Ruby Franke, a former YouTube family vlogger from Utah who was sentenced last month on child abuse charges, detailed months of abuse in handwritten journal entries released by prosecutors.
In the heavily redacted entries, Franke repeatedly insisted that her son was possessed by a demon. In one entry from July 11, 2023, she wrote that it was a “big day for evil” and described an incident when her son was pushed into water and she held her hand over his nose and mouth.
She wrote that she did that to help the boy.
In another entry, Franke called her daughter “manipulative” and described how she forced the girl to stand in the rain for two hours.
In February, Franke received four separate prison sentences of one-to-15 years. Her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, received the same sentence.
Both women were arrested in August 2023 and pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse after police found one of Franke’s sons emaciated with open wounds and bound with duct tape.
The boy had escaped Hildebrandt’s home to a neighbor’s house. One of Franke’s daughters was found in Hildebrandt’s home in a similar malnourished condition.
The journal entries, released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s Office, mainly focused on two of Franke’s six children. Officials redacted their names and identified the daughter as “E” and the son as “R.”
“R was told to stand in the sun w/his sun hat,” Franke wrote in the July 11, 2023 entry. “He is defiant. … R, or I should say his demon, stays in the shade. I push R into the sun. R comes back. I come back with a cactus poker. When I poke his back to get in the sun R doesn’t even flinch. I poke him on the neck. He is in a trance & doesn’t appear to feel anything. Jodi taps him on the cheeks to wake him up.”
Franke also wrote that same day that her son was pushed into a pool and she held her hand “tightly over his nose & mouth.”
In a July 12, 2023 entry, Franke wrote that she cut her…
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