Hulu’s new Ruby Franke docuseries features family members’ 1st public interviews and unseen video footage
"Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke" features interviews with Franke’s husband and her two eldest children as well as unseen archival footage from the ‘8 Passengers’ YouTube channel.
The new documentary series, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, aims to give a more nuanced look at the events leading up to the popular parenting vlogger’s arrest and subsequent conviction on child abuse charges last year.
“There are so many shades of gray in this and so many complicated reasons why the family chose to do things in the way that they did,” the director of the documentary, Olly Lambert, told Yahoo News.
The three-part series, which airs on Hulu this week, features previously unseen footage from Franke’s hard drives as well as interviews with her husband, Kevin, and their two oldest children.
Franke rose to fame in the “momfluencer” community online with her YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, where she documented her life with her husband and their six children, accumulating 2.5 million subscribers at its peak. But some of the behavior depicted in the videos, including Franke’s refusal to bring her 6-year-old daughter’s lunch to school after she forgot it and her decision to exclude two of her young children from Christmas one year, prompted speculations of abuse in the comments section.
In August of 2023, that speculation was validated when Franke’s youngest son rang a neighbor’s doorbell and asked to be taken to the closest police station. The police who responded, who were interviewed in the documentary, reported that the 12-year-old appeared to be malnourished, with duct tape around his arms and legs and scratches across his body. The incident officially kicked off an investigation of the two homes belonging to Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt.
Franke and Hildebrandt both pleaded guilty to child abuse charges and, in late February 2024, were both sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
New insight from Franke’s husband and 2 eldest children
The documentary series features some of the first on-camera interviews since Franke’s arrest with her husband, Kevin, and their two eldest children, Shari and Chad.
Recalling her on-camera upbringing, Shari, now 21, describes the family’s home as “more like a set than a house.” Chad, 20, blames being forced to film as punishment for his outbursts at school, which eventually led to his expulsion.
“It bugged the crap out of me, I hated it,” Chad says about filming with his family. “There was a time — maybe a year or more — where I truly hated [Franke].”
Franke and Kevin, publicly split up in 2022. But a year later, after the arrests, many social media users and former 8 Passengers fans blamed Kevin for allowing their children to be abused.
There´s a special place in hell for those who abuse children and for the US government agency personnel who order and oversee such abuse.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hulus-new-ruby-franke-docuseries-features-family-members-1st-public-interviews-and-unseen-video-footage-130050402.html