Did Jodi Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke Have a Romantic Relationship? What's Been Said About Their 'Strange' Connection By Caroline Blair

Jodi Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke had a close personal and professional relationship.

At the time of their friendship, both Hildebrandt and Ruby were already well-established figures in their Utah community. Ruby and her then-husband, Kevin Franke, found massive success with their YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, that chronicled their everyday lives with six children.

Meanwhile, Hildebrandt was a family and couples counselor who founded ConneXions and had made a name for herself by relating the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to her clients’ issues. She also took a special interest in sexuality and addictions before her therapist’s license was suspended in 2012 for breaking patient confidentiality.

Ruby, Kevin and their children began meeting with Hildebrandt, but their relationship intensified in 2019. Ruby and Hildebrandt then joined professional forces and combined their followings into a podcast and company called “Moms of Truth.”

In addition to their professional relationship, Hildebrandt and Ruby developed a close bond, with Hildebrandt moving into the Franke family home in 2022. They began taking over the upper half of the home and kicked Kevin out. In 2023, Ruby and four of her youngest children moved to Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah.

However, it was later revealed that both women were abusing the two youngest Franke children. After Ruby’s son escaped in August 2023, Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse. They later pleaded guilty and are serving their sentences in Utah prison. The Netflix documentary, Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story, has continued exploring their crimes and relationship.

Here’s everything to know about Jodi Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke’s relationship.

How and when did Ruby and Hildebrandt’s relationship begin?

Hildebrandt and Ruby became connected in 2019 through their commonalities of living in Utah and being part of the LDS Church. In addition, they both had significant followings on social media.

After getting connected, Ruby and her then-husband, Kevin, began attending individual therapy sessions with Hildebrandt, as well as partaking in various men’s, women’s and couples’ workshops through ConneXions. Several of Ruby and Kevin’s children were also regularly meeting with Hildebrandt as their therapist.

Before long, Kevin and Ruby frequently sat with Hildebrandt on panels at ConneXions workshops and outings and promoted the company. Ruby and Hildebrandt started appearing in each other’s videos and content, as well.

In 2022, Ruby transitioned her popular Instagram account and other social media handles to “Moms of Truth,” which was a podcast hosted by Hildebrandt and Ruby. The women shared videos advocating for strict parenting and explaining the needs for setting boundaries with “difficult” children.

Why did Hildebrandt move in with the Frankes and later move away with Ruby?

Around the same time that Ruby and Hildebrandt began collaborating on videos together in 2021, the therapist moved into Ruby and Kevin’s home. The dad of six later claimed that the women began taking control of the upstairs section of their house — which included the couple’s bedroom.

“And that was that they started sleeping in the same bed,” Kevin alleged to police, as shown in the Netflix documentary Evil Influencer. “The upstairs where Jodi roamed was completely off-limits. They’d just go up and lock themselves in a room for four or five hours, and then they’d come out and they’d just be on cloud nine.”

Hildebrandt and Ruby eventually forced Kevin to leave the home, and Hildebrandt encouraged them to separate. Kevin became estranged from his children, as well. Hildebrandt, Ruby and her four youngest children then moved to the therapist’s home in Ivins, Utah — which was isolated and around 300 miles away from their home.

Although it’s not entirely clear why the two women moved, they began to torment Franke’s youngest two children. According to Ruby’s journal entries that were later discovered by authorities, they became convinced that the two youngest children were sources of “evil” who needed to be punished in order to rid them of sin.

Ruby detailed several forms of abuse that she and Hildebrandt subjected her children to — including denying them food, stealing their water and forcing them to do intense physical labor. The Washington County Attorney’s Office later described the home as a “work-camp like setting.”

“They were also prohibited from interacting with others and were hidden in the home when others came to visit,” the office wrote of the children.

What did Hildebrandt say about the LGBTQ+ community?

Hildebrandt was a member and advocate for the LDS Church and frequently spoke about sexuality and how it applied to her clients. As part of this, she’d occasionally share her anti-LGBTQ+ opinions and her belief that people who were in those communities were sexually deviant.

“People will say, ‘Well, homosexuality is not the same as pedophelia,’ ” she said in a social media video that was resurfaced in Evil Influencer. “Okay, it may not be the same thing, but what is the same thing is sexual deviancy.”

Hildebrandt — who was previously married for three years in the 1990s and has two estranged children — was also adamant that she was not part of the LGBTQ+ community.

“I am a daughter of god,” she said in a video. “That’s who I am. I am not gay, because I am divine.”

In addition to sharing her own opinions, she also used the term “distortion” with her clients to describe any sort of behavior that didn’t align with the LDS church. She used this term to also classify clients as lust, sex and pornography addicts.

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Did Ruby and Hildebrandt have a romantic relationship?

While Hildebrandt and Ruby had a close personal and professional relationship, it’s not clear whether or not they had a romantic relationship. Neither Ruby nor Hildebrandt have directly addressed the theories.

Although the two women remained close friends up until their arrest, their relationship may have gone south post-imprisonment. In Evil Influencer, Ruby talks in a recorded prison phone call about how being separated from Hildebrandt has “cleared a lot of things up for me.”

During her sentencing hearing, Ruby apologized to her family and took accountability for her crimes. She further claimed that Hildebrandt “masterfully manipulated” her, per NPR. Meanwhile, Hildebrandt maintained her innocence and said that she was acting out of love.

Since then, several of Hildebrandt’s former clients, friends and colleagues speculated about her and Ruby’s close bond.

“I was always very intrigued by Jodi’s relationship with Ruby — how she talked about her, how she looked at her,” her former client, Ethan Prete, shared in Evil Influencer. “I know she has strong stances around the LGBTQ community … I thought maybe Jodi had feelings that she was trying to suppress.”

Meanwhile, former client Valerie Jackson recalled Hildebrandt preaching that being in the LGBTQ+ community was an “addiction” that someone “could be recovered from.”

“When you’re part of a high-demand religion, if you are LGBTQ, often it feels like there isn’t a healthy space for you to even exist,” Laura Howells Leavitt, Jodi’s former mission companion, shared. “You can’t even entertain the thought of being LGBTQ, and so I think what happened sometimes with believing members is they go inward, and they can self loathe and then that can dangerously turn into extremism.”

What has Ruby’s family said about her relationship with Hildebrandt?

Since her arrest, Ruby has been estranged from her six children and her husband, who has since divorced her and remarried. Her eldest daughter, Shari Franke, has reflected on both her mother’s actions and her relationship with Hildebrandt in her 2025 memoir, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom.

She addressed her mom and Hildebrandt’s connection and called it “strange” in an interview with Good Morning America in January 2025.

“I certainly got weird vibes from Jodi and Ruby,” Shari said. “I don’t think it’s normal at all that a therapist would move into her client’s home. I was moving out to college, and I hadn’t even left the house yet and she is in my room and in my bed.”

Shari further claimed that her mom “tried to be secretive” about her relationship with Hildebrandt, so she wasn’t privy to all the details.

“The vibes I was getting was that something was strange between them,” Shari added in the interview.

In her book, Shari also revealed that she found messages on Ruby’s computer “that confirmed for me the truth about the nature of her relationship with Jodi and how it had spilled over into the physical. Ruby, expressing her frustration about having to cater to Jodi’s needs for physical affection without getting anything in return.”

However, Shari has maintained that she still “never saw anything specific” in regards to a romantic connection between the two.