The 2025 true-crime documentary film streaming on Netflix, Evil Influencer: The Jodie Hildebrandt Story, brings an in-depth presentation of the shocking piece of news from 2023 that gripped the internet, about a mom-influencer being found to have been torturing her own children. The documentary is focused on the discovery of these crimes against children as well as everything that followed. Director Skye Borgman once again brings forward her usual practice of looking at things from a different perspective and raising questions that are usually uncomfortable. Overall, Evil Influencer makes for a profound and grim watch, especially in terms of just what all children and even unsuspecting adults can be exposed to in the name of religion.
How did Jodie and Ruby first become friends?
Although the coming together and very deep friendship between Jodie Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke seemed strange or unusual at first glance, there were plenty of chances for the two like-minded people to have actually united. It is to be noted that the friendship, and then the eventual crimes, all took place in Utah, and the significantly religious state did have a significant role to play in the whole matter. Jodie and Ruby were both Mormons raised in families that strictly abided by the teachings and rules of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Their respective families and the general beliefs around them had instilled in both women an immense faith in God and perhaps the necessity to have a spiritual figure always tell them what to do in life. Despite their many apparent differences, the women ultimately found a lot in common between each other and went on to become very good friends.
For most of her career, Jodie Hildebrandt had worked as a psychotherapist who had a unique twist to her designation, in the sense that she heavily used religious teachings and sermons to guide her patients towards a better life. In fact, other therapists who worked in the same geographical vicinity as hers later came to find out about some truly bizarre techniques and methods that Jodie used from patients who had originally gone to her and then changed therapists. Taking the religious sermons a bit too strictly, Jodie would categorically treat people who came in for couple counselling or family counselling with a very heavy hand. She would talk about the devastating effects that the family or the couple breaking apart would cause and stress the need to go through extreme sacrifice and penance in order to keep things up and running.
Some of Jodie’s past clients, like Ethan Prete and Valerie Jackson, appear throughout the documentary to talk about how the therapist had almost single-handedly destroyed their respective relationships and had pushed them to a terribly dark and depressive state mentally for no apparent rhyme or reason. Jodie would constantly harp on how terrible and lacking the respective partner was and constantly push them towards giving up certain activities in life, particularly curbing their sexual freedom in every sense. It is extremely evident from the interviews that Jodie had a severely twisted perspective on sex, which is in itself not very uncommon among Mormons, as stated by people of the very community, and constantly tried to prove it as a cardinal sin responsible for all problems. She would repeatedly tell her couple clients to abstain from sex, almost as if their intimate relations were her personal concern for no apparent reason.
The men were particularly made to face the worst version of these horrific manipulations and bizarre therapeutic advice, as Jodie would have split private sessions with each partner of the couples. She would outright blame the men and their incessant drive for sex as the main reason for all the failures in their lives and relationships. One of her past clients mentions that according to Jodie, a man searching for pornographic content on the internet for even a day in the whole year was equivalent to a terrible act of infidelity and cheating, one that deserved to be admonished in every sense. She would not just advise these couples to stay apart from each other for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year or two, because of these apparent acts of infidelity, but she would actively interfere in their lives and ensure that the two actually stayed apart.
Ethan mentions that there was a point in time when the only contact he had with his partner and their toddler daughter was through Jodie, who ensured that he was cut off from his own family. Similarly, Valerie recalls how she and her boyfriend were told to stay apart for an entire year, and when she even fell tremendously sick during this while and had to be hospitalized, Jodie made sure that she did not get in touch with her partner. Needless to say, both these individuals failed in keeping up with their respective relationships, and they both still hold Jodie responsible for such a breakdown. Shockingly enough, Jodie had even been stripped of her permission to work as a clinical therapist after she had illegally disclosed one of her client’s personal information to his academic institution and to his family. But she continued to work in the same role as a ‘life coach,’ and the LDS church also supported her by sending potential clients her way when those among the congregation required therapeutic help.
On the other side, Ruby Franke was seemingly just a harmless young woman who shot to fame with her YouTube channel called 8 Passengers, on which she uploaded wholesome family content along with her husband at the time, Kevin Franke. Ruby and Kevin personally lived very religious lives with close ties with the church, and so they decided to make videos on parenthood and the seemingly enormous task of raising 6 children in order to inspire others and also spread the Mormon word to the world. Other than the mostly rare comments about how their style of parenting was not really appropriate to the modern standards, 8 Passengers had a quick and tremendous growth rate, with the channel crossing more than 2 million subscribers during the lockdown phase.
It was clear to the world that Ruby and Kevin knew how to sell their lifestyle and associated products over the internet in a completely new style, and this is what got Jodie interested in them. Jodie and Ruby were part of the same church, and it was through this community that they met for the first time. Not very long after, Jodie asked Ruby to be a part of a new business that she was starting, ConneXions, which was basically aimed at providing a religion-based community but targeted towards the younger and new-age mass. As Ruby readily agreed, she and Jodie both became the face of the company and regularly appeared in promotional videos and tours together. To those around them, this was the beginning of a new business partnership that would take both of them to new heights, but in reality this was the beginning of a series of crimes that the two women would commit together.
How did the world get to know about the women’s crimes?
The unraveling of what Jodie and Ruby had done finally took place on the morning of August 30th, 2023, when the police in Ivins City, Utah, were informed of a rather unusual situation in which a young boy had walked up to the house of his neighbors seeking help. The boy was the younger son of Ruby and Kevin Franke, who immediately told the police that her younger sister was also trapped inside the same house that he had just escaped from and that he had not seen her in the last month. As the police rushed to Ruby Franke’s house and rescued the girl from there, both Jodie and Ruby were arrested, and a full-fledged investigation began. Finally, the police were able to figure out a timeline for the sequence of events, and it all started with Jodie and Ruby’s close friendship. Within a short period of time, Jodie managed to fully take control of Ruby’s decisions and choices, manipulating her at every step and even convincing her that she was a messenger of God who had come to help her and her family.
Naturally, Jodie got Ruby detached from her husband, Kevin, and forced him to stay away from the lives of his wife and children for at least a year, especially after he objected to Jodie moving in with the family when she struggled with mental health issues during the pandemic. It was only Jodie and Ruby who lived at the latter’s house from then on, along with Ruby and Kevin’s four children. The two eldest ones had already moved away and cut ties with the family by this time. But the middle children, the boy and girl eventually rescued in 2023, were also getting hard to control for the two women, and Jodie started to brand them as pure evil and embodiments of the devil, which Ruby very conveniently believed since she was believing just about anything that Jodie was coming up with at the time. Thus, they started treating both the children very harshly and teaching them that they deserved whatever was happening to them, but things got extremely serious when the boy seemingly tried to run away from the house.
Once the boy was found and brought back to the house by Jodie, she and Ruby started tying up both the children to various objects, like themselves or metal weights, even hogtying them for hours. The children, especially the boy, sustained numerous horrific bruises because of these acts of torture, and absolutely ineffective homeopathic remedies were used to treat these wounds, with layers of gauze wrapped over them. On the morning of 30th August, 2023, the boy escaped the house with these bandages still on his body, and after trying to seek help from three of the neighbors, he finally found some assistance at the fourth house, the residents of which immediately called the police. Meanwhile, Jodie and Ruby were also extremely alerted by the situation, and fearing a visit by the police, Jodie quickly hid all signs of the torture and forceful restraining inside a panic room in the basement of the house. Unfortunately for her, she put the passcode on the door of the panic room as a simple ‘123456,’ and as the police did reach the place soon after to rescue the young girl and do a basic search, they were able to find all the evidence and immediately book the two women.
Why did Jodie and Ruby commit the crimes?
The reasons as to why the women, and especially Jodie, went on to commit the horrific crimes against the children seem to be layered and complicated, ranging from her own childhood to her desire to be in control of others’ lives. If we are to believe the things that Jodie wrote in her autobiography, then she was subjected to abuse by a group of boys at a young age, which had a lasting impact on her. According to some of the experts in the documentary, this incident, along with the extremely suppressed perception of sex, led to Jodie growing an unnatural hatred towards anything sexual, which gradually developed into an intolerance against romantic relationships as well. A niece of hers, Jessi, appears in the film to talk about her brutal experiences with Jodie, most of which stemmed from the woman’s terribly inappropriate belief that her young niece was getting obsessed with sex, when Jessi was just a young teenager and hardly knew anything about these matters.
On the other side, Ruby Franke seems to have been the most ideal candidate to be manipulated by just about anyone, let alone by the master exploiter Jodie. As one of the experts puts it brilliantly, it almost seemed to the police that Jodie kept pushing Ruby, making her do absolutely nonsensical things, with the faint hope that Ruby would fight back and stop her. After all, the extreme abuse and torture, which even included depriving food and water for hours at a stretch, if not days, had been carried out on Ruby’s own children. Yet, Ruby never pushed back, and she never questioned the woman whom she wholeheartedly considered to be her spiritual guide, sent from the heavens to help her out. While her business with Jodie did flourish, the monetary angle was no reason for the women to have tortured the kids just to keep them in check.
The film also presents another theory, which suggests that Jodie and Ruby might have actually become lovers some time during their close friendship, which further made it easier for Jodie to control the woman and therefore get to abuse her children without any repercussions. While Jodie has publicly spoken about her objections against the LGBTQ+ community because of religious beliefs, obviously, there are many experts and even close ones who claim that all this could have been her way of dealing with her internal turmoil regarding her sexuality. Kevin reports that when Jodie moved into their house during the pandemic, she was having hallucinations and fits of episodes, suggesting that she was already suffering from mental illnesses.
Apparently Ruby was the one who could calm her down by spending hours at a stretch inside the room with her. Kevin also states how the two women would often spend a very long time inside Ruby’s room together and then come out looking extremely happy and giddy. While Kevin is unable to openly talk about the matter because of his religious restrictions, once again, the suggestion is very clear. In all probability, a mix of mental illness, desire to control and persecute others based on sexual promiscuity, and a possible desire to be with Ruby led to Jodie taking the decisions that she ultimately did.
Where are Jodie Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke now?
Interestingly, even after Jodie and Ruby were arrested and put behind bars, the two continued to support each other. Jodie claimed that she was being misunderstood and her reputation was being dragged down intentionally by haters. She kept claiming that the two children were absolutely evil and needed to be treated exactly in the way that they were. Jodie continues to make these claims even to this day. Ruby was surprisingly supportive of Jodie after her arrest, stating that her friend was being framed for sins that she had not committed. But after a few months in prison, where she was kept away from Jodie, Ruby started changing her mind regarding the matter and began to realize how her children had been mistreated by the one she had understood to be her friend. Ultimately, the two women were sentenced to four consecutive terms of one to fifteen years in prison for aggravated child abuse. The two are currently held at Utah State Correctional Facility, and Jodie Hildebrandt is set to face the Board of Pardons and Parole for the first time in December of 2026. As per Utah’s state laws, Jodie can spend a maximum of 30 years in prison, unless she is released on parole.
