Hulu’s new Ruby Franke docuseries features family members’ 1st public interviews and unseen video footage
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.
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].”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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Ruby Franke docuseries on Hulu shares new details of child abuse case
Ruby Franke docuseries on Hulu shares new details of child abuse case
A year after former YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke was sentenced to prison for child abuse, a new Hulu docuseries is shedding light on what happened behind the scenes before the criminal case made headlines across the nation.
The Franke family, which includes Ruby Franke and her husband, Kevin Franke, alongside their six children, had amassed more than 2 million subscribers on their now-defunct channel “8 Passengers” before she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested and charged with six counts of felony child abuse in 2023. They both pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse and were sentenced to up to 30 consecutive years in prison.
The saga sparked national shock and outrage as more details continued to surface about the abuse the children endured. Ruby Franke, who had faced internet scrutiny for her parenting techniques even before her arrest, frequently appeared in controversial advice videos for Hildebrandt’s life coaching service, ConneXions.
“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,” which debuts Thursday, features interviews with Kevin Franke and the two eldest children, Shari Franke, 21, and Chad Franke, 20. Kevin Franke filed for divorce in the months after Ruby Franke’s arrest.
It also shows behind-the-scenes footage of Ruby Franke, provided to the filmmakers by the family, including multiple clips of her yelling at her children while she was filming herself or her family for their channel.
“Trusting third parties holding cameras was a huge step for [the Franke family],” the series’ director, Olly Lambert, said in an interview. “But when we approached them, I think they all individually had it in mind that the story needed to be told with depth and nuance over a long period of time and in detail, because only then can you sort of fully understand how they ended up where they did.”
Lambert said that the family set strict parameters around protecting the privacy of the four youngest children by blurring out their faces and censoring their names whenever they were mentioned.
Ruby Franke and Hildebrandt were not invited to participate in the docuseries and did not respond to the filmmakers’ request for comment, according to Lambert. Attorneys for the two did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday, ahead of the docuseries’ release.
During Ruby Franke’s sentencing hearing last year, audio of which was streamed on the Utah court’s website, the Utah mom teared up while apologizing to her children. “I … believed dark was light and right was wrong,” she said. “I would do anything in this world for you. I took from you all that was soft and safe and good.”
Here are some of the major moments from the three-part docuseries.
Drawing from an archive containing more than 1,000 hours of unseen footage provided by the family, the Hulu series contains numerous clips depicting Ruby Franke’s persona behind the scenes.
In one unreleased clip of herself, the mother of six yelled at her family for making noise before stopping and restarting her footage, reverting back into a calm demeanor. Other footage showed similar instances of anger, such as when Ruby Franke expressed frustration at her husband for not being interactive enough on camera.
“She filmed everything, and I was so uncomfortable with it,” Kevin Franke said in one episode. “When I came in the door, wherever Ruby was, the camera was. All of a sudden, it wasn’t enough to just interact with her, I had to interact with the camera.”
He later noted that the children began to express discomfort with the constant filming, as well.
“Our entire schedule revolved around YouTube, and I think that’s where I started to have issues,” Shari Franke said, adding that their family home turned into something that “felt more like a set than a house.”
One of the clips in the series shows Ruby Franke telling one of her children to “just be yourself.” When the child said, “That is myself,” the mother responded, “Well, then change it.”
Another clip in the docuseries showed Chad Franke, the eldest Franke son, posing with one of his younger sisters as his mother instructed him to smile. He then says through gritted teeth, “I hate smiling at lenses.”
“I really didn’t want anything to do with YouTube. It bugged the crap out of me,” he said in the episode. “I hated it. And there was a time, maybe even a year or more, where I truly hated her.”
Chad Franke said that as his parents struggled to deal with his increasingly rebellious behavior, they decided to set him up for his first therapy session with Hildebrandt, whose teachings seemed to intrigue Ruby Franke.
In the docuseries, Chad Franke recounted planning to “just put on a happy face” during the call in hopes of quickly “get[ting] rid of her.” But when he tried doing so, he said Hildebrandt immediately called him out for lying.
“She really kind of just read through me,” Chad Franke said. “And that really excited my mom, that there’s finally someone out there who isn’t gonna take my bullcrap anymore. So she was hooked onto [Hildebrandt] from that moment on.”
It was a moment that set the stage for Hildebrandt’s growing influence on Ruby Franke, as well as her gradual infiltration into the family’s relationships and home. Chad Franke said his weekly calls with her soon grew more frequent, and she began counseling other members of the Franke family, including Kevin Franke and Shari Franke.
Hildebrandt then moved into the family’s house in 2022 and took over Shari Franke’s bedroom, where Ruby Franke would often spend nights with her — a transition Shari Franke also recounts in detail in her own memoir, which was published earlier this year.
Kevin Franke, who said in the docuseries that Ruby Franke’s relationship with Hildebrandt was “uncomfortably intimate,” said he agreed later that year to his wife’s request that he move out of the house and halt contact with her and the children. (He filed for divorce in late 2023, a few months after Ruby Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s arrest.)
“[Hildebrandt] immediately started putting her fingers into every aspect of our lives, and I think she wanted Ruby to herself,” Kevin Franke said. “But in order to do that she needed me out of the picture.”
Kevin Franke, whom police have not charged with any crime, has said that he was not aware that his children were being abused.
In the docuseries, he discusses further why he didn’t step in. He said he felt that ConneXions was “a cult” after the first conference he attended. (He had also told investigators that Hildebrandt was a “cult leader,” according to case documents reviewed by KTVX-TV of Salt Lake City.) But he joined a ConneXions support group for men, he reveals in the series, and gradually began looking forward to the sessions because they would garner him praise from Ruby Franke.
He previously told TODAY.com that the moment he allowed Hildebrandt into his home “was the moment when everything really started going crazy.”
“I think about it often and I wish that I really would have put my foot down,” he told the publication. “I was adamantly opposed to it. I felt like she needed professional help.”
Multiple participants in the docuseries described Hildebrandt as seemingly “hating” or being “angry” toward men in particular. (Several of ConneXions’ former therapy clients also previously told NBC News it was a program that isolated them from their loved ones and destroyed marriages.)
Chad Franke recounted having a fallout with his mother at 17 and being sent out of his home alongside his father. By that time, however, he said he had learned to love and trust Hildebrandt, to the point where he “really believed Jodi and my mom were God’s chosen people.”
“Jodi was a businesswoman, and she would prey on the weak,” Chad Franke said in the docuseries. “She knew how to hit on a pain point, the biggest pain point for people, in order to turn it into profit.”
Brannon Patrick, a Utah therapist who had shadowed Hildebrandt, also described ConneXions as “a whole platform of people that were drinking her Kool-Aid,” likening it to “a church within the church and Jodi was the prophet.”
“Jodi was absolutely my god, and it was to her you were looking for forgiveness,” Paige Hanna, a former ConneXions board member and former friend of Ruby Franke, said in the docuseries.
After starting to undergo therapy with Hildebrandt, Kevin Franke said Ruby Franke would finally look at him “the way I always wanted her to look at me.” He didn’t object when Hildebrandt moved into the family home in 2022, nor when Ruby Franke requested a separation later that year — leaving her and Hildebrandt alone with the four youngest kids.
“I was going to support her over all my children, period,” Kevin Franke said in the docuseries, reflecting on his mindset at the time. He was terrified, he said, of possibly losing his marriage.
Lambert, the series’ director, told NBC News that he asked Kevin Franke “the very questions that he knew were most painful, but he wanted to be asked them so that he could respond.”
During his exile, several neighbors said in the series that they were growing concerned about the children’s well-being.
Kevin Franke said in the docuseries that even after Ruby Franke’s arrest in 2023, he was initially suspicious of the details the police had told him about the condition of his youngest children. He noted that he was afraid to do anything that would point the authorities toward Ruby Franke, as he was still trying to protect her.
“I was the last line of defense for these children,” Kevin Franke said, “and I packed my bags and walked away.”
Kevin Franke told TODAY.com that listening to Ruby Franke testify in court “felt like getting stabbed.”
“Because I believe it and I do still love her,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not as angry as can be at her. I don’t want to be hurt and abused by her anymore. And so, it’s a painful decision to say, ‘No. I love you and I love you enough to walk away from you and to leave you so you can get the help that you need.’”
Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.
© 2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
Franke children say they ‘hated’ being forced to perform for the camera
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Where Is Ruby Franke’s Husband Now? All About Kevin Franke’s Life 2 Years After His Wife’s Arrest — and Why He Says He ‘Still’ Loves Her
Kevin Franke shared his story for the first time with PEOPLE and in the Hulu docuseries ‘Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke’
On Aug. 30, 2023, Kevin Franke’s life was turned upside down.
The husband and father of six children learned that his wife of 23 years, family vlogger Ruby Franke, and their family therapist, Jodi Hildebrandt, were under arrest. The pair were accused of abusing Kevin and Ruby’s two youngest children, who were just 12 and 9 years old at the time, after authorities discovered them severely malnourished, emaciated and “covered in wounds.”
The news was a devastating blow to Kevin, who had separated from Ruby a year prior and was allegedly isolated from his wife and children at Hildebrandt’s command.
Over the next six months, disturbing details about the abuse Kevin’s youngest children endured at the hands of their mother and Hildebrandt emerged. In December 2023, Ruby pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse and was ultimately sentenced to between 4 and 60 years in prison (but won’t serve more than 30 years because of a Utah law relating to consecutive sentences, per Business Insider).
MOMS OF TRUTH/ INSTAGRAM
Since Ruby’s arrest and conviction, Kevin has primarily commented on his family’s case through his lawyer, Kester. However, Kevin and his two oldest children, Shari and Chad, spoke out for the first time together in the Hulu docuseries Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which premieres on Feb. 27.
Ahead of the release, Kevin spoke with PEOPLE about his relationship with Ruby now.
“I’m not ashamed to say that after being married over 20 years to that woman, I truly did and still do love her,” he said. “But that doesn’t excuse what she did, and it doesn’t excuse how she hurt our children and how she hurt me … I’m going to do what’s best for my children, for my family, and for myself, and that’s not going to include her.”
So, where is Ruby Franke’s husband now? From his rise to YouTube fame to the family’s fall from grace and how he’s been picking up the pieces for himself and his children, here’s everything to know about Kevin Franke’s life today.
8 PASSENGERS / YOUTUBE
Kevin first rose to prominence in 2015, when he and his then-wife, Ruby, started a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers.
The family vlog featured Kevin, then an assistant engineering professor at Utah’s Brigham Young University, Ruby, a stay-at-home mom, and their six children: Shari, Chad, Abby, Julie, Russell and Eve. The Mormon couple would regularly film their everyday life in Springville, Utah, and post up to five days per week, according to The Washington Post.
The Franke’s vlog gained traction fast, and by 2020, 8 Passengers had amassed 2.5 million followers and over 1 billion views. No topic appeared off limits for the couple, as Kevin and Ruby posted videos on everything from homeschooling to potty training to their fertility struggles — as well as their approach to disciplining their six children, according to the podcast The Rise and Fall of Ruby Franke.
But Kevin and Ruby’s strict parenting style raised red flags for some viewers, with some followers even alleging child abuse. In 2020, an online petition requesting that child protective services investigate the Franke family was signed by 18,000 people. The couple’s eldest daughter, Shari, had also called Child Protective Services about her family because she worried her younger siblings were being left alone too often.
The petition referenced several controversial videos on 8 Passengers in which Kevin and Ruby enforced harsh punishments on their children — such as allegedly taking their son Chad’s bed away for months after he played a prank on his sibling. Another instance involved Ruby saying that she refused to bring her daughter Eve, then 6 years old, lunch at school after she forgot to pack it herself.
As a result of the petition, and some 911 calls, Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services did visit the Franke’s home in June 2020 and interviewed the children for two hours — but the case was dropped due to lack of evidence for the allegations, per Insider. Kevin said that the case workers were supposedly “embarrassed” they had to conduct the visit and apologized for inflicting stress on the family.
“When they walked in unannounced, Eve and Ruby were baking bread together and doing a puzzle,” Kevin said at the time. “Hardly the evidence of an abusive home.”
In February 2025, Kevin opened up to PEOPLE about what he knew about Ruby and Hildebrandt’s abuse.
“A lot of the physical violence that was described was kept hidden from me … I think Ruby was really careful to hide a lot of that from me,” he said. “All of those directives came from Jodi, a licensed mental health counselor. I definitely voiced my opposition and concern and it was always flipped back on to me. Like ‘This is why your children are so disobedient because you enable them all the time.’ “
DISNEY/KAI PFAFFENBACH
In 2021, Kevin and Ruby began working with Jodi Hildebrandt, a Utah-based marriage counselor who purportedly specialized in sex and pornography addiction. However, Hildebrandt came with her own checkered past: She had her therapist’s license suspended in 2012 for breaking patient confidentiality.
Kevin and Ruby started participating in ConneXions, a program founded by Hildebrandt that offered marital and parental counseling and promised to “help you flourish in your relationships.”
By 2022, Ruby returned from a ConneXions trip with Hildebrant and another counselor and informed Kevin that his “attitude” was “infesting the family,” his lawyer, Kester, told PEOPLE. Ruby allegedly said that the only way to save their marriage was to separate, so Kevin moved out.
“Kevin did not want to be separated,” Kester claimed to Today in September 2023. “He wanted to work through concerns as a family.”
Despite Kevin’s alleged wishes, over the next year, the father of six said he was only permitted to have contact with Ruby if she reached out first. According to Kester, Ruby only contacted Kevin “three or four times” during that time period.
“I was completely cut off,” Kevin later told authorities, per Salt Lake City’s ABC4.
In February 2025, Kevin told PEOPLE that he understands onlookers who have never experienced what he went through questioning why he didn’t try harder to see his children. The dad of six cited alleged “indoctrination, coercion and gaslighting” from Hildebrant as reasoning for his gradual belief that he was the problem in their family.
Following her separation from Kevin, Ruby became deeply intertwined with Hildebrandt. In 2022, she stopped uploading videos to the 8 Passengers channel and officially joined the ConneXions podcast with Hildebrandt. She also changed the handle of her Instagram account from “8 Passengers” to “Moms of Truth,” where she and Hildebrandt began sharing more of their strict parenting philosophies.
“I certainly got weird vibes from Jodi and Ruby,” the Franke’s oldest daughter, Shari, told Good Morning America in January 2025. “The vibes I was getting was that something was strange between them.”
MOMS OF TRUTH/ INSTAGRAM
With Kevin out of the house and isolated from his family, Ruby spent more and more time at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah — 300 miles away from where Kevin lived in Springville.
“I don’t think it’s normal at all,” Shari told Good Morning America about Ruby living with her therapist and business partner, Hildebrandt.
It was in Hildebrandt’s home that Ruby’s parenting became extreme. Her journal entries from this time detail the cruel torture her youngest children endured from herself and Hildebrandt — including forcing them to do demanding physical labor, denying them food for days at a time, leaving them to stand in the sun for hours and dressing their wounds with cayenne pepper and honey. According to Ruby’s journal, these were punishments for her children being “evil” and “manipulative.”
The abuse came to an end when, on Aug. 30, 2023, Kevin and Ruby’s then-12-year-old son escaped and sought help from a neighbor — who was driven to tears by the boy’s “emaciated” condition. The neighbor called 911 and when authorities arrived, they found Kevin and Ruby’s youngest son and then-9-year-old daughter injured and afraid.
Both Ruby and Hildebrandt were placed under arrest and charged with six counts of aggravated child abuse. The four youngest Franke children were taken into Utah’s Department of Child and Family Services care.
In 2025, Kevin told PEOPLE that Hildebrant’s therapy often “insisted that we subject ourselves to pain and discomfort which would change us and make us stronger.”
MOMS OF TRUTH/ INSTAGRAM
Kevin was initially considered a suspect in the child abuse case involving his youngest children, according to ABC News. When he arrived at the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department on Aug. 30, 2023, looking for his children, police questioned him about his involvement.
Body camera footage from the interview shows Kevin explaining to the officers that he was not living with Ruby and his children, and hadn’t had any contact with them in “over a year.” As officers describe the condition of his two youngest children and the alleged abuse they endured, Kevin appeared visibly shocked and upset — but still told officers, “I love my wife.”
Authorities quickly confirmed that Kevin was not living with his children at the time and found no evidence connecting him to the child abuse case. He was cleared as a suspect early on in the investigation, and has never been charged in connection with the case.
“A lot of people will look at me and say, ‘How could he ever do that?’ but for those who respectfully ask me about it and say, ‘How could you?’ my response to that is ‘Who do you love more than anybody?’ ” Kevin told PEOPLE in 2025. “And I say, ‘Well, what would happen if that individual that you love more than anybody started to go to another way and started inviting you and encouraging you to go with them?’ Would you be able to easily say, ‘Goodbye, you’re out of my life?’ “
FRANCISCO KJOLSETH/THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Since Ruby’s arrest and conviction, Kevin’s focus has been on repairing his relationship with his children, healing their “past trauma and events” and seeking justice for the emotional and physical abuse they endured.
“[Kevin] is making an effort to rebuild and bridge these relationships rather than sling mud and point fingers” at his estranged wife, Kester told Today in September 2023.
He is, however, seeking restitution from Hildebrant. Kevin filed a lawsuit against the disgraced therapist in April 2024, citing “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” “negligent infliction of emotional distress” and “negligence.” According to Kester, the lawsuit was filed on behalf of the children in order to “preserve Hildebrandt’s wealth and assets until appropriate action can be taken to make the kids whole.”
Kevin is also pursuing justice on behalf of his children by advocating for stronger child welfare laws and pushing for regulations on the life coaching industry in Utah, according to The Salt Lake Tribune and KUTV.
In July 2024, he appeared in front of Utah state legislators and proposed that the state laws be amended to allow child welfare workers to take temporary custody of children when they receive “reported red flags” from friends, family members or neighbors. Kevin pushed for these reforms again in October 2024 and called for an independent investigation of Utah’s DCFS.
“The child welfare system in this state is broken,” he said to legislators, per KSL TV. “It failed my children in their time of greatest need.”
While Kevin works to “strengthen the bonds between he and all of his children,” according to Kester, he is looking to end his marriage to Ruby. Though their separation was initially Ruby’s idea, Kevin filed a petition for divorce — which is sealed under Utah law — in November 2023.
Despite the divorce filing, Kevin attended his estranged wife’s sentencing hearing in February 2024.
“You are the love of my life,” Ruby reportedly said to Kevin at her sentencing. “The ending of our marriage is a tragedy.”
In February 2025, ahead of the Devil in the Family premiere, Kevin opened up to PEOPLE about his progress toward healing and revealed that he and Ruby were “close” to settling their divorce.
“The last letter that I received from [Ruby] from prison was maybe in March or April of last year. And then I requested the Department of Corrections to ask her to stop writing me,” Kevin said. “I didn’t want to hear anymore. I didn’t like what she was saying … I’m still very angry.”
The father of six added, of his former wife, “I genuinely, genuinely hope she gets the help she needs … I really believe that she was damaged severely by swallowing the teachings that Jodi just was serving up for her.”
As part of the Devil in the Family docuseries, Kevin provided the filmmakers with a lot of unedited vlog footage. He told PEOPLE that showing these vulnerable parts of their lives, including Ruby shouting at their children and demanding they change their mood or alter their words for the camera, was an effort to show the negative effects of family vlogging.
“One of the biggest fears of any family content creator is that the raw footage somehow leaks so people can see what really goes on behind the camera,” Kevin said. “These individuals want people to believe that their content is uplifting and wholesome and pure and sure the final product appears that way, but the making of the sausage? That is ugly.”
MOMS OF TRUTH/ INSTAGRAM
The four youngest Franke children have been in the custody of Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services since Ruby’s arrest in August 2023.
Kevin has been fighting for full custody of the children in juvenile court, but as of April 2024, they were still with the state, Kester told PEOPLE.
“He just wants to do what’s best for his kids and get them back, get them under his tutelage and his fathership and protect them,” the lawyer said.
As for his two eldest children, Shari and Chad, Kevin told PEOPLE in February 2025 that he has started his own family tradition of having his kids over for Sunday dinners.
