Exorcisms, Floating Objects, and Trances: New Evidence Shows Ruby Franke’s Religious Extremism Motivated Child Abuse

Last Friday, a trove of evidence was released in the harrowing child abuse case against YouTuber Ruby Franke and her co-defendant, Jodi Hildebrandt. The evidence tells of egregious abuse against Franke’s two young children, who were 9 and 12 at the time the abuse occurred.

Franke and Hildebrandt bound the young boy to the ground with tight ropes that left him with deep wounds. Franke tortured the boy by smothering him underwater, kicking him while wearing boots, and forcing him to work outside in the Utah summer without wearing shoes. The little girl, meanwhile, was forced to jump into a cactus several times, have her head shaved, and perform hours of manual labor outside in the heat. Both children were starved to the point of malnourishment and required multi-day stays in a hospital.

The cruelty inflicted on the children shocks the conscience. The sentence the women can receive, 4 to 30 years, seems inadequate to many. As a result, Utah politicians have discussed reforming the state’s criminal justice system and child abuse laws.

The case has drawn significant attention nationwide given that Franke ran a parenting YouTube channel that was followed by over 2 million people. On the channel, she shared her life raising her six children, including the two children she severely abused.

Last month, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke described the case as being “about religious extremism.” He explained, “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.”

The evidence released last week shows the extent to which the two abusers justified their actions on the basis of their religious radicalism.

In numerous journal entries that were released last week, Franke justified the abuse of her two children with her belief that the two were possessed by demons or the devil. She stated in her journal that she withheld food and water from her son because “I will not feed a demon.” Franke also explained her belief that removing evil from a “possessed person” requires a long-term process. At another point, she justified the extreme physical labor she forced her children to perform on the basis of her desire to break their “bond” with Satan. Franke also recorded that she told her son, “I will not talk w/ a demon. Your soul is damned + I will not hear your damnable words,” and claimed that her son is “in and out of possession” and “worships the devil.”

Her fanatical religious beliefs seemed to be an amalgamation of Mormonism, the religion she practiced, with other beliefs. For example, Franke used the Mormon belief that humans have a preexistence as spirits prior to being given a body to assert that, since her children were supposedly inherently evil, it only made sense that they were given bodies because they were given the oh-so-wonderful gift of her as a mother. “How [the two children] got to come + get a body can only be explained in me advocating to be their mother. This is not a conceited statement,” she asserted. Contrary to Mormonism’s belief that all people will receive “eternal glory,” however, Franke repeatedly told her children that they were damned and would burn in hell in endless torment.

Franke exhibited an extreme form of moral rigorism that demanded strict ascetic practices in the name of religious devotion. For example, she demanded that her children “fast” for several days in a row. (Franke recorded in her journal that her daughter responded to this deprivation of food by writing a rhyme that said: “My mom starves me and calls it fasting. My mom won’t lift 2 fingers and bring me food because all she does is lie on the bed + eat brownies.”) Franke also seemed to believe in total depravity — the Calvinist idea that humans are entirely corrupted and are unable to choose against evil. She also embraced a dualistic worldview that regarded the body and the material world as intrinsically evil.

Then there is her and Hildebrant’s obsession with the demonic. The Salt Lake Tribune spoke to a religious historian, John-Charles Duffy, who asserted that Franke and Hildebrant’s interpretation of demonic possession strays from mainstream Mormon beliefs. “Her notion of demonic possession … almost sounds more Pentecostal,” he said. “There is, of course, the [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] tradition that there are evil spirits around who tempt us. But this goes beyond that. She thinks she’s talking to demons herself.”

Prior to horrifically abusing two young children with the justification that the children were possessed, both Hildebrant and Franke believed that Hildebrant herself was possessed by demons.

In an interview with Utah police, Franke’s husband, Kevin Franke, explained the strange spiritual claims put forward by Hildebrant. He said that Hildebrant had opened up to some friends about how “she believed she was being tormented and haunted by shadow figures every night.” As a result, Hildebrant went to live with a family to get help, he said. Kevin explained that the couple kicked Hildebrant out after she spent six weeks “stabbing herself with forks and knives, cutting herself, and wanting to commit suicide, and trying to seduce the husband of the family.”

After Hildebrant got kicked out of that family’s home, Kevin explained, Ruby convinced him to allow Hildebrant to move in with them. He asserted that, as soon as Hildebrant moved into their house, strange phenomena began happening. “The moment she showed up in my house,” he said, “just the weirdest crap started happening: lights turning on and off, sounds of people walking in walls, sounds of footprints going up walls and across the ceiling, and stuff floating around. It was weird.” He told police: “I’m a smart guy. I’m an engineer. I’ve designed and helped build some really big stuff. I’ve been a college professor. I can’t explain some of the stuff that happened.” He described watching “plates in the kitchen just flying off by themselves, like full-speed smashing on the wall.”

A Mormon bishop had been going over to Hildebrant’s house and saying he was “casting out demons,” Kevin Franke said. After she moved in with the Frankes, Kevin Franke said, he himself “became the resident exorcist.” He explained: “It was my job to go and give her blessings whenever she started to go into a trance and go into possession.” Eventually, he said, these “possessions” became as frequent as every hour at night, at which point Ruby started sharing a bed with Hildebrant. Kevin Franke said that, during these “possessions,” Hildebrant would say things in a weird voice such as: “She’s ours. We’re not letting go. She is Satan’s bride. She’s mine. I am going to marry her.”

He said that Hildebrant and Franke, alongside another female friend, began gathering for spiritual sessions. Ruby would write down Hildebrant’s “visions and trances,” he said, and they believed that God would eventually “decree them to be written as scripture for the whole world to read.” These visions were very often satanic, he said.

Eventually, Hildebrant convinced Ruby Franke to separate from her husband, move in with her, and spend her days abusing her children in what the prosecutor described as a “concentration camp-like setting.” Kevin Franke says he went along with the separation and did not see any of his children for more than a year before Hildebrant and his wife were arrested for child abuse.

Hildebrant and Franke used possession and exorcism to cloak their heinous abuse in religious righteousness. With this new evidence, which reveals the depths of their fanaticism, it is clear that their unchecked extremism enabled the abuse. Those who witnessed the signs of escalating fanaticism and failed to intervene bear a share of the responsibility.

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