A mother with 2.3 million YouTube subscribers laughed on camera while her teenage son explained he’d been sleeping on a beanbag for 7 months as punishment. A few years later her 12-year-old ran to a neighbor’s door, skin and bones, with duct tape on his wrists and ankles: He had climbed out of a window at the house of his mother’s business partner in Ivins, Utah, and asked the neighbor to call the police. His mother was Ruby Franke from the family channel 8 Passengers, and inside that house officers found one of his sisters starved the same way. The beanbag video was one of the reasons people started worrying about the family long before the arrests. Her oldest son had lost his bedroom for seven months over a prank on his little brother, and in other videos kids were threatened with losing dinner. By 2023 Ruby was making parenting advice content with Jodi Hildebrandt, a life coach whose former clients said she cut them off from their families. In the video below the son talks about losing his room, and Ruby sits right next to him smiling and laughing. Both women pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. In February 2024 each got four consecutive sentences of 1 to 15 years, capped at 30, and the parole board decides how much of that they actually serve. In court Ruby said her devotion to her kids had been “masterfully manipulated into something very ugly” and thanked the police who found them. Was she manipulated by her business partner, or was everything she posted the warning sign nobody acted on?