What did Ruby Franke's journal contain? Details explored about Hulu's Devil in the Family subject 

Ruby Franke is a former YouTube vlogger, who ran the now defunct YouTube channel 8 Passengers, and she was convicted of child abuse on August 30, 2023, along with Jodi Hildebrandt. Recently, authorities have made a journal maintained by Ruby Franke public, which reveals disturbing details of the abuse she inflicted on her youngest two children.

Hulu's latest docuseries, Devil In The Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, provides an unsettling account of the misdoings of Franke and the impact that they had on her children, who became victims of her regular abuse. The show premiered today, Thursday, February 27, 2025, and sheds light on the shocking events surrounding Franke's rise to fame and the allegations of child abuse that followed.

What did Ruby Franke's journal contain?

Ruby Franke's journal was released by the Washington County Attorney along with other evidence related to the case after her sentencing of 30 years in prison for child abuse. The diary entries are dated from July 9 to August 27, 2023, three days before she was arrested after her son managed to escape and reach out to a neighbor for help, following which the police arrived to handle the situation.

In her diary, Ruby Franke wrote that she shaved her daughter's head on several occasions and denied her food for three days, claiming that her daughter was being “manipulative." Franke would also deny her son food, and she wrote at a point in her diary that she told her son,

“I will not feed a demon," she wrote in her diary.

The account also revealed that the children were doused with water, made to stay outside, and forced to perform physical labor even in extreme weather conditions. It is apparent from her diary entries that Ruby Franke harbored a deep-held belief that her children were controlled by the devil and that she was teaching them how to repent.

Before his escape in August, Ruby's son had previously tried to run away in July, on a night he was forced to sleep outside on the patio. He had even left a message for his mother and Hildebrandt that read:

“Jail will call when I get there.”

But the 12-year-old could not escape, and he was found by Franke later that night. Other incidents which Franke wrote about included the incident when she brought her children to a Native American cemetery and had them pick weeds and broken glass before they were told that they were trespassing. Franke even mentioned kicking her son while she was wearing boots because he was acting out.

Franke even wrote that Jodi Hildebrandt had traveled to Arizona in search of land because she intended to sell her house in order to buy property with more acreage so they could have a ranch where the children could do more hard labor, which Franke referred to as “good" and wrote:

“Satan cannot be where there is good."

The abuse that Ruby Franke was inflicting on her children was motivated by what authorities referred to as "religious extremism" because Ruby had made multiple references to her belief that her children were possessed by a demon and she was doing what she had to do to rid them of it.

How were Franke's misdoings exposed?

Ruby Franke used to run a family YouTube channel that once had millions of subscribers. However, she left that to work with therapist and parenting coach Jodi Hildebrandt, and it soon came to light that the duo was abusing Franke's children. Franke kept her 12-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter in what prosecutors called “work-camp like” conditions in Hildebrandt’s home in Utah.

All this was exposed when her son escaped to the neighbor's house and requested that he be taken to the police station. There were clear signs of abuse on him. When the police arrived and searched Hildebrandt's home, they found Ruby's daughter in a closet. According to authorities, she was "petrified" and spent nearly four hours sitting on the floor before they were able to coax her out.

Catch the full story of Ruby Franke on Hulu today.

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