About
Ruby Franke (née Griffiths; born January 18, 1982) is an American former family vlogger and convicted child abuser who ran the now defunct YouTube channel 8 Passengers. On August 30, 2023, Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt were arrested in Washington County, Utah, and charged with six counts of felony aggravated child abuse of two of Franke’s children. Franke ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts and on February 20, 2024, was sentenced to serve between four and thirty years in prison.
In early 2015, Franke created a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers in which she documented her family life in Utah with her husband Kevin and their six children.
She originally posted five days a week at 6:00 a.m. As of June 2020, the channel had around 2.5 million subscribers and amassed 1 billion views.
Beginning in 2020, when one of the Franke children, a 15-year-old, said that he had been banned from his bedroom and made to sleep on a bean bag for seven months, viewers became concerned about his mother’s disciplinary methods. On another occasion, her youngest daughter was sent to school without a packed lunch because Ruby believed her 6-year-old daughter was old enough…
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Bio and photo via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons licensing.