Why Shari Franke Speaks Out Against Family Vlogging (Exclusive)

Shari Franke, the eldest of Utah-based YouTube vlogger Ruby Franke’s children, will publish her memoir, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedomthrough Gallery Books on January 7. The memoir comes after Ruby, along with therapist Jodi Hilderbrandt, was arrested for aggravated child abuse in 2023 and received four consecutive prison sentences of one to 15 years in February 2024.

Now Shari is telling her story, as well as her experiences in the Franke house, for an important reason.

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“I’ve witnessed the damage of what happens when your life is put online,” Shari, 21, tells PEOPLE in a story in this week’s print issue. “There is no ethical way to do it.”

Ruby and her husband, Kevin, rose to fame when they started the YouTube channel 8Passengers in 2015. The channel, which cataloged the family’s daily life, had 2.5 million subscribers.

Shari says Ruby was “never warm or kind” as a mother, but she initially saw her mother’s bribe to share private moments on camera as “a fair trade-off.” As she got older, however, she became uncomfortable with some of the content.

“I was 18 and we were bra shopping and she filmed it,” says Shari. “I thought, ‘This is kind of weird and inappropriate’.” Followers of the YouTube channel also began criticizing Ruby’s questionable behavior in the videos in 2020, driving Ruby “deeper into delusion,” Shari writes in the memoir.

In 2018, Ruby was linked to Jodi Hilderbrandt, a former sex therapist and founder of religious social media network ConneXions. Hilderbrandt became the family’s therapist and advocated extreme parental discipline in the home. Not long after, Shari was rejected by Ruby, who also asked Kevin and son Chad to move out of the house.

Ruby’s punishments evolved into “grand gestures and extended periods of deprivation,” says Shari. When she left for college at Brigham Young University, Shari had become incredibly concerned about the safety of her siblings who stayed in the house. She even called the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, although no further action was taken after a welfare check.

“‘They’re old enough to take care of themselves. It’s about you, Shari. Your jealousy, your need for attention,'” Shari recalls her mother saying in the memoir.

In 2023, during her junior year of college, Shari received a call from a neighbor who told her that the police had surrounded her mother’s home in Springville, Utah. On August 30, 2023, Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested after Shari’s 12-year-old brother, Russell, asked a neighbor to call the police after he fled Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah through the window. Russell was malnourished and had restraint marks and wounds on his wrists, as well as duct tape on his ankles. His sister Eve, 10, was also found malnourished at the home.

“My biggest priority was just making sure the kids were alive,” says Shari. “As long as they were alive, of course, I knew things would be okay.”

Today, Shari is happy. She is a political science major who will graduate in 2025, has started a new hobby of climbing and is the proud owner of her cat, Muppet. Shari is also in therapy and beginning to repair her relationship with her father, who sought custody of the younger Franke siblings (Shari refuses to talk about their lives now to protect their privacy). She even got engaged recently, which she announced in a jubilant Instagram post.

But while sharing this news, Shari also noted that “this is the end of me sharing my private life.” She explained: “I’ve had my voice and my agency for so long and now I’m putting my foot down. I don’t want to talk about my wedding, future husband or future children.”

The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom will be released on January 7 and can now be pre-ordered wherever books are sold.