The new documentary series, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, aims to give a more nuanced look at the events leading up to the popular parenting vlogger’s arrest and subsequent conviction on child abuse charges last year.

“There are so many shades of gray in this and so many complicated reasons why the family chose to do things in the way that they did,” the director of the documentary, Olly Lambert, told Yahoo News.

The three-part series, which airs on Hulu this week, features previously unseen footage from Franke’s hard drives as well as interviews with her husband, Kevin, and their two oldest children.

Franke rose to fame in the “momfluencer” community online with her YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, where she documented her life with her husband and their six children, accumulating 2.5 million subscribers at its peak. But some of the behavior depicted in the videos, including Franke’s refusal to bring her 6-year-old daughter’s lunch to school after she forgot it and her decision to exclude two of her young children from Christmas one year, prompted speculations of abuse in the comments section.

In August of 2023, that speculation was validated when Franke’s youngest son rang a neighbor’s doorbell and asked to be taken to the closest police station. The police who responded, who were interviewed in the documentary, reported that the 12-year-old appeared to be malnourished, with duct tape around his arms and legs and scratches across his body. The incident officially kicked off an investigation of the two homes belonging to Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt.

Franke and Hildebrandt both pleaded guilty to child abuse charges and, in late February 2024, were both sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.

New insight from Franke’s husband and 2 eldest children

The documentary series features some of the first on-camera interviews since Franke’s arrest with her husband, Kevin, and their two eldest children, Shari and Chad.

Recalling her on-camera upbringing, Shari, now 21, describes the family’s home as “more like a set than a house.” Chad, 20, blames being forced to film as punishment for his outbursts at school, which eventually led to his expulsion.

“It bugged the crap out of me, I hated it,” Chad says about filming with his family. “There was a time — maybe a year or more — where I truly hated [Franke].”

Chad Franke says he hated being filmed with his family. (Hulu)

Franke and Kevin, publicly split up in 2022. But a year later, after the arrests, many social media users and former 8 Passengers fans blamed Kevin for allowing their children to be abused.

In the docuseries, Kevin argues that he was also manipulated by Franke and Hildebrandt, insisting that he had “no idea that this was going on in my family.” He says he initially attributed the backlash against some of the 8 Passengers videos to “an innocent, religious family that’s being attacked by cancel culture.”

“I’ve learned that there was a whole lot of horror that was going on in the shadows and behind the scenes,” he said.

Kevin Franke faces the camera. (Hulu)

Chad and Shari described some of the horrors that they say took place behind the scenes, recalling how Franke “blew up” at the children and, they allege, would sometimes beat them.

“[Chad] got beat really bad one time, and I helped him clean blood off the walls,” Shari said. “Looking back on it, I don’t think [Franke] was a good person. I think she was already an abusive mother before, and obviously it escalated dramatically in the last couple of years.”

Franke’s family provided Lambert with boxes of archival footage from the filming of 8 Passengers, some of which they saw for the first time while watching the docuseries.

Some of the clips show Franke yelling at the kids for making noise in the background while she was filming or threatening to punish them for not cooperating with her on camera, especially while filming advertisements.

An unseen outtake from 8 Passengers, where a young Chad tells his mom, Ruby, that he doesn’t feel like reading an advertisement. (Screenshotted by Yahoo News; Credit: Hulu)

While Franke’s children may have come to resent having their lives constantly documented, the director, Lambert, told Yahoo News that he observed how the camera also sometimes served as a buffer between the kids and Franke’s abusive behavior.

“It wasn’t black and white for them,” Lambert said about the kids. “She was less harsh and less strict, and in some cases, more loving, when the camera was on. So that just added another sort of incentivization for the camera to be on, because they got a better Franke when things were being filmed.”

New details about Franke’s relationship with Jodi Hildebrandt

The second episode of the docuseries dives into Franke’s relationship with Hildebrandt, Franke’s business partner, who was arrested and convicted on child abuse charges along with Franke.

Hildebrandt is the co-founder of a Utah-based life coaching business called ConneXions. In the documentary, Franke’s friend Paige Hanna says she first told Franke about Hildebrandt after Chad was expelled from a high school in 2019, suggesting that Hildebrandt could help.

At the time, Hanna said she and many other members of the Mormon community considered Hildebrandt to be some kind of “guru.”

Jodi Hildebrandt hosting a ConneXions video. (Screenshotted by Yahoo News; Hulu)

Chad describes his first few meetings with Hildebrandt, whom he soon began seeing twice a week. He said he trusted Hildebrandt as a therapist figure and wasn’t surprised that his parents followed her suggestions — even if they were a bit extreme.

“To get me back in line, they had to take everything away from me,” Chad says in the series. “[Franke then] gave me the option to sleep in the living room or go down in the basement and sleep on a bean bag. I slept on that bean bag every night for seven months.”

Kevin admits that he was also influenced by Hildebrandt, who became increasingly close with Franke after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, and by early 2021, he’d agreed to allow Hildebrandt to move into their home.

“This is also a story of deception, of control, and ultimately it’s a story of faith,” Kevin said. “If you put your faith in the wrong hands, you can lose everything.”

While Franke and Hildebrandt appeared to have a unique relationship, one former employee of Hildebrandt’s suggests that she might have had ulterior motives.

“Jodi was always enamored by money and fame,” says Patrick Bannon, who worked for Hildebrandt for a year in 2010. “I saw her treat clients differently according to their status.”

Both Kevin and Shari recalled details that made them speculate about the nature of Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s relationship, including the fact that they slept in the same bed. Publicly, their relationship was raising eyebrows as well. In June 2022, Franke announced her business partnership with ConneXions and Hildebrandt. The two began co-hosting conversations on YouTube about parenting, including offering questionable advice, such as how exerting total control over children is the best way to show love and arguing that children do not deserve privacy. Viewers at the time called some of their comments homophobic, transphobic, racist and ableist.

By the time the two women were arrested in 2023, Kevin and Chad had moved out of the family home.

In the aftermath of the arrests, some former 8 Passenger fans tried to blame the alleged abuse on Franke’s relationship with Hildebrandt. But Shari disagrees.

“The fact that Ruby went as far as she did, I wouldn’t blame that on Jodi,” Shari said. “[Hildebrandt] set off things in Ruby that were already in her heart.”

The docuseries notes that the filmmakers reached out to lawyers for both Hildebrandt and Franke and received no response from either party.