Religious fanatics Jodi Hildebrandt, left, and Ruby Franke, center, being arrested on child abuse charges on Aug. 30, 2023, in Ivins, Utah.
Washington County Attorney’s Office via AP
Only a few days ago I wrote an article explaining why people who believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities and now we have a spectacular example of the truth of that claim.
It comes in the form of an Associated Press story of how a fanatical Mormon and mother of six, Ruby Franke, who held the absurd belief that magic demons can take over and 'possess' people because her religion teaches that these demons exist, became convince that her twelve-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were the Devil incarnate and inflicted physical punishment, including deliberate starvation, on them, "to teach them how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies".
Belief in a magical 'evil' Devil figure is of course fundamental to the Abrahamic superstitions, of which Mormonism is a recent manifestation, and is found in all forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their derivative superstitions. It was particularly strong during the Middle Ages when thousands of (mostly) women were burned alive in the belief that they were so possessed.
Ruby Franke and a business associate, Jodi Hildebrandt, have each been sentenced to 30 years in jail after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse after the 12-year-old boy managed to escape through a window from the room he was locked in and alerted a neighbour who called the police.
Franke is a well-known YouTuber who made her name lecturing gullible people who assumed her religious fanaticism gave her special insight into how to be a good parent. She and Hildebrandt, a fellow Mormon and mental health counsellor, were arrested after neighbours, the Clarksons, answered their door to find an emaciated boy with bruising and other injuries on their doorstep.
The court was shown doorbell video of the shoeless child walking away from the door wearing torn socks with his ankles wrapped in bloody duct tape and plastic wrap. He turned back when they opened the door. The court also saw a video of him telling the Clarksons that his injuries were his own fault. Franke had convinced him and his younger sister that they had been possessed by the Devil and everything they were doing to them was an act of love.
According to AP:
The boy later told investigators that Hildebrandt had used rope to bind his arms and his feet to weights on the ground. She used a mixture of cayenne pepper and honey to dress his wounds, according to the police report. He had been told by Franke and Hildebrandt that everything being done to him was an act of love.
In handwritten journal entries also released Friday, Franke chronicles months of daily abuse that included starving her son and 9-year-old daughter, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and isolating them from the outside world. The women often made the kids sleep on hard floors and sometimes locked them in a concrete bunker in Hildebrandt’s basement.
Franke insists repeatedly in her journal that her son is possessed by the devil. In a July 2023 entry titled “Big day for evil,” she describes holding the boy’s head under water and closing off his mouth and nose with her hands. Franke tells him the devil will lie and say she is hurting him but that she is actually trying to save him.
She later justifies withholding food and water from her son, writing, “I will not feed a demon.”
Franke’s attorney, LaMar Winward, and Hildebrandt’s attorney, Douglas Terry, did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment on the new evidence.
Body camera video shows officers entering Hildebrandt’s house and detaining her on the couch while others scour the winding hallways in search of the young girl. They quickly discover a child with a buzzcut sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty closet. After hours of sitting with the girl and feeding her pizza, police coax her out.
Franke describes shaving the girl’s head several times for whining, and writes in her journal, “If she is going to act sick, she can look sick.”
Franke and her husband, Kevin Franke, launched “8 Passengers” on YouTube in 2015 and amassed a large following as they documented their experiences raising six children in a Mormon community in Springville. The couple also have a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old, as well as two adult children.
She later began working with Hildebrandt’s counseling company, ConneXions Classroom, offering parenting seminars, launching another YouTube channel and publishing content on their shared Instagram account, “Moms of Truth.”
Ruby Franke was already a divisive figure in the parent vlogging world. The Franke parents had been criticized online for banning their oldest son from his bedroom for seven months for pranking his brother. In other videos, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to take lunch to a kindergartener who forgot it at home.
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Yes this case is very much child abuse. Ruby Franke is more demon possessed than anyone else in this case. The Church of Mormon should be called the Church of Moron. It's such an obvious fake cult and Utah is full of these religious nutcase.
ReplyDeleteA more disturbing case was the Annelise Michel case in Germany in the 1970s. Annelise Michel was a devout Christian who suffered both mentally and physically. Some claim she was demon possessed while others say it was a serious case of mental disturbance. This case is such a tragic, loathsome story and nothing good has come out of it. Annelise would yell like an angry animal, lick her urine, eat spiders and flies, and bend and twist her body for hours at a time. It's disgusting, degenerate behavior, but where is the proof that it was a genuine supernatural demonic possession? Proof of possession would be phenomena such as levitation or floating in the air, telekinesis or moving objects through the air, being able to physically climb up the walls like a spider, and having the eyes turn into something similar to a snake.
Annelise Michel's demonic possession or serious mental disturbance lasted for the last 3 years of her life before she died of starvation and exhaustion in 1976. Exorcist were sent to help her and the exorcism lasted close to a year. She didn't get better. Instead of sending her to doctors and hospitals her parents sent only exorcists. This case is more disturbing than meets the eye. Not only did the exorcism fail to save her, but there's also another disturbing rumor claiming that Annelise Michel saw and heard the Virgin Mary appear and told her that if Annelise agreed to allow herself to become possessed by demons, she would be saving the souls of other people and she would be proving to the world that Satan and demons are real. Wow. This is unbelievably disturbing and disgusting! This is blasphemy. This is BEYOND disgusting, and I'll explain why.
First of all, the real Virgin Mary would never say something like that. How in the world would Annelise allowing herself to be demon possessed help save the souls of other people??? This is implying that Jesus Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough. Why choose this poor girl as a martyr to save other souls? Only Jesus Christ can save souls. And aren't there more intelligent, constructive, merciful, humane ways to prove to the world that Satan and demons are real than having a poor girl be subjected to demonic possession? What a cruel crime to put this girl through such a hellish ordeal. Nowhere in the Bible does it teach that individual Christians should volunteer to become demon possessed. Jesus Christ simply cast out demons in the Bible. So what kind of baloney is this Virgin Mary telling Annelise Michel? My personal opinion is that if this was for real and not a hallucination, that apparition was not really the Virgin Mary at all, but rather it was a demon in disguise who took advantage of Annelis's religious fanaticism and tricked her into allowing herself to be possessed. Annelise was really duped by a demon. The only other possibility is that she hallucinate the Virgin Mary. Either way this is a very, very disturbing case. Why would God allow such horrors if this was a genuine demonic possession? And if it was just a case of serious mental disturbance or insanity why would God allow such suffering? It doesn't make sense.