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Shari Franke, the oldest daughter of YouTube family vlogger and convicted child abuser Ruby Franke,has revealed that she witnessed evidence of an intimate relationship between her mother and mother’s business partner Jodi Hildebrant.
On Tuesday (January 7) the 21-year-old’s memoir The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom was released. In the book, she wrote about her “8 Passengers” family vlogger mother and how she was “sneaking around” with Hildebrant.
Back in February Ruby and Hildebrant were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse, including trying to convince Ruby’s two youngest children that they were evil, possessed by demons, and needed to be punished. Ruby’s four minor children were taken into the custody of the Department of Children and Family Services.
In her memoir, Franke revealed that at one point, her room had been given to Hildebrant, and she was forced to sleep on the living room couch.
She wrote that the two of them were the only people allowed upstairs and in her old bedroom as they even cut off Ruby’s now ex-husband Kevin Franke.
When Hildebrandt began experiencing “demonic night terrors” Ruby decided she would sleep in the room with her business partner, explaining that Franke’s bedroom was their “sanctuary.”
At one point, she snuck back into her bedroom noticing that it was filled with candles and massage oils. “The room was bathed in the soft glow of candles,” she wrote in her memoir. “The air was heavy with the scent of lavender and vanilla wafting form the massage oils on the dresser.”
“I quickly grabbed what I needed and got the hell out of there, feeling like I had just walked into someone else’s honeymoon suite,” she continued.“The only thing missing was rose petals on the bed.”
She recalled Ruby then leaving her old bedroom at 5 a.m. trying to quickly tie her robe with “messy hair” and “flushed cheeks.”
“What the hell was going on?” she asked in her memoir. “Why was Ruby sneaking around in the middle of the night like a teenager trying not to get caught by her parents? Were they really doing candlelit massages in my bedroom?”
Franke admitted how bad she felt for her father, who seemed “oblivious” to what his wife was doing.
She also committed on how the two of them had “condemned queerness very publicly in their ConneXions videos, while embodying it privately. In my room. On my bed, most likely.”
Despite the pain she says she would have felt if Hildebrant and her mother openly admitted their affair, Franke also wrote that she would have supported them.
“It would have been preferable to living like … this,” she wrote. “In this house of lies that I couldn’t bear to step foot in anymore.”
At a different point in her book, Franke recounted what happened when she first contacted child protective services in a bid to help her siblings.
“Ruby’s face contorted with anger and hurt. ‘I can’t believe you called the police on me,’ she began, her voice rising. ‘After everything I’ve done for you, after all the sacrifices I’ve made. How could you betray me like that, Shari? How could you be so selfish?” she wrote.
“The words hit me like physical blows, but I stood my ground. [I reminded myself] that I wasn’t alone, that I had support beyond the toxic web of my family,” she continued.
Franke first revealed she had written a memoir in an Instagram post back in October 2024.
