'I will not feed a demon': YouTuber Ruby Franke's child abuse case rooted in religious extremism

The boy later told investigators that Hildebrandt had used rope to bind his arms and his feet to weights on the ground. She used a mixture of cayenne pepper and honey to dress his wounds, according to the police report.

In handwritten journal entries also released Friday, Franke chronicles months of daily abuse that included starving her son and 9-year-old daughter, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and isolating them from the outside world. The women often made the kids sleep on hard floors and sometimes locked them in a concrete bunker in Hildebrandt’s basement.

In a July 2023 entry titled “Big day for evil,” she describes holding the boy’s head under water and closing off his mouth and nose with her hands.

Body camera video shows officers entering Hildebrandt’s house and detaining her on the couch while others scour the winding hallways in search of the young girl. They quickly discover a child with a buzzcut sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty closet. After hours of sitting with the girl and feeding her pizza, police coax her out.

Wtf, i can't imagine being raised like this 😭

Religion as the basis for the justification of the suffering of children...

Is reason alone to avoid it.

My heart aches for the 12-year old boy and his siblings. I feel so bad for them. I hope they are getting the care they need.

For anyone that's interested in a deep dive into what kind of shit was going on here, John Dehlin has covered this pretty extensively on his Mormon Stories podcast. Episodes 1805, 1807, 1808, 1809 (removed due to threat of a lawsuit for defamation; you'd have to find an archived copy. Adam Steed is a difficult interviewee in many ways, unless you are already deeply, intimately aware of Mormonism; his thoughts are often very jumbled and he has a hard time expressing things in a linear fashion), 1817, 1817, 1825 (tangentially; it's about "Visions of Glory"), 1826, 1844, 1865, 1869, and 1873. It's also tangentially related the the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell murder cases, in that the beliefs of Jodi Hildebrant and Ruby Franke were both heavily influenced by the same apocalyptic book, "Visions of Glory".

Keep in mind that the episodes I just listed comprise roughly around 30 hours of listening. About half of them are long-form interviews. Unless you have an an interest in cults, religious indoctrination, apocalyptic beliefs, this is probably not going to be your thing. And unless you were raised Mormon--or have listened to the other 5400 hours or so of podcasts that John Dehlin has done--it's probably going to be a little hard to follow what's going on.

A very, very short version is that, while Franke was always borderline abusive as a mom (and that's pretty par for the course in Mormon families, TBH), Hildebrandt is an incredibly charismatic, persuasive psychopath that used a version of Mormon theology to induce her to be far, far worse than she would have otherwise been. If Hildebrandt had been male--because you must be male to have real power in the Mormon church--she almost certainly would have ended up leading a fundamentalist cult.

EDIT When I say that Franke was borderline abusive, I mean that she was borderline before she met Jodi Hildebrandt. Once Hildebrandt attached herself to Franke, Franke's behavior became overtly, obviously abusive. In my opinion, Franke was always vulnerable to acting in that way, but Hildebrant was who convinced her that abuse was appropriate and moral.

Their actions have been condemned by other Mormon parenting bloggers who say they misrepresented their community and the religion

Oh bullshit. These religious zealots get together every fucking week at church and pretend they didn't know this abuse was happening? Mormons are a cult and should be treated as such.

typical religious nut, dont let them fool you in to thinking that this person is an outlier

I guess "religious extremism" is accurate, but this is batshit insanity as well. There is something very, very wrong in this woman's brain, and it requires treatment. While she rots in prison of course.

The bitterest part?

• "Do not harm little children" - Church of Satan
• "One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason." - The Satanic Temple

Are you getting the picture? People who claim themselves to side with Satan are more eager to show compassion than people who claim to fight against a devil. It immediately reminds me what my grandma used to say, that "Protestants love the devil so much that they talk about him nonstop". (Not that the Catholic church is any better, I know.)

[I'm not Satanist, regardless of my nickname, by the way.]

These children deserve better. I cried when I watched the little girl inside the closet and the cops giving a pizza to her.

I would adopt that little girl and raise her as my own. She deserves a better life.

Sounds like we really need a “priest hunter” profession again so we can squash religion once and for all.

People wonder why I’m so against religion, well folks, here is an easy example of why the delusional need to wake the fuck up.

He forgot the famous aphorism, "feed a demon, starve an evangelist"

“I will not feed a demon” says Youtuber – is a fun headline.

What the actual fuck? These women are sick. There’s a deeper reason (like some mental illnesses or sociopathy) for why these women did these things, and their motivations should be examined. If we know more about such things, we can hopefully protect against other people with such behavior in the future.

Sure, we can blame religion, but what if religion didn’t exist? Would people like these women not exist either, or would they use another excuse for their behavior?

I keep saying this, but the issue are the people that watch these videos. If they didn't have followers they wouldn't be where they are or could do what they do. (But in this case, maybe even without all the money they still would have abused those poor kids)

Let me guess.. Mormons?

Gotta love religion