my mom—and I’m not even kidding, this was, like, every five minutes—was ‘say that again,’” says Chad (who is now a successful influencer in his own right). “You know: ‘Now that the camera’s on, say that again.’”
COMMENTS