Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke
Disney+/Hulu, 2025 — the Ruby Franke child abuse case in Utah
Quick facts
What Is the Series About?
Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke is a three-part true crime documentary series directed by Olly Lambert and released on February 27, 2025, on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in international markets including the UK. The series examines one of the most disturbing child abuse cases to emerge from the American family-vlogging world: the prosecution of Ruby Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt for aggravated child abuse against Franke's minor children in Washington County, Utah. Each episode runs approximately 50 minutes, and the series draws on unseen footage and interviews with family members — including Franke's two oldest children, Shari and Chad Franke — to reconstruct both the public face the family presented online and the private reality behind closed doors.
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The Case
Ruby Franke (née Griffiths), born January 18, 1982, built a significant online following through her YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the daily life of her large family and attracted millions of subscribers. To her audience, Franke projected the image of a devout, organized, and loving mother. Behind that image, according to prosecutors and her own subsequent guilty plea, she was subjecting her children to severe physical and emotional abuse.
The case became public on August 30, 2023, when one of Franke's youngest children — visibly malnourished and bearing signs of physical mistreatment — escaped and knocked on a neighbor's door in Ivins, Utah, pleading for help. Police were called immediately. Officers arrested both Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a family therapist and counselor associated with the ConneXions program, on six counts of aggravated child abuse.
Investigators and later court documents described the abuse as encompassing starvation, physical confinement, and forced labor. The children had been denied basic necessities while Franke and Hildebrandt justified the treatment through a framework of extreme religious and psychological control linked to the ConneXions program Hildebrandt ran.
On December 18, 2023, both women pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse as part of a plea agreement that reduced the original six-count charges. At sentencing on February 20, 2024, a Utah judge imposed four consecutive prison terms of 1 to 15 years on each defendant. Because the sentences run consecutively, each woman faces a practical maximum of up to 30 years of incarceration, with parole eligibility determined by the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. Both Franke and Hildebrandt are currently incarcerated at the Utah State Correctional Facility.
Additional police documents were released publicly in March 2024, providing further detail about the conditions in which the children were kept and generating renewed media coverage of the case.
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Production
The series was directed by Olly Lambert, a documentary filmmaker with experience covering sensitive and high-stakes subjects. Lambert and his team secured access to material that had not previously been seen publicly, including footage that contrasts the family's curated YouTube persona with evidence of what was happening privately. The documentary features on-camera interviews with Shari Franke and Chad Franke, Ruby Franke's two oldest children, who speak about their experiences growing up in the family and what they witnessed. The inclusion of family members as interview subjects was both a major selling point of the series and a source of ethical discussion among critics and viewers.
The production leans into the central irony of the case: that a family which voluntarily placed its domestic life on camera for public consumption was simultaneously concealing serious ongoing abuse. The series uses archival YouTube footage alongside new interviews and reporting to construct a chronological account of how the abuse escalated and how it was ultimately uncovered.
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Reception
Following its February 27, 2025 premiere, Devil in the Family quickly became a hit, topping the charts on Disney+ in the UK and drawing substantial viewership on Hulu in the United States. Critics and reviewers highlighted the documentary's use of previously unseen footage and its willingness to let family members speak at length about the abuse they witnessed or experienced.
The Los Angeles Times noted the series for its disturbing revelations about the family dynamic, describing how the contrast between the cheerful vlogging content and the reality of the children's situation made for especially uncomfortable viewing. Vulture and other outlets focused on the ethical questions raised by producing a slick streaming documentary around a recent case involving child victims.
A recurring point of debate in press coverage concerned the tension between the public's appetite for true crime content and the potential for such productions to retraumatize victims or to turn serious child suffering into entertainment. Critics were divided on whether Lambert's approach handled those tensions responsibly, though the series' viewership numbers indicated strong audience interest regardless. An IMDb rating was not verifiable from available sources at the time of publication.
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The Case Today
As of the series' release in early 2025, both Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt remain incarcerated at the Utah State Correctional Facility. Their parole eligibility is subject to review by the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole; neither has a fixed release date, and each could serve up to 30 years given the consecutive structure of their sentences.
The case continues to prompt broader conversations about the regulation of family content on platforms like YouTube, the responsibility of online audiences who consume and financially sustain family-vlogging channels, and the warning signs that were visible — in retrospect — in the 8 Passengers content. Shari and Chad Franke, who speak in the documentary, have become public voices on those issues following their mother's conviction.
The 8 Passengers YouTube channel has been inactive since the case broke in August 2023. Ruby Franke's public platform, built over years and watched by millions, now stands as a central piece of evidence in discussions about the darker potential of family content creation and the limits of what viewers can know about the private lives of the people they follow online.
