- Police reports obtained by Insider reveal a history of police visits at Ruby Franke’s Utah home.
- But the initial police checkups were not tied to the former parenting YouTuber’s arrest.
- In 2020, Franke called the police twice to report stalking and harassment from viewers.
Police visits at the home of former YouTuber Ruby Franke changed gradually as the parenting vlogger’s fame turned to infamy.
Utah police had at least five interactions connected to Franke in the years leading up to her August arrest on six felony counts of child abuse. The calls included two incidents in 2020 in which she reported harassment and a possible stalker stemming from her popular YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, according to police records obtained by Insider.
Franke called Springville, Utah, police twice in the spring of 2020 to report two instances of threatening messages from apparent viewers of her channel, the documents show.
The initial calls came at the height of Franke’s success on the 8 Passengers YouTube channel, which began in 2015 and peaked at about 2.5 million subscribers. The channel was shut down in 2023.
In a police report filed in April 2020, Franke told an officer that she had been receiving text messages from someone threatening to “take her family down,” asking her not to post on social media for a week.
Later, in June 2020, Franke told police that she had received an Instagram DM from an account that shared her address and said it was “going looting at the place that actually deserves it.”
According to the June 2020 police report, Springville police set up a patrol car at Franke’s house after the second incident.
However, by 2022, the police calls shifted from those made by Franke to those made by concerned neighbors and even Franke’s eldest daughter.
Other Springville police documents obtained by Insider revealed that police conducted two welfare checks at Franke’s home in 2022, leading up to her arrest.
During one of the welfare checks, in September 2022, multiple neighbors told Springville officers that Franke repeatedly left her children unattended and alone for days on end at the house, while she visited business partner Jodi Hildebrandt in a town several hours away. Hildebrant was arrested at the same time as Franke, and also charged with six counts of child abuse.
The children were left with “strict rules to not go anywhere or do anything,” the neighbors told the police, per the documents.
According to the documents, it was Franke’s eldest daughter, Shari Franke, who requested the wellness check on September 18, 2022, saying neighbors had also told her that her siblings were alone while their mom was in St. George, Utah, for five days.
Earlier in September of this year, Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped from a window at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah. The boy was found with duct tape on his ankles, and had run to a neighbor’s house to ask for food and water, authorities said at the time of Franke and Hildebrandt’s arrests.
Franke’s 10-year-old daughter was also found in Hildebrandt’s home, and police said both children were malnourished.
Shari Franke, a student at Brigham Young University who has been estranged from her mother since the summer of 2022, also lauded her mother’s arrest earlier this month.
Attorneys for Hildebrandt and Franke did not immediately return Insider’s requests for comment.
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