GUWAHATI: An American woman who ran a popular YouTube channel where she shared parenting advice has been sentenced to prison by a US court for child abuse, as per media reports.
Ruby Franke, a 42-year-old YouTube influencer, and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a 54-year-old counsellor and life coach, have received a prison sentence of at least four years after they pleaded guilty in a Utah court for starving and abusing her children, as reported by BBC.
The two women were arrested last year in August after Franke's malnourished 12-year-old son climbed out of a window at Hildebrandt's house in Ivins, Utah and ran to a neighbour's house asking for food and water. He reportedly had lacerations from being tied up with rope, according to police records.
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The children, aged nine and 11 at the time, were living in a "concentration camp-like setting" and were regularly denied food, water, beds to sleep in, and virtually all forms of entertainment, the prosecutor Eric Clarke reportedly told the court as per media reports.
During the hearing, Ruby Franke apologized for her actions and said, "I was so disoriented that I believed dark was light and right was wrong. I was led to believe that this world was an evil place, filled with cops who control, hospitals that injure, government agencies that brainwash, church leaders who lie and lust, husbands who refuse to protect and children who need abuse."
The 8 Passengers YouTube channel ran by Franke depicted a typical Mormon suburban family, including her husband and two kids, home-schooling, cooking, eating and chatting together, but viewers became suspicious in 2020, when one of her sons mentioned that he had been forced to sleep on a bean bag for seven months.
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A closer look at the videos put a new light on some disturbing ways Franke imposed punishment on her children such as withholding food, threatening to chop the head off a toy stuffed animal and "cancelling" Christmas.
Soon, an online petition was started which garnered thousands of signatures and Utah's child protection agency was called in to investigate, but no legal action was taken at the time, and Franke and her husband dismissed the criticisms and stated that their clips had been taken out of context.
However, the popularity of the channel declined and it was later deleted in 2022 as Franke and her husband separated.
Franke’s former husband Kevin Franke reportedly asked the court to impose maximum sentence to be and called the abuse suffered by his children "horrific and inhumane".