Shari Franke’s Family Vlog Ended in Tragedy. Now She’s Speaking Out

S
hari Franke’s memoir starts, fittingly, with an Instagram story. As police officers forced the front door of her family’s home open with a battering ram, Shari captured the surreal scene, later posting it to her account for her 621,000 followers. “This moment, this climax of my family’s descent into madness, needed to be documented, preserved, and shared on social media,” she writes. “Just like every forced smile, every staged perfection had been, too. This nightmare was born on social media — it should die there, too.”

Shari is the eldest daughter of disgraced family vlogger Ruby Franke, who ran the channel 8 Passengers, which documented Ruby’s life with her husband Kevin and their six kids, including Shari. They shared their life as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for nearly 2.5 million subscribers — until Ruby was arrested on multiple counts of aggravated child abuse, and the channel was taken down. In House of My Mother, Shari’s memoir released today through Gallery Books, she invites readers behind the scenes of the tabloid hell into which her family devolved. 

Ruby was arrested in 2023, after her young son fled the home of her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, and begged a neighbor for help. Police records would later reveal Ruby’s son appeared “emaciated and malnourished,” with “deep lacerations from being tied up with rope.” Franke’s young daughter was found in a similar state. Both Ruby and Hildebrandt later pleaded guilty to aggravated child abuse and were sentenced to four to 30 years in prison.

Before all of that, the Frankes were YouTube family vlogging royalty, with millions of subscribers tuning in to watch their idyllic life. How did the family fall from those heights to the depths of Ruby being charged with aggravated child abuse? In Shari’s charting of the path, the family fundamentally changes when Hildebrandt — who ran a counseling business called ConneXions Classroom known for its strict, dogmatic principles — enters the scene. As Shari watches, Hildebrandt seems to take over her family — even, she reveals for the first time in the memoir, an increasingly close relationship with Ruby and pushing Kevin out of the family home. (Representatives for Ruby and Hildebrandt did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Shari writes about how she became worried about the welfare of her younger siblings, who were then under the care of Ruby and Hildebrandt. She made repeated, desperate calls to the Department of Child and Family Services until, finally, Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested. Now 21, Shari, who had her privacy traded away for clicks and views as a child, is advocating for protections for the children in family vlogs. As part of that fight — and to set the record straight about her family and their downfall — Shari has invited the public back in to scrutinize her even further with a heart-wrenchingly personal memoir.

“Writing the book was a way to take back my privacy, as strange as that sounds,” Shari tells Rolling Stone in a wide-ranging, hour-long phone call. “Just because it was Ruby who took my voice away… and then with the arrest, it was the media then that picked a side of me to portray.” The book is Shari’s way of correcting the record: her opportunity to share what she’s comfortable telling the world about and keep the rest to herself.

What Shari is comfortable telling, it turns out, is a lot: she writes about herself as a child, worrying her mother didn’t love her; her struggles with suicidal ideation, and a relationship with a married church elder that ends in Shari losing access to the church. She writes about stumbling across intimate messages between Hildebrandt and her mother, which led her to believe they were in a romantic relationship — though she admits she never pushed for clarity. It’s a dizzying book — about a mother chasing YouTube fame and finding it; about a family falling into the clutches of an outsider (in her book, Shari calls Hildebrandt “our family’s very own cult leader… [who turned] my mother into a fawning, starstruck acolyte who lapped up her every demented word like it was holy water”); about a young girl struggling through a relationship with an older man and wondering if the abuse she’s facing is her fault. She was so open in her writing, Shari says, in order to close this chapter of her life once and for all. “The reason that I wrote this book is, ‘Hey, everyone, here’s how I feel. Please don’t speculate and leave the rest alone.’”

To write the book, Shari dove into her stash of journals that she meticulously kept during her childhood, and watched old family vlogs. (Though the family’s channel was taken down after Ruby’s arrest, there are compilations and re-uploads all over YouTube and TikTok.) Reading her words and watching the family’s life again was strange. “It felt like it wasn’t my life, in a way,” Shari says. “I don’t like to watch old vlogs because I don’t really remember the things that were filmed, but I can remember the behind the scenes of like, ‘Oh, this was the day that Ruby was yelling, and that wasn’t shown, but that’s all that I can remember about it.” In the videos, the Franke family may appear smiling and joyful when in reality, Shari says, Ruby was yelling at the children to get them to cooperate. “It would cut and then the next clip would be, ‘We’re happy again’,” she says. “She was very selective about when she turned the camera off and when she started.”

But the story of the Frankes is not only the story of a family who found viral fame through clever editing tricks, but of a family who fell into the hands of a charismatic would-be therapist. About a third of the way into Shari’s memoir, Hildebrandt appears on the recommendation of a family friend as a potential therapist for Shari’s younger brother Chad. (Chad is the only sibling Shari names in the book, because he is now an adult and was able to approve of what she included. She left out the names of her four youngest siblings, to extend them the privacy they so rarely had.) 

With alarming swiftness, Hildebrandt starts therapy with not only Chad but Shari, Ruby, and Kevin. For the remainder of the book, Hildebrandt is a shadow over every page as she seems to take control of the Franke family. At one point, Hildebrandt instructs Ruby to let Hildebrandt take over Shari bedroom. When Shari returns to her bedroom to grab some books she left behind, she finds her room filled with candles and the smell of lavender and vanilla from massage oils. That night, sleeping on the couch in the living room, Shari witnesses her mother sneaking out of Shari’s bedroom and it hits her: Ruby is in a relationship with Hildebrandt. “It was equal parts fascinating and horrific,” she writes. “Two women who preached ‘Truth’ while living lies. Who condemned queerness very publicly in their ConneXions videos, while embodying it privately.” In a statement to Rolling Stone, Kevin said he is “unaware of to what extent any physical relationship between Ruby and Jodi went, but it’s pretty clear to all of us now that the relationship went beyond friendship. From my perspective now, I feel like I was replaced with Jodi.”  

In one heartbreaking scene, Shari runs into her father on campus after he has been — in the parlance of Hildebrandt’s teaching — “invited to leave” the family to work on his own shortcomings, which he does. Shari, who by then was attending Brigham Young University, is essentially cut off herself. Their eyes lock and Kevin walks away without talking to his daughter, just giving what Shari describes as a “pathetic little grimace.” Throughout the book, Kevin is portrayed as kindly but incapable. “He could barely keep himself afloat,” she writes, “let alone throw a lifeline to his drowning children.” Kevin tells Rolling Stone the invitation to leave and the ensuing separation was a “hellish and abusive experience” that he wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy. “Ever since the arrest of Ruby, I have been working tirelessly to help my children, my family, and myself heal,” Kevin says.

Shari says she warned her father of what she was going to write about him because she didn’t want him to feel blindsided, and because she still has fond memories of him as a dad. Shari and Kevin are working on their relationship, she says, which gets better every day. It helps that Kevin acknowledges his own mistakes to her. “He doesn’t defend or explain involving us in family vlogging, he takes full responsibility,” Shari says. “To me, we still have our disagreements, but the fact that he’s trying is what’s most important to me.”

As for her mother, Shari has no interest in a relationship. Their last interaction was after Ruby was arrested and Shari’s siblings were taken from her custody, when Ruby wrote her daughter a letter in which she reminisced about Shari’s baby nursery and lamented not spending more time with her before she went to college. There was no mention of the reason she was writing the letter from prison.

“I’ll never respond to that,” Shari says. “I don’t feel an emotional tie to her anymore.”

Because of the experience of growing up in a family vlog, Shari doesn’t believe family vloggers should exist at all, and since the arrest of her mother, has committed herself to activism to eradicate it. “There is no exception,” she says. “Making money off your kids [with] no oversight as to how much the kids are getting paid — there’s no way to do that well for me.” She worries about the privacy of the kids at the center of these channels and their ability to give informed consent. She doesn’t think, as fans claim, that there are family vloggers who do it the “right way.” In a statement to the Utah State Legislature in support of a proposed bill to protect the rights of underage influencers, Shari said there is “no such thing as an ethical or moral family vlogger.” She sees her book, too — the first memoir from a child influencer — as a part of her work to convince the public family vlogging should be put to an end. “It definitely feels heavy, but it’s also something that I feel really driven to do,” she says.  

Right now, only three states (Illinois, Minnesota, and California) have laws protecting the rights of child influencers, guaranteeing that some percentage of their earnings will be put into a trust for when they turn 18. She believes that amount should be higher — “Shouldn’t it be 100 percent?” — but even if kid-influencers were given all of the profits from content they’re featured in, that wouldn’t make it right, Shari says. “It wouldn’t justify it for me,” she says. “Because the consequences of it growing up with your whole life online, I don’t think any amount of money would justify that.”

With the memoir out, however, she’s focused on moving forward. In the spring, she’ll graduate from BYU with a degree in political science, and she recently announced her engagement on Instagram. (She did not reveal who her fiance is; the caption stated this was “the end of sharing my private life.”) She wants to live normally, she says, with a job in data analytics or consulting — something far from the world of social media. But before she moves on to what is next, Shari will invite people in, one last time, to examine her life. She wants her story to make a difference, especially for other influencer kids. “I hope that, by writing this, child influencers will see that their voices matter,” she says. “And that it’s worth whatever bridges they might burn.”