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The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
This person’s actions are an outlier, but the beliefs are not. My own mother held very similar ones during my early years, and the circle of women at the church was not shy in voicing their opinions which, oh so outlier-like, were also similar to this woman’s. That was in an eastern US state, in a protestant church. Don’t forget that the US had the (insanity of) belief in the childcare cults of satan, that D&D was from satan, that rock music was the road to satan, etc. Those were massive, widespread beliefs. They haven’t gone away entirely. Talk to members of a rural church, and you’ll hear the subtle hints of all those things, but they’ve learned not to be overt.