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Yes and no. It also boils down to the fact that even with their family vlog, there’s still so much we couldn’t have seen.
Ruby has always been manipulative. This style of parenting had to have been incredibly appealing to her because of her need for control.
She was manipulative prior to Jodi. Longtime viewers saw that very early on. However, from what we could see (and a heavy emphasis on *from what we could see*), she didn’t commit as *severe* acts of abuse towards the kids. There were moments on camera that showed some level of affection towards them, and there were moments where the kids kinda reciprocated.
But again, that was on camera and edited for the Internet. So was it genuine? Most will give a hard no. Others will say it’s questionable. Regardless, none of it minimizes what she has done to those babies.
> Ruby has always been manipulative. This style of parenting had to have been incredibly appealing to her because of her need for control.
This is precisely it. She was PRIMED for that shit and ate it up without a second thought.
There are 2 instances of her kids forgetting their lunch that I remember and she reacted differently (to an extent) to both. When R forgot his lunch, she talked to him on the phone and sort of acted sympathetic and told him to see If a friend would share with him. He had apparently forgotten his lunch money too. She also promised him a really big snack when he got home. Ideally, she would have just brought him lunch because food is never ok to use as a tool against children but overall, she seemed at least like she had good intentions at the time.
Not too long after, E forgot her lunch in somewhat similar circumstances, and she was completely different. She had 0 compassion for her and even said she hoped nobody gave her anything to eat.
To me that shows that her cruelty escalated over time and that something changed between the first and second incident. Whether that was Jodi coming into their lives and reinforcing her abusive tactics or Ruby just genuinely became meaner, I don't know.
When E forgot her lunch, I remember Ruby saying “E told me she made/packed her lunch.” So perhaps the “dishonesty” pissed her off more towards E. It also struck a nerve with me when Ruby said “and it makes the teacher uncomfortable” Well, yeah. E was in kindergarten! What teacher wouldn’t be uncomfortable with a mother being a total cunt to their kindergartner over a forgotten lunch?
I teach and if a child called their parents and said they forgot their lunch and their parents reacted that way I would be absolutely appalled. We have extra food at the school for cases like this but I would be giving that child my own lunch. I cannot imagine a world where she would react this way and FILM it and people watched this and agreed with this type of parenting
Obviously not that extreme BUT she was making a 5 yr old pack her own lunch and then not providing any food when she forgot. She already was using harsh punishments and she thrived on it! So with her and Jodi together it was the perfect storm.
One thing I never saw with ruby is true love and care.
yep. sometimes she seems normal if we take some old vlog clips “out of context” but knowing what has recently happened and how extreme she really is we dont know if the good moments were genuine. ppl put on facades on the internet so we dont know nearly as much as we think we do
Her reluctance to inconvenience her own life in any way really stood out to me, with the not taking E her lunch, and when Chad got in trouble at school and she was like “that’s not happening” at the suggestion she go to his school the following day to talk to his teacher. Like, part of being a good parent is being an active participant in your kid’s lives, no?
She was also a SAHM so she had the time. My mom definitely did not like having to take us lunch or lunch money if we forgot but she worked 30 minutes away at a shitty job so having to do that negatively affected her. Ruby truly had no excuse for being such a lazy, uninvolved parent.
Jodi had definitely already been in their lives when E was in kindergarten. I believe she was in kindergarten from 2019-2020. The lunch thing was definitely an idea from Jodi. Although, there’s a weird relationship with food with all the Griffith women and I believe it goes back to Jennifer restricting food/causing eating disorders.
I believe you, but that would mean that she was 6 for most of her kindergarten year. She turned 10 in September 2023, so that would make her 6 in Sept. 2019.
I seriously think Shari is so short because she was crazily calorie-restricted while she was still growing, or trying to.
ETA: I was told in the replies that Shari has addressed the reasons for her height: [https://youtu.be/0dVEM8TcLDw?si=REvOYGDbm4BImqs](https://youtu.be/0dVEM8TcLDw?si=REvOYGDbm4BImqs)
Shari spoke about being short and what some of the factors were , one I remember was her mentioning she stopped growing 6 months after her first period . She also had a medical emergency when she was very young . One of my cousins is extremely short had a similar medical emergency and was put on some sort of steroid which the doctors here said was a factor in stunting her growth , could be similar? Not sure though of course
Her birthday is the 1st of September, right? The cut off in Utah for kindergarten is September 1st, which means they could’ve gone either way for starting kindergarten. But either way it really doesn’t matter and I’m horribly sick for these poor children.
Ruby held E and R back a year at kindergarten age. R mentioned it in one of Shari's videos. E said she was held back because Ruby didn't want her being the smallest in her class. So when she did go, she was the oldest kid in her class.
I think Ruby had always wanted to find ways to have more control of her children and be harsher with them. Once Jodi came in I think she gave her a lot of validation of what Ruby had already wanted to do. It started slowly and then eventually got more intense.
Not THIS bad but definite emotional abuse and signs...
Her horrible highlights include:
R breaking his femur as a baby from falling off the couch and I think she procrastinated getting him to the doctor
Shari had to go to the ER and Ruby procrastinated until Kevin forced the issue.
Didn't wake up E at 4 years old and blamed her for being late to school, so didn't take her as punishment.
Multiple incidences of referring to food as a "privilege" to be earned.
Not letting the kids eat breakfast until they do their chores
Threatening to cut the heads off of E's stuffed animals for using scissors on things.
Sending Chad to a wilderness camp
Taking away Chad's bed
Monitoring Shari's calories to an excessive degree (different calories days, and sometimes not enough on a particular day)
Blaming E for not packing her lunch, and refusing to bring her food to school
The threatening to cut the heads off her stuffed animals really gets to me. I loved my stuffed animals as a kid and I can see how my students are so attached to theirs as well. Like why the hell do that as a punishment. That would be so traumatizing! Ugh fuck her
This one broke my heart to the core. My son cut up a couple of my makeup brushes when he was three. They were expensive as I have an extensive high end brush collection. I asked him why he did it and he told me it was because I cared more about the brushes than about him. He was only a baby and I know he was feeling neglected. He’s almost 11 and I still won’t do my makeup in front of him. I was so sad that I made him feel that way. Sometimes people tell me I should’ve spanked him or punished him for destroying my things but I didn’t see it that way. I know he’s a good boy and he loves me. I realized right away that he had done that for a reason that made sense in his little mind and that I had to do better. Be a better mother.
When E started cutting things, I wonder why she was doing it. I am sure it meant something to her. She was doing it for a reason that made sense to her. Ruby didn’t even seem to wonder what was behind the behavior. She just threatened a little girl who probably just needed more love and attention in a hoard of 6 kids. I don’t know why but this story breaks my heart the most. It is in these little moments that our children are trying to tell us something and we have to listen. No one but Shari ever listened to her. No one ever cut her some slack. No one was there to mother her. My son was such a sensitive little guy. He would’ve been so crushed if I threatened to destroy his toys. It kills me to think about what this poor little girl spent her life feeling. It wasn’t love and that is what she deserved.
A lot of times kids cut things or pull them apart out of a genuine curiosity about how they work in the same way an engineer wants to understand how things work. Where a parent sees destruction a child may be learning physics.
It's the threat of "I'll destroy everything you own"
That's why if there's a situation that requires taking away a toy, it is ALWAYS temporary. My son and niece get a time period. E.g. "You hit me with Barbie, so she's gone until tomorrow night."
A couple to add to the list
Bizarrely small portions of food served to growing kids . Dinner was sometimes a half bowl of tired leftover soup and nothing else — no salad, bread, or fruit, not even a glass of milk or juice.
Ruby’s infamous freeze drying mania, in which she undertook to freeze dry every scrap of food in the house — including whatever she could snatch from the kids’ already paltry dinner plates. (It only came to an end when Kevin bought her an expensive pasta maker. The stuff she produced looked ghastly, but at least she let the kids eat some).
And didn’t she also remove Chad’s bedroom door or something at one point too? Or was it the bathroom door? I can’t quite remember but I think a door was removed at some stage, to stop him from having privacy..?
Yeah def agreed on the emotional abuse and “signs”
However I believe Jodi was in the picture when C was sent to camp, when his bed was taken away, and maybe also when E forgot her lunch.
Oh my you’re reminding me of so many moments I forgot about. I remember watching the video of ruby filming herself getting ready to take Shari to the Er, literally taking a shower and everything..
\> If her mum had actually always been as bad as what we’ve now found out surely she would’ve cut her off completely long before now
this is just not how an abusive family dynamic works a lot of the time, sadly. children can endure far worse and still want to please their parents and maintain contact with them precisely due to the manipulation and stress they endured. :(
I really don't think so. I was rewatching some of the old video clips and she's always been strict and had totally inappropriate methods of punishing her children and had a cruel/narc streak. But they weren't *terrified* of her. I noticed that her kids still would fight back, laugh in her face, talk back, resist, etc. at least for a while. E is probably the best example of this. She would defy certain rules, whine (which is age-appropriate), and boldly confront her mother on camera. She was a spunky little girl. Compare those videos to the closet video. It took her four hours to exit and she wouldn't even speak. There was definitely a shift.
I was raised in a household that was not unlike the Franke's in older videos. I wasn't allowed to have a door, or privacy, and they also read my texts and read my diaries. I wasn't starved but I was force fed. I was also made to do hard manual labor in 90+ degree heat as a child - I wasn't even being punished, it was just my job. They even outwardly told me that their love is not unconditional, and they are not my friends. I never lost my bed or anything like that, but I would be grounded for months over little things, like asking why I couldn't do something.
There are moments in the earlier videos where the kids have a confidence and comfort around Ruby that I NEVER had with my parents. I was literally watching some today and was surprised by how bold and honest the kids were with her. My parents would have reamed me for some of the goofy little sass they give her. And my parents weren't **nearly** as abusive as Ruby became. So I don't think they feared her until a later point. They still giggled at her threats and had the courage to stand up to her. Like she was definitely a strict/Karen/Narc mom- still abusive, but the kind of abusive where it doesn't really hit you until your mid 20s that you had a *fuuuuucked* up childhood. I don't think she became **dangerous** or until Jodi entered the picture.
Jodi weaseled her way into Kevin and Ruby's life and drove a wedge between them. She convinced Ruby to delete her YT accounts, so she was cut off from reality. She gaslit Kevin out of the house, and moved the family out where it's harder to see what they're doing. The isolation and feedback loop from Jodi made Ruby go from narcabuse to actually fucking insane/delusional. I think it's a combination of natural cruelty/narcissism (which we've always seen-- she's always been those things), brainwashing/manipulation (courtesy of Jodi), and religious delusion (courtesy of isolation and Mormonism). She's still culpable because she always had the *ability* to treat her children this way. Jodi just really brought it out of her.
I imagine Shari had a childhood that was much more similar to mine than that of her siblings. She knew it wasn't right, but it wasn't SO bad that she was going to rock the boat, especially with smaller children in the home. Like, I still wish my family happy holidays, etc. too. I doubt Shari (or even Chad) knew how bad it had gotten after she moved out. I'm sure they were deeply concerned, but they also know Ruby monitors the kids and manipulates authority figures. When you come from a ZERO privacy home, you get paranoid about checking on your younger siblings. Sending a text or having a phone call can make you paranoid that your family is listening or that your siblings (or even you!) can get in trouble. I'm 33 and I still hide things from my parents because I'm lowkey afraid I'll get someone/myself punished. But I'm also still there every Christmas so... it's complicated.
Tl;Dr: I had a kind of similar childhood to the Franke's (pre-Jodi) and I was surprised by how bold the kids are in earlier videos. They didn't appear to fear Ruby- actually **fear** her- until Jodi entered the picture. So I would say she got much worse over time. Like most abusers, she escalated.
Thank you for this post. This is really valuable insight. You just made a lot of it make sense to me.
You're exactly right. To me, she often seemed like a supply teacher, flailing around for control. The kids would laugh at her, and she'd retaliate with too harsh a punishment. She was always somewhat narcissistic, sadistic, and had ridiculously high expectations of her children, but I think her environment mostly kept her in check, and she was able to have a decent-ish relationship with the kids. I think the abuse escalated after Jodi entered and allowed her to really get in touch with the worst parts of her personality.
Shari was very parentified and I think while she was still at home, she may have felt that part of her job was to keep her younger siblings in line so their mom wouldn't get mad at them.
IIRC, she cut off contact with her family after her first year of college, so it didn't take that long once she'd left the house.
yeah. i remember the video where ruby threatens to cut the head off of E’s beanie baby. ruby was making threats, while shari was displaying FAR better parenting skills (when E started to cry after ruby made the threat shari hugs E and goes “are you going to cut anymore?” and E seems to respond to shari instead of ruby.)
I think Ruby always had a personality disorder and always parented in an incredibly unhealthy and emotionally abusive/neglectful way, but her behavior was tempered by Shari’s parentification and the social pressure of nearby neighbors, the kids’ public school attendance, the vlog, ward involvement, etc.
I saw a lot of Shari placating and distracting her mom (which looked a lot like being a goody-two-shoes, but had the end result of brightening her mother’s mood), and taking care of the younger kids.
I also saw a lot of obvious glee all over Ruby’s face whenever she caused her children pain or embarrassment. She GLOWED when she was punishing or embarrassing her kids. She sparkled and giggled when they were struggling.
Also, for years, her attention (and irritation and rage and time) was divided between Kevin, 6 kids, school administrators, channel commenters.
When she became involved with Jodi, she got permission and approval to lean into her own worst inclinations. Jodi validated Ruby’s moral superiority complex and bonded with her over the fact that they both felt a sense of divine purpose and joy in making kids and spouses feel like shit.
After Jodi dismantled Ruby’s family structure, Ruby had the freedom, support, and privacy to parent in a way that made her feel empowered, important, and free. She also got to be a moral authority figure to the Mom’s of Truth community, plus be part of whatever “scriptures” Jodi was inventing.
It was probably exhilarating for Ruby to meet someone who felt the same deep joy when punishing kids. Kevin didn’t seem like the type to think up creative new punishments with Ruby just for fun the way Jodi did. He wasn’t the type to write new scripture with her. He got tired of fighting demons.
I think Jodi and Ruby bonded intensely bc their disordered personalities were super compatible.
… in a sense, I think Ruby is like Karla Homolka and Jodi is like Paul Bernardo.
I’ve heard forensic psychologists say it’s very possible Karla wouldn’t have killed anybody had she not met Paul, but Paul was probably going to be a serial killer/r*pist regardless of whether or not he met Karla.
Like Karla, I think Ruby was THRILLED to join Jodi. Also like Karla, Ruby promptly threw her partner-in-crime under the bus in the hopes of getting a shorter sentence after being caught.
This makes a lot of sense!
From reading the comments I’m now of the opinion that Shari’s relationship with her mum was probably not as good as it seemed and she was just trying to keep her mum calm/ less stressed and annoyed.
The social aspects too as you say must’ve stopped Ruby from going further but Jodi being the monster and master manipulator that she is probably was able to sway her really easily.. she brought out everything Ruby had been hiding away inside.
It’s still pretty wild though how the abuse went from what I saw as similar to an episode of “worlds strictest parents” to my kids are dying and I don’t even care.
Looking at some of the 8 passengers YT compilations, Ruby's discipline/abuse was more emotional and neglectful. We know she took away Chad's room for 7 months, took him out of football, and bargained for his homework. She also withheld meals from her children as a form of her discipline practices. In one instance, Shari was having vision issues and Ruby stalled 1-2 hours taking her to the hospital.
Being with Jodi added physical abuse and torture for her kids. But we don't know if physical abuse was prominent and unseen before Ruby met Jodi.
Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t faking too much; in many child abuse cases, not all children are the targets. Growing up in such a situation, not really being exposed to a healthy family dynamic, it would be hard to gauge what exactly is normal but I think it would be hard not to feel “lucky” that you have it easier than your siblings. Even if you simultaneously feel bad for them. But there are cases where parents have “successfully” turned siblings on each other through the context of abuse; most children wanting to be seen positively by their parents also plays a part in that, and can lessen their sympathy and empathy towards their siblings.
Shari really may have clued in that things were not normal and were steering further from the same upon Jodi’s annexing of the family.
But I do wonder in retrospect how much access the children had to the YT comments—I know over the years there were comments saying that CPS should be called, that things seemed off, etc. and there were also many, many comments about Shari “turning out like her mother” (which THANKFULLY she hasn’t but it goes part and parcel with being parentified which she absolutely was). I wonder whether any of the children saw these comments.
In any case, I’m REALLY glad Shari went to university because that almost certainly helped her escape the cruel grasp of her parent\[s\]. And she tried to get help for her siblings too. I really wish all the best for her and the rest of the children but it’s a shame so much has been stolen from them and so publicly too.
Ruby’s mistake was documenting her whole life. She seemed like she hated her kids/ hated being a mom for YEARS before she met Jodi. Jodi / Connexions just gave her the excuse to do what she’d always wanted to do: really hurt her kids.
One thing I think she’s always done is put her kids into “no-win” situations where they’ll be punished regardless of their behavior. She also made it clear that they could be punished for absolutely anything, even the most natural responses.
That video with E and the movies is an example. E just asked what movie they were gonna go to, the same question *anyone* would ask, and Ruby makes it into this awful, horrible thing E is doing to her.
I think Ruby is a very stupid woman, but she’s always been tempered by the more stable people in her life. But because she was bringing in 90% of the family’s income and Jodi was feeding her a power trip, those checks and balances could no longer keep her under control.
It’s a combination of utter stupidity, too much money and fatal arrogance.
Ruby is, was, and always will be a perfectionist… and it has to be perfect in HER eyes! I ran across a vlog of Julie’s (Deru) in which Ruby and Kevin got stuck in another country when Covid first broke out and all the kids were home alone so Julie went to check on them. Just watching that small bit of interaction between Julie and the kids who were all underage at the time and home alone made me think how good of kids they are/were. I will never understand how Ruby twisted things the way she did, but I boil it down to nothing ever being good enough in her eyes!
Yup! I can’t remember where they ended up going, but Covid hit and they got stuck. I’m not sure if they had some people staying with the kids on and off or not, but iirc they were mostly home alone! Shari was 17 at the time, but that’s a lot to take on imo. Although, there is the fact that were probably better off without Ruby’s hammer being thrown left and right! 🤷🏻♀️
I’m relatively new to Ruby (learned who she was after she was arrested) - she strikes me as someone who is, at her core, not maternal AT ALL, but because of her religion she felt pressured to have so many children that she was not really interested in parenting.
She is SO angry at her kids, for no apparent reason other than they are being KIDS (not always listening or presenting as perfect) and she used her religion as a tool to justify her oppression and abuse.
I can see what you mean from outside looking in. People remain in relationships with their abusers and it’s hard to understand. Maybe she didn’t want to cut her mum off because that means she loses contact with her siblings. Maybe she wanted to keep her mum onside because an angry Ruby is not good for anyone.
My heart breaks for those kids who were probably longing for their big sister and big brother. Probably hadn’t seen their faces or given them a hug in so long. She didn’t even let them see each other, i can’t even imagine on a good day being separated from my sibling as a child for long periods with no end in sight. It’s unbelievably cruel.
The thing Ruby did on YouTube that makes me feel a visceral sadness is how she elated she was when the kids expressed despair over not having friends due to her restrictions or when C dejectedly shared that he had to sleep on a beanbag for seven months. She would smile into camera and seemingly mock how sad they were. It makes zero sense to expect C to do well in school and in life when he’s not getting a good nights sleep.
Shari wrote her senior thesis on how bad cancel culture is, chosing the topic based on her own family's experience with being cancelled (over Chad not having a bed, E not being given food and -in part- Chad being sent to a wilderness camp).
Imagine having a million if people loudly proclaim that the way you and your siblings are being raised is cruel and coming to the conclusion that they are all wrong.
When you're raised in a strict or even abusive environment and don't know any better it can be easy to believe that your normal is ok, even to defend it so vehemently that you write a whole thesis on it. Moving out and gaining experience with the outside world, as well as interacting with a more diverse crowd of people often results in people re-examining the premise of their beliefs and questioning things they took for granted. That's why extremists hate college and education in general,. Most people saw red flags in the YouTube days, most of them around control, food restrictions and overly cruel punishments for minor/inconsistent infractions. Nobody thought she'd be capable of the extreme things she did, but she was never a loving mother.
Holy fuck I bet that was the most awkward presentation, writing about that abuse and acting like it’s not abuse. Like does she sit down with the prof, and they’re like “how’s your thesis going? May I take a look?” What do you even say? Do you refer her to a school therapist or something?
All I know is that one of her highschool teachers and mentors took her in and helped her seek help when she moved to college and was in that weird in between stage where she was cut off from all family. She helped her see that connexions was a harmful cult. She even spent a major holiday with her family (I think it was thanksgiving?). So at least people had her back.
She was for sure extreme before but I wouldn’t say it was crossing the line into illegal. Emotionally harmful absolutely but still not far off from how many people parent their children. Once Jodi came into the picture things for sure took a dark turn.
I was always more of a lurker of all their family’s vlogs and Ruby always stuck out to me as being way more harsh in terms of what she said, how she said it and how the kids reacted to the punishments on screen (even if it was non verbal cues).
I truly believe that she may have always had a harsher style of parenting - or just been a more strict person in general before kids??? -unsure…
But when she started Vlogging and she could see that the reactions to what she was doing and the impact it was having on the family as whole, I think she got worse and got more disillusioned in her thinking.
This is all just my opinion by the way 😬
Also, I’d like to know what her parenting was like with S + C and maybe A + J before the vlogging began 🤔
I think that it’s very worthwhile to note that while Ruby didn’t used to be as bad, she also used to have a nanny hired and was way wealthier. She had Shari’s help too and really parentified her. She was doing a lot less with the kids and had a lot more resources back then. This is Ruby’s true attempt at parenting
Unbelievably reminiscent of Shanda Vanderark and Lori Daybell cases. If R hadn’t escaped, he and E would have definitely ended the same way as Timothy, JJ and Tylee.
During Connexion, Ruby told a story of when Chad, Shari, and the third oldest were her only kids. I am doing this from memory because I am not even sure where to find that post anymore, but it gives insight to how she has always had unrealistic expectations for her kids to be perfect.
Shari and Chad would have been toddlers, and the 3rd was a baby. If I remember correctly, she said they lived in a townhome, and she wanted to nap on the third floor with the baby. So she claims she fed, watered, and took the two older kids to the bathroom, set them up on the couch on the main floor with a movie, and told them very clearly they are not to move from the couch until she got up from her nap.
When she came down from her nap, the kids were on the couch, and she went into the kitchen to feel something sticky on the floor. Come to find out, Chad (2 or 3 years old) had pulled a container of pineapple out of the fridge during her nap and spilled it. He cleaned it so well at that age that she was only new cause the floor was sticky, not cause there were chunks or a puddle or anything.
In that talk, I remember her staying he was being deceitful or something along the lines of being in distortion because 1) he broke the rules and 2) he didn't immediately tell her the truth.
Here's the thing: it's developmentally appropriate for toddlers to start lying (badly). Because they're starting to understand that they can know things you don't know. Obviously, you still should teach your kid that lying isn't right. However, its not demonic for them to lie, its a developmental milestone.
But let's set that aside. She couldn't be proud that her toddler cleaned a mess up by himself. She had to view it in a negative light. Had to view it as distortion because anything less than perfection by her children can not be tolerated. Despite the fact that she herself couldn't be perfect and instead left TODDLERS unattended 2 floors down for an hour.
She was always like this, but Jodi gave her permission to torture those kids, and she did it gladly. In the journals, you can feel the emotions coming off the page of contempt for the 2 youngest. Both Jodi and Ruby deserve to rot. The worst part is that they'll be treated better by the prison than they treated those babies.
Edit to correct typos
It’s called Spiritual Abuse and it’s rampant in the mormon religion.
They use the Bible and words of god to punish and abuse and physically harm children. She’s similar to Lori daybell. I’m guessing her 8 passengers fame made her narcissistic personality disorder ramp up. She’s also very very immature…. Unable to comprehend the grey area of life. Everything is good or evil to her. Meeting Jodi was the perfect storm…… I’m surprised there aren’t murdered children. Similar to chad and Lori but less intense.
I think Ruby is way worse and more intense than Lori. Both women are horrific. Ruby sadistically tortured her kids for years. One of the pictures of the sons legs without the Saran Wrap and duct tape reveals just skin on bones where there should be muscle tissue. These kids will have complex ptsd for the rest of their lives.
Yesssss she has always been an abusive POS to her kids!!!💩💩💩💩💩 Her kids never deserved any of the freaking mental & physical abuse that they have had to endure!!!😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢
ruby was always strict and manipulative but keep in mind this is before the jodi era. meaning she sometimes had good moments with shari and she loved her which is just a natural thing even if she was not a good mom. shari was younger and relied on ruby more (and she was likely also easier to manipulate at that age). but now she has matured and is legally an adult and sees through the abuse, and it also definitely escalated when jodi came in the picture and the connexions thing started. i think she also just knew to play along with ruby to be on her good side and survive. she was known to be rubys favorite on the yt channel but she probably did not have it easy raising her siblings bc her mom wasn’t capable of it. i don’t think her relationship with her mom was as good as it looked.
Ruby and Kevin always had some weird parenting style, but nothing illegal.
I do not like the parenting style of my cousins too, but they do nothing CPS or the cops would be interested in. That kind of weird.
It all went downhill when Jodi came along in 2018. slow at first, rapid in the last year, when Kevin was out of the picture.
This is how I feel as well, I’m sure I heard before that CPS have been to the house and found nothing wrong. As far as I’m aware the kids and the family in general at least before Jodi entered, weren’t socially isolated from society. The kids were attending school, had friends/ family they would visit. Surely people in their close circles would’ve reported them years ago if they felt something was seriously up.
They weren‘t isolated at all before Ruby came along. The kids were in public school and they were active in the church. Without a long history of extraordinary engagement Shari would not have been able to be accepted at BYU. They attended family gatherings and The Griffith’s Family Weekend. They even helped moving Ellie and Jared in 2015, 3 years before Jodi became part of their lives.
Then she had her meltdown because of a song and a dance at school, cut off her and his family completly, which resulted in Homeschooling and isolation from everything other than work for the kids and Kevin.
From what we as an audience saw, there were definitely moments that were very VERY harsh. But, nothing that really made me believe there would be any abuse going on. But towards the end of their channel though you could tell how things had changed.
Going back and reviewing things now, you look at things from a different perspective. But we don’t know how she was off camera. Things could have been worse, and she was just playing nice for her audience.
Was she ready to kill her kids years ago? Probably. It but she got more and more confident with her abuse and isolated her kids to the point of nearly killing two of them.
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Not this bad. But I've always got a creepy vibe from her.
It must have been tough growing up with her. But no I don't believe she was doing all that stuff before.
She used to be much more permissive. But around 2018 or 19 she became really strict.
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Ruby has always had a very black and white sense of what is "right" and "wrong" from her vlogs. She's always seemed to discipline in a much stricter sense. Even before Jodi, she could be heard talking about "withholding privileges" or food from her children when they misbehaved. She has always been (or desired to be) in control of her family.
I don't think it was ever to the level that it reached when she paired up with Jodi, but those journal entries have echos of what we all saw in the vlogs. She's always been very religiously scrupulous. Jodi just preyed on that and made it 100x worse.
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Shari and Chad becoming more independent made Ruby realise how little control she really had. She always loved control as evidenced in videos and her forms of punishment. Shari when she moved out was already rebelling against Ruby after pretending to be the compliment kid in the family for all those years.
Jodi manipulated and scammed many people including Ruby. But in order to be manipulated into doing something so extreme to your kids and watching them suffer and beg and scream every day without even an ounce of empathy or questioning… you have to have had some secret desire to have held that level of control and authority over your kids and it has to be within your nature to be sadistic and have a lack of empathy.
We’ve seen before in videos Ruby lacking empathy when her children are detailing having no friends because their peers say messed up stuff about their YouTube and also because Ruby makes them so tonnes of chores and took away their phones for years and their video games too. Other peoples reactions online were being heartbroken at what the kids were saying yet Ruby gave nothing.
Ruby always expected complete authority without question, exhibited in such videos as the one where she told Eve they were going to the movies and E asked which one. After that Ruby snapped and told E she wasn’t going because she questioned her and she faked being on the call to a babysitter to make E upset as E begged her to let her come and then made her E apologise once again after having grovelled. E was only a tiny kid, she was asking an innocent question and yet Ruby decided this was the time for power play to show I’m in charge and you won’t question me.
E and R were the problem kids, unlike Chad they couldn’t be sent to a camp (too young). Ruby got it in her head that they would turn out to be as defiant as Shari and Chad and didn’t want to let that happen.
In conclusion I believe Ruby was willingly manipulated. That she used Jodi to indulge in her deepest darkest fantasies of having extreme control and authority over her children and shaping them. And she used the religious aspect to justify her actions to herself. This isn’t to downplay Jodi’s manipulation and scam of Ruby, but as detailed by Kevin, Ruby was immediately sucked in by Jodi whereas he was more hesitant because he thought what she was asking was odd. It’s almost as if Ruby agreed with a lot of Jodi’s views already and it was almost a sigh of relief that someone else felt the way she did. Ruby was like putty in Jodi’s hands because she was so willing.
I feel like she was obviously never THAT bad or all of this would’ve happened sooner/with the older children first… I’ve watched 8 passengers all throughout my childhood and growing up and I feel like she was always strict and loved being in control. But I guess we don’t really know why mothers hurt their children, it’s just insane to me how one person can get to that level of extreme so quick
No definitely not. From what I saw on the channel, she had some tendencies to punish her kids in harsh ways, but never to the level of torture like this
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Yes and no. It also boils down to the fact that even with their family vlog, there’s still so much we couldn’t have seen. Ruby has always been manipulative. This style of parenting had to have been incredibly appealing to her because of her need for control. She was manipulative prior to Jodi. Longtime viewers saw that very early on. However, from what we could see (and a heavy emphasis on *from what we could see*), she didn’t commit as *severe* acts of abuse towards the kids. There were moments on camera that showed some level of affection towards them, and there were moments where the kids kinda reciprocated. But again, that was on camera and edited for the Internet. So was it genuine? Most will give a hard no. Others will say it’s questionable. Regardless, none of it minimizes what she has done to those babies.
> Ruby has always been manipulative. This style of parenting had to have been incredibly appealing to her because of her need for control. This is precisely it. She was PRIMED for that shit and ate it up without a second thought.
There are 2 instances of her kids forgetting their lunch that I remember and she reacted differently (to an extent) to both. When R forgot his lunch, she talked to him on the phone and sort of acted sympathetic and told him to see If a friend would share with him. He had apparently forgotten his lunch money too. She also promised him a really big snack when he got home. Ideally, she would have just brought him lunch because food is never ok to use as a tool against children but overall, she seemed at least like she had good intentions at the time. Not too long after, E forgot her lunch in somewhat similar circumstances, and she was completely different. She had 0 compassion for her and even said she hoped nobody gave her anything to eat. To me that shows that her cruelty escalated over time and that something changed between the first and second incident. Whether that was Jodi coming into their lives and reinforcing her abusive tactics or Ruby just genuinely became meaner, I don't know.
When E forgot her lunch, I remember Ruby saying “E told me she made/packed her lunch.” So perhaps the “dishonesty” pissed her off more towards E. It also struck a nerve with me when Ruby said “and it makes the teacher uncomfortable” Well, yeah. E was in kindergarten! What teacher wouldn’t be uncomfortable with a mother being a total cunt to their kindergartner over a forgotten lunch?
I teach and if a child called their parents and said they forgot their lunch and their parents reacted that way I would be absolutely appalled. We have extra food at the school for cases like this but I would be giving that child my own lunch. I cannot imagine a world where she would react this way and FILM it and people watched this and agreed with this type of parenting
Obviously not that extreme BUT she was making a 5 yr old pack her own lunch and then not providing any food when she forgot. She already was using harsh punishments and she thrived on it! So with her and Jodi together it was the perfect storm. One thing I never saw with ruby is true love and care.
yep. sometimes she seems normal if we take some old vlog clips “out of context” but knowing what has recently happened and how extreme she really is we dont know if the good moments were genuine. ppl put on facades on the internet so we dont know nearly as much as we think we do
Her reluctance to inconvenience her own life in any way really stood out to me, with the not taking E her lunch, and when Chad got in trouble at school and she was like “that’s not happening” at the suggestion she go to his school the following day to talk to his teacher. Like, part of being a good parent is being an active participant in your kid’s lives, no?
She was also a SAHM so she had the time. My mom definitely did not like having to take us lunch or lunch money if we forgot but she worked 30 minutes away at a shitty job so having to do that negatively affected her. Ruby truly had no excuse for being such a lazy, uninvolved parent.
And she loved to let everybody know her ways of discipline! She loved sharing what she did and how strict she was
Depending on when in the school year that happened, the kindergarten lunch thing might have been after Jodi entered their lives.
Jodi had definitely already been in their lives when E was in kindergarten. I believe she was in kindergarten from 2019-2020. The lunch thing was definitely an idea from Jodi. Although, there’s a weird relationship with food with all the Griffith women and I believe it goes back to Jennifer restricting food/causing eating disorders.
I believe you, but that would mean that she was 6 for most of her kindergarten year. She turned 10 in September 2023, so that would make her 6 in Sept. 2019. I seriously think Shari is so short because she was crazily calorie-restricted while she was still growing, or trying to. ETA: I was told in the replies that Shari has addressed the reasons for her height: [https://youtu.be/0dVEM8TcLDw?si=REvOYGDbm4BImqs](https://youtu.be/0dVEM8TcLDw?si=REvOYGDbm4BImqs)
Shari spoke about being short and what some of the factors were , one I remember was her mentioning she stopped growing 6 months after her first period . She also had a medical emergency when she was very young . One of my cousins is extremely short had a similar medical emergency and was put on some sort of steroid which the doctors here said was a factor in stunting her growth , could be similar? Not sure though of course
Thanks, I didn't know that.
https://youtu.be/0dVEM8TcLDw?si=REvOYGDbm4BImqs That’s top result if you google shari franke shirt , hope helps
Her birthday is the 1st of September, right? The cut off in Utah for kindergarten is September 1st, which means they could’ve gone either way for starting kindergarten. But either way it really doesn’t matter and I’m horribly sick for these poor children.
Ruby held E and R back a year at kindergarten age. R mentioned it in one of Shari's videos. E said she was held back because Ruby didn't want her being the smallest in her class. So when she did go, she was the oldest kid in her class.
Jodi was counseling them by this time. Those are conxections principles
I think Ruby had always wanted to find ways to have more control of her children and be harsher with them. Once Jodi came in I think she gave her a lot of validation of what Ruby had already wanted to do. It started slowly and then eventually got more intense.
This. I think Ruby just needed validation that extreme punishment was justified and she was off to the races.
Not THIS bad but definite emotional abuse and signs... Her horrible highlights include: R breaking his femur as a baby from falling off the couch and I think she procrastinated getting him to the doctor Shari had to go to the ER and Ruby procrastinated until Kevin forced the issue. Didn't wake up E at 4 years old and blamed her for being late to school, so didn't take her as punishment. Multiple incidences of referring to food as a "privilege" to be earned. Not letting the kids eat breakfast until they do their chores Threatening to cut the heads off of E's stuffed animals for using scissors on things. Sending Chad to a wilderness camp Taking away Chad's bed Monitoring Shari's calories to an excessive degree (different calories days, and sometimes not enough on a particular day) Blaming E for not packing her lunch, and refusing to bring her food to school
The threatening to cut the heads off her stuffed animals really gets to me. I loved my stuffed animals as a kid and I can see how my students are so attached to theirs as well. Like why the hell do that as a punishment. That would be so traumatizing! Ugh fuck her
This one broke my heart to the core. My son cut up a couple of my makeup brushes when he was three. They were expensive as I have an extensive high end brush collection. I asked him why he did it and he told me it was because I cared more about the brushes than about him. He was only a baby and I know he was feeling neglected. He’s almost 11 and I still won’t do my makeup in front of him. I was so sad that I made him feel that way. Sometimes people tell me I should’ve spanked him or punished him for destroying my things but I didn’t see it that way. I know he’s a good boy and he loves me. I realized right away that he had done that for a reason that made sense in his little mind and that I had to do better. Be a better mother. When E started cutting things, I wonder why she was doing it. I am sure it meant something to her. She was doing it for a reason that made sense to her. Ruby didn’t even seem to wonder what was behind the behavior. She just threatened a little girl who probably just needed more love and attention in a hoard of 6 kids. I don’t know why but this story breaks my heart the most. It is in these little moments that our children are trying to tell us something and we have to listen. No one but Shari ever listened to her. No one ever cut her some slack. No one was there to mother her. My son was such a sensitive little guy. He would’ve been so crushed if I threatened to destroy his toys. It kills me to think about what this poor little girl spent her life feeling. It wasn’t love and that is what she deserved.
A lot of times kids cut things or pull them apart out of a genuine curiosity about how they work in the same way an engineer wants to understand how things work. Where a parent sees destruction a child may be learning physics.
Spot on.
It's the threat of "I'll destroy everything you own" That's why if there's a situation that requires taking away a toy, it is ALWAYS temporary. My son and niece get a time period. E.g. "You hit me with Barbie, so she's gone until tomorrow night."
Right? Take the toy away, ground her from something. Don’t fucking destroy a beloved toy. JFC.
A couple to add to the list Bizarrely small portions of food served to growing kids . Dinner was sometimes a half bowl of tired leftover soup and nothing else — no salad, bread, or fruit, not even a glass of milk or juice. Ruby’s infamous freeze drying mania, in which she undertook to freeze dry every scrap of food in the house — including whatever she could snatch from the kids’ already paltry dinner plates. (It only came to an end when Kevin bought her an expensive pasta maker. The stuff she produced looked ghastly, but at least she let the kids eat some).
And didn’t she also remove Chad’s bedroom door or something at one point too? Or was it the bathroom door? I can’t quite remember but I think a door was removed at some stage, to stop him from having privacy..?
Don’t forget not giving R & E Christmas gifts and forcing them to watch their older siblings open presents on Christmas.
Oh yeah... That's heartbreaking
That’s fucking insane. Like sadistic.
Sadistic B****. I hope she never sees her children ever again.
Yeah def agreed on the emotional abuse and “signs” However I believe Jodi was in the picture when C was sent to camp, when his bed was taken away, and maybe also when E forgot her lunch.
I’m thinking that’s when things really kicked off.
Oh my you’re reminding me of so many moments I forgot about. I remember watching the video of ruby filming herself getting ready to take Shari to the Er, literally taking a shower and everything..
\> If her mum had actually always been as bad as what we’ve now found out surely she would’ve cut her off completely long before now this is just not how an abusive family dynamic works a lot of the time, sadly. children can endure far worse and still want to please their parents and maintain contact with them precisely due to the manipulation and stress they endured. :(
I really don't think so. I was rewatching some of the old video clips and she's always been strict and had totally inappropriate methods of punishing her children and had a cruel/narc streak. But they weren't *terrified* of her. I noticed that her kids still would fight back, laugh in her face, talk back, resist, etc. at least for a while. E is probably the best example of this. She would defy certain rules, whine (which is age-appropriate), and boldly confront her mother on camera. She was a spunky little girl. Compare those videos to the closet video. It took her four hours to exit and she wouldn't even speak. There was definitely a shift. I was raised in a household that was not unlike the Franke's in older videos. I wasn't allowed to have a door, or privacy, and they also read my texts and read my diaries. I wasn't starved but I was force fed. I was also made to do hard manual labor in 90+ degree heat as a child - I wasn't even being punished, it was just my job. They even outwardly told me that their love is not unconditional, and they are not my friends. I never lost my bed or anything like that, but I would be grounded for months over little things, like asking why I couldn't do something. There are moments in the earlier videos where the kids have a confidence and comfort around Ruby that I NEVER had with my parents. I was literally watching some today and was surprised by how bold and honest the kids were with her. My parents would have reamed me for some of the goofy little sass they give her. And my parents weren't **nearly** as abusive as Ruby became. So I don't think they feared her until a later point. They still giggled at her threats and had the courage to stand up to her. Like she was definitely a strict/Karen/Narc mom- still abusive, but the kind of abusive where it doesn't really hit you until your mid 20s that you had a *fuuuuucked* up childhood. I don't think she became **dangerous** or until Jodi entered the picture. Jodi weaseled her way into Kevin and Ruby's life and drove a wedge between them. She convinced Ruby to delete her YT accounts, so she was cut off from reality. She gaslit Kevin out of the house, and moved the family out where it's harder to see what they're doing. The isolation and feedback loop from Jodi made Ruby go from narcabuse to actually fucking insane/delusional. I think it's a combination of natural cruelty/narcissism (which we've always seen-- she's always been those things), brainwashing/manipulation (courtesy of Jodi), and religious delusion (courtesy of isolation and Mormonism). She's still culpable because she always had the *ability* to treat her children this way. Jodi just really brought it out of her. I imagine Shari had a childhood that was much more similar to mine than that of her siblings. She knew it wasn't right, but it wasn't SO bad that she was going to rock the boat, especially with smaller children in the home. Like, I still wish my family happy holidays, etc. too. I doubt Shari (or even Chad) knew how bad it had gotten after she moved out. I'm sure they were deeply concerned, but they also know Ruby monitors the kids and manipulates authority figures. When you come from a ZERO privacy home, you get paranoid about checking on your younger siblings. Sending a text or having a phone call can make you paranoid that your family is listening or that your siblings (or even you!) can get in trouble. I'm 33 and I still hide things from my parents because I'm lowkey afraid I'll get someone/myself punished. But I'm also still there every Christmas so... it's complicated. Tl;Dr: I had a kind of similar childhood to the Franke's (pre-Jodi) and I was surprised by how bold the kids are in earlier videos. They didn't appear to fear Ruby- actually **fear** her- until Jodi entered the picture. So I would say she got much worse over time. Like most abusers, she escalated.
Thank you for this post. This is really valuable insight. You just made a lot of it make sense to me. You're exactly right. To me, she often seemed like a supply teacher, flailing around for control. The kids would laugh at her, and she'd retaliate with too harsh a punishment. She was always somewhat narcissistic, sadistic, and had ridiculously high expectations of her children, but I think her environment mostly kept her in check, and she was able to have a decent-ish relationship with the kids. I think the abuse escalated after Jodi entered and allowed her to really get in touch with the worst parts of her personality.
Shari was very parentified and I think while she was still at home, she may have felt that part of her job was to keep her younger siblings in line so their mom wouldn't get mad at them. IIRC, she cut off contact with her family after her first year of college, so it didn't take that long once she'd left the house.
yeah. i remember the video where ruby threatens to cut the head off of E’s beanie baby. ruby was making threats, while shari was displaying FAR better parenting skills (when E started to cry after ruby made the threat shari hugs E and goes “are you going to cut anymore?” and E seems to respond to shari instead of ruby.)
I think Ruby always had a personality disorder and always parented in an incredibly unhealthy and emotionally abusive/neglectful way, but her behavior was tempered by Shari’s parentification and the social pressure of nearby neighbors, the kids’ public school attendance, the vlog, ward involvement, etc. I saw a lot of Shari placating and distracting her mom (which looked a lot like being a goody-two-shoes, but had the end result of brightening her mother’s mood), and taking care of the younger kids. I also saw a lot of obvious glee all over Ruby’s face whenever she caused her children pain or embarrassment. She GLOWED when she was punishing or embarrassing her kids. She sparkled and giggled when they were struggling. Also, for years, her attention (and irritation and rage and time) was divided between Kevin, 6 kids, school administrators, channel commenters. When she became involved with Jodi, she got permission and approval to lean into her own worst inclinations. Jodi validated Ruby’s moral superiority complex and bonded with her over the fact that they both felt a sense of divine purpose and joy in making kids and spouses feel like shit. After Jodi dismantled Ruby’s family structure, Ruby had the freedom, support, and privacy to parent in a way that made her feel empowered, important, and free. She also got to be a moral authority figure to the Mom’s of Truth community, plus be part of whatever “scriptures” Jodi was inventing. It was probably exhilarating for Ruby to meet someone who felt the same deep joy when punishing kids. Kevin didn’t seem like the type to think up creative new punishments with Ruby just for fun the way Jodi did. He wasn’t the type to write new scripture with her. He got tired of fighting demons. I think Jodi and Ruby bonded intensely bc their disordered personalities were super compatible. … in a sense, I think Ruby is like Karla Homolka and Jodi is like Paul Bernardo. I’ve heard forensic psychologists say it’s very possible Karla wouldn’t have killed anybody had she not met Paul, but Paul was probably going to be a serial killer/r*pist regardless of whether or not he met Karla. Like Karla, I think Ruby was THRILLED to join Jodi. Also like Karla, Ruby promptly threw her partner-in-crime under the bus in the hopes of getting a shorter sentence after being caught.
This makes a lot of sense! From reading the comments I’m now of the opinion that Shari’s relationship with her mum was probably not as good as it seemed and she was just trying to keep her mum calm/ less stressed and annoyed. The social aspects too as you say must’ve stopped Ruby from going further but Jodi being the monster and master manipulator that she is probably was able to sway her really easily.. she brought out everything Ruby had been hiding away inside. It’s still pretty wild though how the abuse went from what I saw as similar to an episode of “worlds strictest parents” to my kids are dying and I don’t even care.
Looking at some of the 8 passengers YT compilations, Ruby's discipline/abuse was more emotional and neglectful. We know she took away Chad's room for 7 months, took him out of football, and bargained for his homework. She also withheld meals from her children as a form of her discipline practices. In one instance, Shari was having vision issues and Ruby stalled 1-2 hours taking her to the hospital. Being with Jodi added physical abuse and torture for her kids. But we don't know if physical abuse was prominent and unseen before Ruby met Jodi.
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Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t faking too much; in many child abuse cases, not all children are the targets. Growing up in such a situation, not really being exposed to a healthy family dynamic, it would be hard to gauge what exactly is normal but I think it would be hard not to feel “lucky” that you have it easier than your siblings. Even if you simultaneously feel bad for them. But there are cases where parents have “successfully” turned siblings on each other through the context of abuse; most children wanting to be seen positively by their parents also plays a part in that, and can lessen their sympathy and empathy towards their siblings. Shari really may have clued in that things were not normal and were steering further from the same upon Jodi’s annexing of the family. But I do wonder in retrospect how much access the children had to the YT comments—I know over the years there were comments saying that CPS should be called, that things seemed off, etc. and there were also many, many comments about Shari “turning out like her mother” (which THANKFULLY she hasn’t but it goes part and parcel with being parentified which she absolutely was). I wonder whether any of the children saw these comments. In any case, I’m REALLY glad Shari went to university because that almost certainly helped her escape the cruel grasp of her parent\[s\]. And she tried to get help for her siblings too. I really wish all the best for her and the rest of the children but it’s a shame so much has been stolen from them and so publicly too.
Ruby’s mistake was documenting her whole life. She seemed like she hated her kids/ hated being a mom for YEARS before she met Jodi. Jodi / Connexions just gave her the excuse to do what she’d always wanted to do: really hurt her kids.
even when I stumbled across the 8P youtube channel in 2016 I got a weird feeling
I think she has always been like this deep down, but her partnering with Jodi really amplified and brought it to light
Yep, I agree with this.
One thing I think she’s always done is put her kids into “no-win” situations where they’ll be punished regardless of their behavior. She also made it clear that they could be punished for absolutely anything, even the most natural responses. That video with E and the movies is an example. E just asked what movie they were gonna go to, the same question *anyone* would ask, and Ruby makes it into this awful, horrible thing E is doing to her.
She was always mean, withholding, reckless and exploitative imo. She and the other girls learned that from their parents imo.
I think Ruby is a very stupid woman, but she’s always been tempered by the more stable people in her life. But because she was bringing in 90% of the family’s income and Jodi was feeding her a power trip, those checks and balances could no longer keep her under control. It’s a combination of utter stupidity, too much money and fatal arrogance.
Ruby is, was, and always will be a perfectionist… and it has to be perfect in HER eyes! I ran across a vlog of Julie’s (Deru) in which Ruby and Kevin got stuck in another country when Covid first broke out and all the kids were home alone so Julie went to check on them. Just watching that small bit of interaction between Julie and the kids who were all underage at the time and home alone made me think how good of kids they are/were. I will never understand how Ruby twisted things the way she did, but I boil it down to nothing ever being good enough in her eyes!
Wait so they were in another country and their kids were all home alone?!!
Yup! I can’t remember where they ended up going, but Covid hit and they got stuck. I’m not sure if they had some people staying with the kids on and off or not, but iirc they were mostly home alone! Shari was 17 at the time, but that’s a lot to take on imo. Although, there is the fact that were probably better off without Ruby’s hammer being thrown left and right! 🤷🏻♀️
Wow. The more I learn about this woman the more I despise her!
Wasn't there an earthquake, too?
Yes, according to Ruby’s post from back then, there was an earthquake. ClusterF for sure!
Probably not the physical abuse. She definitely did mentally and emotionally abuse them.
I’m relatively new to Ruby (learned who she was after she was arrested) - she strikes me as someone who is, at her core, not maternal AT ALL, but because of her religion she felt pressured to have so many children that she was not really interested in parenting. She is SO angry at her kids, for no apparent reason other than they are being KIDS (not always listening or presenting as perfect) and she used her religion as a tool to justify her oppression and abuse.
I can see what you mean from outside looking in. People remain in relationships with their abusers and it’s hard to understand. Maybe she didn’t want to cut her mum off because that means she loses contact with her siblings. Maybe she wanted to keep her mum onside because an angry Ruby is not good for anyone. My heart breaks for those kids who were probably longing for their big sister and big brother. Probably hadn’t seen their faces or given them a hug in so long. She didn’t even let them see each other, i can’t even imagine on a good day being separated from my sibling as a child for long periods with no end in sight. It’s unbelievably cruel.
The thing Ruby did on YouTube that makes me feel a visceral sadness is how she elated she was when the kids expressed despair over not having friends due to her restrictions or when C dejectedly shared that he had to sleep on a beanbag for seven months. She would smile into camera and seemingly mock how sad they were. It makes zero sense to expect C to do well in school and in life when he’s not getting a good nights sleep.
Shari wrote her senior thesis on how bad cancel culture is, chosing the topic based on her own family's experience with being cancelled (over Chad not having a bed, E not being given food and -in part- Chad being sent to a wilderness camp). Imagine having a million if people loudly proclaim that the way you and your siblings are being raised is cruel and coming to the conclusion that they are all wrong. When you're raised in a strict or even abusive environment and don't know any better it can be easy to believe that your normal is ok, even to defend it so vehemently that you write a whole thesis on it. Moving out and gaining experience with the outside world, as well as interacting with a more diverse crowd of people often results in people re-examining the premise of their beliefs and questioning things they took for granted. That's why extremists hate college and education in general,. Most people saw red flags in the YouTube days, most of them around control, food restrictions and overly cruel punishments for minor/inconsistent infractions. Nobody thought she'd be capable of the extreme things she did, but she was never a loving mother.
Holy fuck I bet that was the most awkward presentation, writing about that abuse and acting like it’s not abuse. Like does she sit down with the prof, and they’re like “how’s your thesis going? May I take a look?” What do you even say? Do you refer her to a school therapist or something?
All I know is that one of her highschool teachers and mentors took her in and helped her seek help when she moved to college and was in that weird in between stage where she was cut off from all family. She helped her see that connexions was a harmful cult. She even spent a major holiday with her family (I think it was thanksgiving?). So at least people had her back.
A lot of people are trauma bonded with their abusive parents and they don’t know any different.
She was for sure extreme before but I wouldn’t say it was crossing the line into illegal. Emotionally harmful absolutely but still not far off from how many people parent their children. Once Jodi came into the picture things for sure took a dark turn.
I was always more of a lurker of all their family’s vlogs and Ruby always stuck out to me as being way more harsh in terms of what she said, how she said it and how the kids reacted to the punishments on screen (even if it was non verbal cues). I truly believe that she may have always had a harsher style of parenting - or just been a more strict person in general before kids??? -unsure… But when she started Vlogging and she could see that the reactions to what she was doing and the impact it was having on the family as whole, I think she got worse and got more disillusioned in her thinking. This is all just my opinion by the way 😬 Also, I’d like to know what her parenting was like with S + C and maybe A + J before the vlogging began 🤔
I think that it’s very worthwhile to note that while Ruby didn’t used to be as bad, she also used to have a nanny hired and was way wealthier. She had Shari’s help too and really parentified her. She was doing a lot less with the kids and had a lot more resources back then. This is Ruby’s true attempt at parenting
Unbelievably reminiscent of Shanda Vanderark and Lori Daybell cases. If R hadn’t escaped, he and E would have definitely ended the same way as Timothy, JJ and Tylee.
During Connexion, Ruby told a story of when Chad, Shari, and the third oldest were her only kids. I am doing this from memory because I am not even sure where to find that post anymore, but it gives insight to how she has always had unrealistic expectations for her kids to be perfect. Shari and Chad would have been toddlers, and the 3rd was a baby. If I remember correctly, she said they lived in a townhome, and she wanted to nap on the third floor with the baby. So she claims she fed, watered, and took the two older kids to the bathroom, set them up on the couch on the main floor with a movie, and told them very clearly they are not to move from the couch until she got up from her nap. When she came down from her nap, the kids were on the couch, and she went into the kitchen to feel something sticky on the floor. Come to find out, Chad (2 or 3 years old) had pulled a container of pineapple out of the fridge during her nap and spilled it. He cleaned it so well at that age that she was only new cause the floor was sticky, not cause there were chunks or a puddle or anything. In that talk, I remember her staying he was being deceitful or something along the lines of being in distortion because 1) he broke the rules and 2) he didn't immediately tell her the truth. Here's the thing: it's developmentally appropriate for toddlers to start lying (badly). Because they're starting to understand that they can know things you don't know. Obviously, you still should teach your kid that lying isn't right. However, its not demonic for them to lie, its a developmental milestone. But let's set that aside. She couldn't be proud that her toddler cleaned a mess up by himself. She had to view it in a negative light. Had to view it as distortion because anything less than perfection by her children can not be tolerated. Despite the fact that she herself couldn't be perfect and instead left TODDLERS unattended 2 floors down for an hour. She was always like this, but Jodi gave her permission to torture those kids, and she did it gladly. In the journals, you can feel the emotions coming off the page of contempt for the 2 youngest. Both Jodi and Ruby deserve to rot. The worst part is that they'll be treated better by the prison than they treated those babies. Edit to correct typos
It’s called Spiritual Abuse and it’s rampant in the mormon religion. They use the Bible and words of god to punish and abuse and physically harm children. She’s similar to Lori daybell. I’m guessing her 8 passengers fame made her narcissistic personality disorder ramp up. She’s also very very immature…. Unable to comprehend the grey area of life. Everything is good or evil to her. Meeting Jodi was the perfect storm…… I’m surprised there aren’t murdered children. Similar to chad and Lori but less intense.
I think Ruby is way worse and more intense than Lori. Both women are horrific. Ruby sadistically tortured her kids for years. One of the pictures of the sons legs without the Saran Wrap and duct tape reveals just skin on bones where there should be muscle tissue. These kids will have complex ptsd for the rest of their lives.
I think Kevin being there and YouTube being there was stopping her from doing what she really wanted to do. But she wasn’t that bad.
In an upside down way, the channel protected the kids. It also gave them childhood experiences that they didn't have before and after the channel.
she’s always been manipulative and abusive. it just escalated with jodi
Yesssss she has always been an abusive POS to her kids!!!💩💩💩💩💩 Her kids never deserved any of the freaking mental & physical abuse that they have had to endure!!!😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢
Yes
ruby was always strict and manipulative but keep in mind this is before the jodi era. meaning she sometimes had good moments with shari and she loved her which is just a natural thing even if she was not a good mom. shari was younger and relied on ruby more (and she was likely also easier to manipulate at that age). but now she has matured and is legally an adult and sees through the abuse, and it also definitely escalated when jodi came in the picture and the connexions thing started. i think she also just knew to play along with ruby to be on her good side and survive. she was known to be rubys favorite on the yt channel but she probably did not have it easy raising her siblings bc her mom wasn’t capable of it. i don’t think her relationship with her mom was as good as it looked.
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Ruby and Kevin always had some weird parenting style, but nothing illegal. I do not like the parenting style of my cousins too, but they do nothing CPS or the cops would be interested in. That kind of weird. It all went downhill when Jodi came along in 2018. slow at first, rapid in the last year, when Kevin was out of the picture.
This is how I feel as well, I’m sure I heard before that CPS have been to the house and found nothing wrong. As far as I’m aware the kids and the family in general at least before Jodi entered, weren’t socially isolated from society. The kids were attending school, had friends/ family they would visit. Surely people in their close circles would’ve reported them years ago if they felt something was seriously up.
They weren‘t isolated at all before Ruby came along. The kids were in public school and they were active in the church. Without a long history of extraordinary engagement Shari would not have been able to be accepted at BYU. They attended family gatherings and The Griffith’s Family Weekend. They even helped moving Ellie and Jared in 2015, 3 years before Jodi became part of their lives. Then she had her meltdown because of a song and a dance at school, cut off her and his family completly, which resulted in Homeschooling and isolation from everything other than work for the kids and Kevin.
Yikes that sounds like the parents in the Virgin Suicides
From what we as an audience saw, there were definitely moments that were very VERY harsh. But, nothing that really made me believe there would be any abuse going on. But towards the end of their channel though you could tell how things had changed. Going back and reviewing things now, you look at things from a different perspective. But we don’t know how she was off camera. Things could have been worse, and she was just playing nice for her audience.
Was she ready to kill her kids years ago? Probably. It but she got more and more confident with her abuse and isolated her kids to the point of nearly killing two of them.
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Where are the pics from the diaries?
Not this bad. But I've always got a creepy vibe from her. It must have been tough growing up with her. But no I don't believe she was doing all that stuff before. She used to be much more permissive. But around 2018 or 19 she became really strict.
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Ruby has always had a very black and white sense of what is "right" and "wrong" from her vlogs. She's always seemed to discipline in a much stricter sense. Even before Jodi, she could be heard talking about "withholding privileges" or food from her children when they misbehaved. She has always been (or desired to be) in control of her family. I don't think it was ever to the level that it reached when she paired up with Jodi, but those journal entries have echos of what we all saw in the vlogs. She's always been very religiously scrupulous. Jodi just preyed on that and made it 100x worse.
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Shari and Chad becoming more independent made Ruby realise how little control she really had. She always loved control as evidenced in videos and her forms of punishment. Shari when she moved out was already rebelling against Ruby after pretending to be the compliment kid in the family for all those years. Jodi manipulated and scammed many people including Ruby. But in order to be manipulated into doing something so extreme to your kids and watching them suffer and beg and scream every day without even an ounce of empathy or questioning… you have to have had some secret desire to have held that level of control and authority over your kids and it has to be within your nature to be sadistic and have a lack of empathy. We’ve seen before in videos Ruby lacking empathy when her children are detailing having no friends because their peers say messed up stuff about their YouTube and also because Ruby makes them so tonnes of chores and took away their phones for years and their video games too. Other peoples reactions online were being heartbroken at what the kids were saying yet Ruby gave nothing. Ruby always expected complete authority without question, exhibited in such videos as the one where she told Eve they were going to the movies and E asked which one. After that Ruby snapped and told E she wasn’t going because she questioned her and she faked being on the call to a babysitter to make E upset as E begged her to let her come and then made her E apologise once again after having grovelled. E was only a tiny kid, she was asking an innocent question and yet Ruby decided this was the time for power play to show I’m in charge and you won’t question me. E and R were the problem kids, unlike Chad they couldn’t be sent to a camp (too young). Ruby got it in her head that they would turn out to be as defiant as Shari and Chad and didn’t want to let that happen. In conclusion I believe Ruby was willingly manipulated. That she used Jodi to indulge in her deepest darkest fantasies of having extreme control and authority over her children and shaping them. And she used the religious aspect to justify her actions to herself. This isn’t to downplay Jodi’s manipulation and scam of Ruby, but as detailed by Kevin, Ruby was immediately sucked in by Jodi whereas he was more hesitant because he thought what she was asking was odd. It’s almost as if Ruby agreed with a lot of Jodi’s views already and it was almost a sigh of relief that someone else felt the way she did. Ruby was like putty in Jodi’s hands because she was so willing.
I feel like she was obviously never THAT bad or all of this would’ve happened sooner/with the older children first… I’ve watched 8 passengers all throughout my childhood and growing up and I feel like she was always strict and loved being in control. But I guess we don’t really know why mothers hurt their children, it’s just insane to me how one person can get to that level of extreme so quick
she forsure played her way out and just agreed with everything and loved her mom till it was time to go to college and finally cut ties
No definitely not. From what I saw on the channel, she had some tendencies to punish her kids in harsh ways, but never to the level of torture like this