On August 30, former YouTuber Ruby Franke was arrested on two counts of aggravated child abuse.
Ruby launched her YouTube channel, titled "8 Passengers," back in 2016, and amassed over two million subscribers before deleting it earlier this year. She would frequently share family-centered videos featuring her husband, Kevin, and their six children: Shari, 20, Chad, 18, Abby, 16, Julie, 14, Russell, 12, and Eve, 10.
And while Ruby found herself at the center of public attention this year with her arrest, she’s faced backlash several times in the past due to her controversial parenting style.
Back in 2020, for example, Ruby’s son Chad alleged in a since-deleted video that his parents had forced him to sleep on a beanbag for seven months.
Chad alleged that he’d had his bedroom “taken away” as punishment for pulling pranks on his younger brother Russell. Ruby and Kevin later claimed that they’d given Chad the option to either sleep on a pullout guest bed, inflatable mattress, or the beanbag — and that he’d chosen the latter because it was the most comfortable.
A couple of years prior, Ruby sparked outrage as she casually revealed that she’d refused to drop lunch at school for her daughter Eve, then six, after being informed by her teacher that the little girl had forgotten it.
“I responded [to Eve’s teacher] and said, ‘Eve is responsible for making her own lunches in the morning, so the natural outcome is she is just going to be hungry, and hopefully nobody gives her food and nobody steps in and gives her lunch,’” Ruby told her viewers.
