The Rise and Fall of Ruby Franke | Meet the Frankes | 1
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of The Rise and Fall of Ruby Frankie early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. This is a Law & Crime Network presentation. This podcast explores themes of child abuse and trauma. Please listen with care.

Honestly, my biggest fear ever since I started vlogging was what if I wake up and my children are just staring at a wall all day and there's nothing to film. My gosh, you guys having kids is so much fun. Hi guys, I'm Kevin. I'm Ruby. We're the drivers of the eight passengers. Let the madness begin!

Her rise to fame really started by publishing constantly about her family insides and outs on YouTube. And that is why her channel amassed over 2 million subscribers. My dream was to be a stay-at-home mom and to make, like, dinner for my family and to have lots and lots of babies. She always had this saying that said, "Motherhood is powerful." Eve, give it back. Oh, thank you.

If you're going to film, you've got to film it so you can laugh.

It was like, you're in her household, you're gonna play under her rules. If she's recording, you're gonna be there. When your child falls down and gets hurt or crashes on their bike and the kid's getting up for help and the first thing they see is a camera stuck in their face to get the views. 9, I'm on the address of your emergency. I just had a 12-year-old boy show up here at my front door asking for help. I'm like, we need to come as soon as possible.

and my kids are literally starving. I hesitate to say this 'cause it's gonna sound like I'm like a mean barbarian, but I told the kids, I said, "I'm not even gonna let you eat breakfast until you get your chores done." - They can only keep up those appearances and put on the mask for the camera or for the public for so long. Finally, it's like the lid's gonna come off of this and all of this that's hidden is gonna come out.

I'm Paula Barros, and this is The Rise and Fall of Ruby Frankie, presented by Law & Crime. What are we doing? What is this? It's a cake, and inside is the color of the baby. Meet the Frankies. They call themselves the Eight Passengers. Ruby is the blonde, beautiful, and high-energy mom. Kevin is the bald, handsome, fun-loving dad. And baby number six is on the way to round out their team.

By all appearances, they're your stereotypical American Mormon family. Wholesome, charming, and full of a lust for life and gratitude to their creator. They love to go to church, play sports, and practice their musical instruments. Oh, and by the way, they're filming all of it.

They're very much in the way that a lot of Mormons present themselves online, very cookie cutter. All of the children are blonde. They go to church every week. They're very active within their award communities. They had a lot of contact with their extended families who would often appear in their vlogs. The children were very well groomed. The children were polite.

That's Alice Dawes, a history teacher who wrote her thesis on Christian fundamentalist families in the Midwestern U.S. She's been following the Frankies from the beginning. It's 2015 in their Springville, Utah home. The five Frankie children and a glowing and visibly pregnant Ruby are gathered around the kitchen island, preparing to cut into a cake. It's a gender reveal party.

And Kevin is gleefully filming his family as they embark on what will be a seven-year journey to internet stardom. Every moment, big and small, will be blasted out to their subscribers on their YouTube page. So we're going to find out if it's pink or if it's blue. I'm nervous. Go. I hope it's going to be a girl. This is the first video Ruby and Kevin Frankie post on their new family vlog, Eight Passengers. Chad, what do you think?

I thought for sure it was a boy. Chad, staring at it won't make it turn blue, pal.

Brian Schnee is a reporter from KUTV in Salt Lake City, Utah. 2015 is when Ruby started really publishing a lot of content on her A Passenger's page, and it just grew exponentially from there. Obviously, a lot of it was family-focused, really inside baseball to her family. I mean, something that people don't typically show of their lives, the disciplining, the tears, the hard conversations,

Carl Andreessen, a documentarian and ex-Mormon vlogger based in Utah, met Ruby and Kevin at a YouTube convention. There's different types of content creators on YouTube, and some of them, they approach it in a daily vlogging manner, which means they wake up every morning and all of their activities from doing breakfast all the way until they tuck their kids into bed is what their content is.

In their second video, viewers get to meet the entire Frankie bunch. Of course, there's Ruby and Kevin, center stage as they often are, but also their six children: Sherry, age 11, Chad, age 10, Abby, age 8, Julie, age 6, Russell, age 3, and baby Eve, who's now 1. Hi, guys. I'm Kevin. I'm Ruby. We're the drivers of the eight passengers. We're mom and dad.

We thought it would be fun to just say hi and introduce our family. And if you're not good, I will turn this car around and we will go home. -Seriously. -Behave. My associations and affiliations with the Frankie family had to do mostly as family content creators and YouTubers in the same sort of niche and category going up through the area through Idaho and Utah. We all kind of knew each other. Intending for this vlogging lifestyle to become the new normal for their family,

Ruby celebrates her 33rd birthday with the internet as she's being filmed blowing out the candles on her cake. Happy birthday dear Ruby. Happy birthday to you. Some families, content creators, they wake up and no matter what, whether your kids are hurt or going to the hospital or whatever, their goal is to not miss a day.

Ruby and Kevin have been married for 15 years. They met when Ruby was just 18 years old. She had finished high school and was beginning college at Utah State. And her new apartment was hosting a meet and greet. Kevin was 21 years old and also attending Utah State, working on his degree in civil engineering. I saw her and I thought, well, she's pretty.

So I want to talk to her. And so as I talked to her, she was kind of flirty with me. And so I kind of took that as a sign as she likes me. And so I came to discover a little bit later that she's just kind of flirty with all the boys, which is another funny part of the story. But I don't know. There's just something about Ruby. She was the hottest hot dog at the social, at the hot dog party. Ah!

They have one of their first dates at Olive Garden, and within days, they're introducing one another to their parents. Just two short weeks after meeting, Ruby and Kevin are engaged. They set a date for just a few months later, tying the knot in December 2000. Ruby wore a big, white, modest dress. Kevin wore a tux.

Their official wedding portraits are snapped outside in the Utah winter. The couple bundled up under a blanket. It's because of you that I have been able to live my dream. Like, my dream was to be a stay-at-home mom and...

and to make dinner for my family and to have lots and lots of babies. That has always been my dream and to take care of them. And you have always followed through and come through and provided for us. And I know that's not easy. Thank you. - Oh, come here, you. Come here, you. - Thank you. I love you.

Kevin works as an assistant professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, commonly referred to as BYU, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Over the course of their relationship, they've moved from Washington State to Idaho before finally settling back in Utah.

The Frankies purchased their Springville home in 2012. A four-bedroom, three-bathroom, 3,000-square-foot home with a finished basement. That's like your picture-perfect location for so many people that move or want to settle in in Utah. You'd like a little bit of both. You're close enough to the main access points, but you're just far enough out of town where you've got a nice mountain view. There are temples there. There are meeting houses there. I would

I would say there is a lot of Latter-day Saint faith in Utah County. Specifically, Springville has lots of homes, lots of big families. Ruby and Kevin create their YouTube page with a pie-in-the-sky mentality. The eight Frankies want their fans, their subscribers, to come along for the ride as they celebrate their highs, their lows, their firsts, their hurts, and everything in between.

And hopefully, they make some money along the way. Ruby's sister, Ellie, was the first one to really go online and do the family daily vlogging stuff. And then her sisters, Bonnie and Ruby and the rest of the family, when they saw the success, they jumped on board, started YouTube channels likewise. And then the success of Ruby and Bonnie's channels actually took over and they got bigger faster than Ellie, their sister.

Yeah tell me what you're doing. You're on photo not video. No I'm not, I'm on video. What's going on? What are you doing? I'm trying to eat sushi for the first time and I'm gonna try a piece of wasabi with it. Okay tell me how it is. Okay. You know you're eating raw fish right now right?

It's not all adventures. Most of the time, it's just the basics. It's their everyday lives. The kids are all extremely active and involved in extracurricular activities. Chad plays basketball, a fixture on their driveway, shooting hoops. It's January, and there could be snow on the ground, and he is out here every morning shooting hoops. The girls do arts and crafts and try out wearing makeup.

Positioning herself as an authority on parenting and motherhood, Ruby is most insistent on illustrating how close-knit they are as a family. We see them spending time together, everyone playing musical instruments from the violin to the piano and even the harp.

Viewers are soon completely immersed in every moment of the family's home life. Sometimes it feels like you're actually there. Let's hear it. One, two, go. I can't breathe. Whoa. And you are doing the

Rhythm. I notice. The entire packaging of their channel and their entertainment is wrapped around what they did as a family and the dynamics of that.

Okay, well I'm just gonna end the vlog here. Thanks for watching. I know that I'm just learning how to use the camera. I'm learning... I know that the videos are kind of choppy and I'm learning how to take better videos. Oh, no, no, not the cereal. Not, no.

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The family and everything that comes with it is the main source of content for the platform after all. Her mantra that motherhood is powerful really became the focal point of her life and wanted to be able to, or she purported to want to be able to coach other mothers and families through the issues they might be having with their teenagers and be able to point to her own family and say, hey, look how well I've done here.

Some people go even farther where they try to portray a certain message or teach a certain message or sell certain classes and things like that and try to make themselves up to be an authority on family or parenting or marriage. And they start giving out advice in that aspect. In 2015, Ruby makes the announcement that 10-year-old Chad will now be homeschooled.

The big project that I have been working on has been, I am homeschooling Chad this year. You excited?

Ruby says she's identified certain areas he needs to work on, and he just won't get the one-on-one attention he needs at school. Chad, he's just, he's a great kid, and there were some needs that were not being met at school and I think can be better met at home, and then we'll try school again next year. And so last year, when we were having kind of a rough year, I offered a few suggestions to

And I said, "Homeschool can be an option that might address..." The first one that came around was you. Yes, you were really excited. So today is day one. She's so happy with this decision, in fact, that she tells her viewers she intends to homeschool each child for one year so that they can get alone time with her, which is a rarity in a family of eight.

A lot of kids, okay, so every kid I have decided has something that they struggle with. They were very focused on that YouTube channel. So a lot of the parenting tactics, a lot of the kids, you almost saw grow up in that YouTube channel.

Ruby seemingly has the camera rolling at all times. Even when they thought an animal broke into their home and died, but the sewer actually flooded their basement and stunk up the whole house. This is around the same time that they're potty training Eve. What happened? Eve pooped in the chair. What? Turn around. Turn around. Oh my gosh. This night is getting worse and worse and worse.

It's my favorite shorts on here. Eve pooped on the chair and you sat on it? It looks like barf. It looks like barf. That might be half of the show. This is the nastiest night ever. Relatability and candor are very important to the Frankies. In 2015, as the subject is becoming less taboo in American culture, Ruby reveals her personal experience with miscarriages. Eve is our little sweetheart. She is the baby of the passengers, right?

She came to our family because we felt like our family wasn't complete. Maybe we really were meant to have a sixth baby. And so we tried again and got pregnant very quickly and easily. And we were very excited and just knew that she was, well, we actually thought it was going to be a boy. We really thought he was the caboose, but then we lost that baby too.

which actually made for five miscarriages for us, not in a row, but those two were right in a row. And I was really discouraged and I thought that she just wasn't going to be here

Alexis Anderson found the 8 Passengers YouTube page when she was in the ninth grade. I began watching Ruby Frankie actually from her sister, Ellie Mika. I was diagnosed with endometriosis in high school. So I was like Googling and like looking at all these different people like on YouTube. And it comes to find out that Ellie had a lot of miscarriages, you know, at the beginning of her family life.

Fans like Alexis are already well aware that Ruby is not the only member of her extended family who's a vlogger.

Ruby's own parents, Chad and Jennifer Griffiths, run the YouTube channel Grandma and Grandpa Griffiths. Their bio reads, Hi, everybody. I am at my daughter Ruby's home from eight passengers. You might have heard of them. I'm staying with her children while her and her husband are on a vacation in Thailand.

Ruby's three younger sisters, Ellie, Julie, and Bonnie, also have their successful YouTube channels. Just like their big sister, they publish videos about raising their families and what it means to be a Mormon mommy vlogger.

This is not unique to Ruby in the family. It's almost like she was just following the family trade by being a YouTube vlogger and really showing some of the more vulnerable parts of their family's daily lives. But this is something that is rooted in the Frankie family or the Griffiths family with her maiden name.

It's very common for YouTubers, especially up through the Salt Lake Valley in Utah, to YouTubers to get together that are members of the Mormon church and try to collaborate and affiliate with one another. There's even specific conventions that were held in

Provo, Utah, that were built around that Mormon influence and Mormon content creators. While there was other YouTubers and content creators that did attend and come as featured creators, most of it was centered around that Mormon focus and emphasis as family content creators in the Utah Valley representing that image to the public.

Mormon families are overwhelmingly wealthy. They're overwhelmingly white. They're overwhelmingly educated, all of which looks good on screen. Their families are generally exceedingly nice people. Even if their politics or their values aren't exactly what, you know, everyone would aspire to, they're definitely palatable to a wide, wide community, which I think helps their popularity. And so when you see like a family who seems to have it all together,

who are beautiful to look at, who have, you know, polite, well-dressed, you know, children, it's going to be something that is a balm that soothes how you might, you know, what might otherwise look like, you know, a country or a town or a city that is, you know, feels fragmented. And I think that's also part of the appeal. ♪

On November 30, 2021, Ethan Crumbly opened fire on his classmates at Oxford High School, killing four students. In an unprecedented turn of events, his parents, Jennifer and James, were charged in connection with their son's acts of violence.

It's a case that raised questions about parenting, responsibility, and what could have been done to prevent the heartbreaking outcome. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of this landmark case, taking you behind the scenes of the trials of Jennifer and James Crumbly that has everyone asking, "What would I do if I were held responsible for my child's crimes?"

You can listen to Sins of the Child exclusively with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. By June of 2016, a year and a half after its launch, 8 Passengers hits 100,000 subscribers. By summer 2017, the YouTube page is a certified sin-sation.

As their popularity grows, the Frankies are able to secure sponsorships from brands, from hair care companies to photography storage systems. It's all going according to plan. Okay, you guys, we are almost ready to go. JCPenney is sponsoring the kids' back-to-school clothes. I am so excited. We just hit...

900,000 subscribers. We are almost at a million, you guys. And I thought to celebrate, we need to do something big. So we are going to go shopping for 10 girls and 10 boys in need and buy them a full outfit, a jacket, a pair of pants, underwear, socks, backpack, shoes, the works. By the end of 2018, the channel has racked up 2 million subscribers.

To celebrate the momentous occasion, Ruby and Kevin fly the kids to Hawaii for Christmas. With a steady stream of income generated from their platform, Ruby's able to get more help around the house. And before you know it, Ruby is announcing she's even writing a book. The sponsorships keep rolling in. It's at this time that they move into a new, larger home. Everything's coming up roses for the Frankie family.

Certainly she was earning the most out of her siblings at that point from vlogging. Social Blade at the time, which rates different YouTube channels or different social media sites, gave her an A-plus rating at this time. Her siblings didn't have that. At one point they had over 2 million views. They were breaking in a lot of money. Her husband, Kevin, said at one point that she was earning over six figures and certainly earning more than him as a professor of engineering at BYU.

But there's something simmering under the surface. Loyal fans of the 8 Passengers page have been picking up on something startling over the years.

People started to question some of the strategies that she was using and those kind of comments became more and more prevalent as opposed to the ones that were praising what she was doing or were overwhelmingly positive. That's when she would either begin to hide a lot of those strategies and you see in a number of vlogs where she says the discipline happens off camera and that's true for a lot of these families who vlog their children is the discipline will happen off camera.

or she will go into detail in a talking head kind of segment where she will speak to the camera about exactly what happened and how she dealt with the situation, usually after the fact. The biggest difference I think I found between Ruby and her sisters Ellie and Bonnie and even Julie is her willingness to corporal punishment on camera.

Like, you could tell that sometimes her girls were uncomfortable, even when she started talking about, like, menstrual stuff. Like, they were uncomfortable, and they asked to not be filmed. And they were still filmed through it all, you know? On Bunny's channel, for example, now that her kids have gotten older, we don't hardly see them. Like, if they choose to not be there, they just...

aren't there, but they didn't really seem to be an option with Ruby. It was like, you're in her household, you're gonna play under her rules. If she's recording, you're gonna be there. From the very beginning, you could always tell that there was something off with her that you just couldn't quite put your finger on. I have to figure out what is going on. - No, Ruby Frankie isn't your average mom. Viewers are actually starting to wonder, is she something much worse?

Her curious parenting style moves many people to speak out in the comment sections across social media. One video, where Ruby's disciplinarian parenting style is on full display, goes viral. I just got a text message from Eve's teacher, and she said that Eve did not pack a lunch today, and can I bring a lunch over to the school?

This happens quite often when you're having raising children because I know that her teacher is uncomfortable with her being hungry and not having a lunch and it would ease her discomfort if I came to the school with a lunch. But I responded and just said, Eve is responsible for making her lunches in the morning and she actually told me she did pack a lunch.

So the natural outcome is she's just going to need to be hungry. And hopefully, hopefully nobody gives her food and nobody steps in and gives her a lunch. Longtime fans are now conflicted and voicing their anger. What is going on in that home? Is Ruby abusing her children? Like some days you'll watch her videos and you're like, oh, she may be just a tad bit normal. And then another day you'll watch something and her parenting choices would be just so strange.

My bedroom was taken away for seven months and then you give it back like a couple weeks ago. I don't think our viewers know that. I was sleeping on a beanbag. I was sleeping on a beanbag. They gave my room back like two weeks ago.

It's interesting because they had been positioned themselves as authorities on parenthood. They had six children, well-behaved, well-presented, well-spoken children. So when you see the flip side of this in their punishment methods, I don't think she had done something as serious as taking away her child's bed for seven months until this point. This is a step in a direction that I didn't see this family going.

In one video, brothers Chad and Russell are seen play wrestling on the floor before dinner. Ruby is annoyed, like any mother would be, but it's what she believes to be a fitting punishment that sends fans into a tailspin. Torturing him! Stop it! I know you're not, but it looks like you are. Because he's screaming! Okay, Russell. I'm only going to say it one more time, and then you're going to lose the privilege to eat dinner.

It did become to a point where it was kind of like, well, maybe I need to read through the comments to make sure that I'm not the one that's thinking, you know, above this.

Ruby even instructs her youngest daughter to sleep on the bathroom floor after accidentally wetting the bed. At about two this morning, she's like, Mom, I peed the bed, which is not like her. She pees the bed maybe like once every eight months. Like it's been a very long time since she wet the bed. I was like, oh, darn it. That's all right. Just go sleep on the floor in the bathroom.

Within these kind of types of parenting strategies, they were asserting their power as the parent over a child. And obviously within a legal sense, a parent has guardianship and legal responsibility for their child. But what they were doing was taking that into the home and using it to...

elicit a certain type of behavior. And when that behavior wasn't what they wanted and usually wasn't immediately when they wanted it, that's when the punishment would occur. In another video posted to the eight passengers YouTube, Ruby broadcast that her son Russell has forgotten his socks outside.

A punishment for him this time? So you see now I'm using bad language. That's how bad of a mood I'm in. You get your socks picked up and don't you leave your stuff out anymore. Right over there. Run and go pick them up. And then give me ten push-ups. Put them in your pocket so you can take them down to the hamper and drop and give me ten. One. Put your hands straight out. They're in. They're not supposed to be out. Shape your hands forward. There you go. One. Two. Down further. Bring your butt down.

Like one has nothing to do with the other. Because he left socks, you know, in your yard, your punishment is to do pushups? It just never made sense to me.

Russell would get punishments like 50 push-ups, and we are talking 50 push-ups, for he would have been at the time about six or seven years old. Ruby's strategy was punitive. So usually there would be a consequence that wasn't working to restore the relationship, that wasn't working to help the child understand or make the right choice.

Viewers are now so concerned, they take to social media to raise the alarm. There are ones that people really keyed in on and started speaking out, at least loudly on the internet to some extent.

I think the audience and the subscribers were more keen on that. I think there was more criticism coming from the fan base and the general audience noticing patterns. And the things that I saw were off camera. They were all the stuff at parties. They were just patterns of behavior, saying things like, you know, my kids won't go to bed. I just give them Tylenol PMs, like Tylenol.

every day, like adult medications and things for kids and stuff and just certain things off the cuff. It 100% felt like she picked on, I'm not going to even say one child, I'm going to say a few of them over the others. Sherry always seemed to be the angel child, the mini Ruby, as people would call her growing up. She just always seemed to be the one to...

be loved on more, to get more, you know, that kind of thing. And then it just kind of went downhill from there. I mean, you could definitely tell those younger two had it much harder than the older ones.

Other punishments that Russell received and Eve as well was they had their Christmas taken away because they weren't presenting as grateful to, well, Ruby and Kevin for what they had received in the lead up to Christmas. And so to teach their children or to give their children the gift of kindness for Christmas, they decided that the younger children would not receive presents while the older four did.

The online backlash against Ruby Frankie reaches a boiling point in 2020. According to a Springville police report dated April 27, 2020, Ruby calls the police. She reports that she's been receiving threatening messages. One message read, quote, unquote.

Ruby tells police about another message she received, quote, leave her kids outside unsupervised, unquote, and that she should not post on her social media, quote, or there would be trouble, unquote. Ruby doesn't know who is sending these messages, but she has their phone number. The officer calls the number, but is unable to identify the person on the other line. When asked for their name, the woman on the line says, this is Ruby Frankie, and hangs up.

Obviously, the disciplining is where it started to take notice. And in 2020, there were a few Change.org petitions that started coming out about the YouTube channel itself, about Ruby's parenting practices, about how she was actually treating her children, about disciplining her children. The first petition received only a few hundred signatures. But another petition started just the next day, amasses thousands.

All of the petitions are started anonymously by concerned citizens who've been watching the page for years and are worried about the Frankie children's well-being. If it looks like a half-hour long video and it's being posted every single day, you have to realize there's like 10 hours of work and effort that everybody involved and around that

are being subjected to in order to accomplish that. And then what's real and what's not real. When your child falls down and gets hurt or crashes on their bike and the kid's getting up for help and the first thing they see is a camera stuck in their face to get the views. Just one week later, on June 5th, 2020, Ruby files another police report stating she's receiving more hateful messages on social media.

KUTV's Brian Schnee obtained a copy of this report. It says, quote, "All righty, y'all, grab your pitchforks. We're going looting at the place that actually deserves it." And they actually traced the channel back to more than 1,000 miles away. People were upset about whatever was happening on this channel. Police are unable to gather enough information to issue a warrant for the threats. They close the case shortly after.

records show that between 2012 and 2020 when ruby and kevin were still living in their first home the springville police department were called to the frankie home 12 times once they were in their new home in springville records show that the police were called to the house nine times with the division of child and family services assisting in four of those calls ruby doesn't feel like enough is being done to protect her she takes matters into her own

her own hands the only way she knows how through social media. Online who hate me, who would like to cancel me, who would like to see me either burn in hell or disappear off the face of the earth. And I'm not going anywhere. I do want to look at how I deliver my message. But as everyone would later come to learn.

This is only the beginning of the fall of Ruby Frankie. I'm on the address of your emergency. I just had a 12-year-old boy show up here at my front door asking for help. We need the cops here as soon as possible. You're going to realize how deep the rabbit hole goes. Like, it's not good. If you cut one more thing in my house...

I'm going to take the scissors, look at me, and I'm going to cut its head off. How long has this been going on and who are the other adults that allowed it? And my kids are literally starving. I hesitate to say this because it's going to sound like I'm like a mean barbarian, but I told the kids, I said, I'm not even going to let you eat breakfast until you get your chores done. I think anything you put online, there's going to be an element of performativity, but I also truly believe that she was, um,

incensed, enraged, and unable to control her emotions. Welcome to District Court. We're here in the matter of State of Utah versus Frankie, case number 231. That's all coming up on the Rise and Fall of Ruby Frankie.

This has been a Law & Crime production. I'm your host, Paula Barrows. Our executive producer is Jessica Lowther. Our writer is Jennifer Tintner. Our editor is Brad Mabee. Our bookers are Alyssa Fisher and Diane Kay. And special thanks to Sean Panzera for designing our key art. ♪