Jodi Hildebrandt, Convicted of Child Abuse with Family Vlogger Ruby Franke, Waged 'Psychological Warfare': Niece By Christine Pelisek

Jessi Hildebrandt was on a family trip to Utah celebrating their grandparents’ wedding anniversary when the then-16-year-old got into a fight with their mom over washing dishes.

“I was just a 16-year-old bratty teenager,” Jessi, now 32, tells PEOPLE. Jessi, who uses they/them pronouns, says they refused to wash the dishes, went downstairs to the basement and slammed the door.

Jessi’s mom allegedly went back to California without them, and it wasn’t long before Jessi moved in full-time to the Utah home of their aunt, therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, in the late 2000s.

“I was deeply depressed, incredibly angry and anxious,” says Jessi, who grew up a devout Mormon. “I just knew that I had basically dropped out of school, I was grounded all of the time, I was always in trouble. And I thought in the beginning, ‘Okay, maybe Jodi can help. Maybe this is the answer to my prayer. She’s a professional. She’s my aunt. I’m going to be compliant.”

It wasn’t long before “she got me involved in the Jodi method,” says Jessi, who appears in the four-part docuseries Ruby & Jodi: A Cult of Sin and Influence, premiering Monday, Sept. 1 at 9/8c on ID.

The docuseries delves into the abusive partnership between Jodi Hildebrand and her business partner Ruby Franke, who first gained prominence in 2015 when she started her YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, with her ex-husband, Kevin Franke.

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It explores Jodi’s rise to power within the Mormon community through her popular ConneXions program — and how that program led her to Franke, a mother of six, and laid the foundation for the twisted bond they shared.

The duo was arrested in August 2023 after Franke’s 12-year-old son had escaped Hildebrandt’s home, where he was bound and starved, and made his way to a neighbor’s house seeking help.

The neighbor called 911, leading local police to then discover Franke’s 9-year-old daughter being held captive in a similar situation. Authorities said the two women subjected Franke’s two youngest children to torture, which included dressing the children’s wounds with cayenne pepper and honey, forcing them to work in the sweltering heat for hours with little food or water and plunging the youngest son’s head underwater.

Both women were ultimately sentenced to prison on four convictions of child abuse, PEOPLE reported last year, and were sentenced to serve between four and 30 years in prison.

“It’s the same stuff she was doing to me, she just refined and got better at it and then continued to do it to two of those kids,” says Jessi, who spent close to a year living with Jodi before they escaped. “It’s psychological warfare, emotional, physical. And I think the scariest part to me is I think at this point she believes it. I think she believes her insanity, which I think makes her even more dangerous.”

 Jessi says it didn’t take long for Jodi to start “chipping away” at their identity, sense of self and sense of reality after moving in with the mother of two.

They were forced to cut their hair, barred from wearing makeup and playing the piano and studying.  

“She focused on the things that brought me the most identity and took them from me,” they say. “And at the time, even while I was in it, I didn’t know that this was abuse. I thought the reason it wasn’t working was because of some defect in me that I wasn’t trying hard enough, that I wasn’t spiritual enough, faithful enough, that I was manipulating and lying, and I didn’t even know that’s what I was doing.”

“I was so grateful that Jodi was helping me because she was fighting for my soul,” Jessi says. “And I believed it. She would use this phrase, masterful manipulator, constantly with me. My conclusion was, I must be such a good manipulator and liar that I don’t even know that I’m doing it. I have to just fully trust whatever Jodi says is the truth because I don’t know what is real.”

Jessi wasn’t allowed to close the door of the bathroom and was allotted seven minutes to shower.  

“I wasn’t allowed to use tampons because she was convinced I was a sex addict and that I was masturbating with them,” Jessi says.

The alleged torture included being duct taped across their mouth, sleeping outside on Jodi’s balcony in the middle of the winter in Utah and being forced to run for hours at a time. “In her own words, she wanted to make my life so uncomfortable that it would force the sin out,” Jessi says.

“And a lot of what she would tell me is, Satan is working through you,” says Jessi. “Jesus is literally, not figuratively, but literally working through her. And that I should be grateful because she was saving me from Satan. This was a fight for my soul. I believed all of this so fully and thoroughly that I deserved this, that God was testing me. And if I can just get through this, then I’ll be a good righteous Mormon child.”

After almost a year living there, Jessi says they ran away and ended up in a homeless shelter before eventually making their way to Los Angeles where they became a tattoo artist. Jessi now lives in Berlin, Germany.

“Between the shelter and here it’s a lot of iterations of myself and a lot of chapters and phases,” they say. “It feels like I’ve had many, many lifetimes between 17 and now.”

“I don’t want to put too much of a bow on it, but I mean, I still deal with the after-effects of living with Jodi every day,” Jessi says. “I have severe, complex PTSD from that experience that affects me every day.”

Jessi says that they continue to speak out about Jodi because “I just want to see her held accountable. I want her to never have access to any vulnerable person ever again. I want her to never have access to anyone ever again.”

The thought of Jodi getting out of prison one day “is always looming in the back of my mind.”

“The idea that she could somehow get herself out of this is terrifying to me,” Jessi says. “She has no moral framework. I think she believes in her own delusions that she really is doing God’s work.”

In March, Jodi Hildebrandt challenged her conviction claiming ineffective counsel, per KTVX.

Her attorney could not be reached for comment.

The four-part docuseries Ruby & Jodi: A Cult of Sin and Influence, premieres Monday, Sept. 1 at 9/8c on ID.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.