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So have you heard about the new trend in parenting called gentle parenting? Here's how a video on one big Instagram account describes it.

The secret to getting your toddler to stop hitting, it's not threatening them. It's not shaming them.

In gentle parenting, instead of punishing your kid, you try to talk through situations in a way that helps them understand their actions.

Come in calm, confident, I know that part's hard, and okay the feelings.

So say very calmly, Can you tell me why you're ripping off your sister's necklace? Then let's resolve those deeper issues and problem-solve as a team to stop doing it again.

This is how we're going to raise a resilient generation.

Now, whatever your thoughts about gentle parenting, and it has its ups and downs, I'm sure you've realized by now that this is not what Ruby was doing. She was not a gentle parenting No. She was doing something much more old-school, something that felt more in line with '50s style strictness' than contemporary YouTuber parenting content. I'm going to play you a clip of one thing she put on her vlog.

If you cut one more thing in my house.

Ruby is holding a wide-eye stuffed animal in front of her youngest child, Eve.

I'm going to take the scissors. Look at me. And I'm going to cut its head off.

Ruby almost seems like the complete opposite of gentle parenting. Maybe that's part of what made her so popular. She was appealing to parents who wanted strict rules that had to be followed. Otherwise, there were serious consequences. But it was all for the kids' own good, right? From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Infimus. I'm Vanessa Gregoriades. And I'm Natalie Robamed. So last week, we We met YouTuber Ruby Franky and her brood of children in Springville, Utah. We heard how Ruby's mormonism informed her turn to vlogging. This week, we're continuing the story of Ruby and what happened when she met a woman who supercharged her life, and you could also say her powers, both positive and negative. This is part two, The Gift of Repentance. Ruby was getting more and more popular on YouTube. Tons of people were watching her, and they were watching the birth of this very specific brand, the Disciplinarian Mom. Ruby was all about the moments before everyone gathers in the backyard to take that Instagram photo in their Sunday best with a freshly washed labradoodle at their feet. She was the YouTube vlog, the moments of chaos and unwashed faces when voices are raised and hair gets pulled and tempers flare in both adults and kids.

Ruby wanted to be authentic authentic. That's what's supposed to work on YouTube, an authentic voice. So she showed the times when she punished her kids. But the threats and the punishments began feeling extreme. Like, one year, she canceled Christmas for two of her kids.

The two youngest are showing long patterns of selfishness. So Kevin and I have decided that we are going to give the gift of truth to them this year for Christmas. We are going to give them the gift of boundaries, and we're going to give them the gift of repentance. And we told them that this year, they are not going to be visited by Santa. Christmas morning, their four older siblings will be getting Christmas presents to open, and that they will have the gift of love from their dad and I, because we want them to really have a visceral experience that hits them.

Now, among all of the moms at home consuming this content, maybe some of them were impressed. I mean, watching a mom actually hold the line with her kids and winning is certainly something. But Angie Wilson, the fan from Massachusetts, had mixed feelings about it.

Well, at first I thought she was just strict. I grew up with parents who I always described as strict but fair. But then I started seeing things like she pulled her oldest son out of school for for some odd reason, and was homeschooling him, and he was miserable.

Angie was put off by Ruby's parenting style, but there was one incident that really stood out. Here's what happened. Ruby's daughter, who was around six at the time, was supposed to pack her own lunch, but she forgot it at home.

I just got a text message from Eve's teacher, and she said that Eve did not pack a lunch today, and can I bring a lunch over to the school? I responded and just said, Eve is responsible for making her lunches in the morning, and she actually told me she did pack a lunch. So the natural outcome is she's just going to need to be hungry. And hopefully, hopefully, nobody gives her food and nobody steps in and gives her a lunch.

Ruby decided to let her kid go hungry to teach her a lesson.

I would talk to a friend of mine the other day. I said, Your mother, do you think that a six-year-old can be expected to remember to make a lunch every morning and take a lunch to school without help? She said, Hell, no.

This seems so young. In Normanism, kids don't even get baptized until eight. That's when they're considered accountable for their actions. But not to Ruby.

When she wouldn't bring her daughter lunch, that did it. Unsubscribed.

Angie was turning off the show, but not everyone did. Ruby was still hugely popular, and she was about to team up with a kindred spirit in the Norman Church. It was another woman. She was about 12 years older, an influencer of sorts in her community. This woman turned out to be very odd. But one of the first things Ruby learned about her was that she was as strict as Ruby was with her kids, with other adults.

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So as Ruby was disciplining her kids and building her follow account, I mean, I'm talking nearly a million YouTube subscribers by 2019. She was also having problems with one child in particular, Chad.

How do you feel about not having any friends? Sucks, but I don't I feel safe or accepted in any friend group.

Chad, Ruby and Kevin's rambunctuous son, was now in his teens, and he was having a hard time. This is the same kid Ruby used to pull off the tricycle who Ruby's old neighbor, Tammy, said was a bit of a bully as a child.

So summer goal, become the best athlete I possibly can.

For all of her expertise as a parent, for all the advice she gave others on her YouTube channel, Ruby believed she needed professional help. This is a clip from publicly available recordings of Kevin Franke, Ruby's husband, which you'll be hearing throughout these episodes.

Ruby had a very close friend who was, I massive fan of Jody Hildebrand.

I think she was the most recommended therapist by Roman bishops in Romanism. Yeah.

John DeLinn, the ex-Morman who advocates for those who have left the church. Bishops They're basically pastors, but have a lot more power.

You can't be forgiven by God and by Jesus unless you've confessed to your bishop. Even though Jesus died for our sins, you cannot receive forgiveness unless you confess them to a bishop. And so literally, the Roman Church says, As powerful as God and Jesus are, if you skip the step of confessing your sins to your bishop, then you will not receive forgiveness for it.

So what happened here is that certain bishops would receive confessions from their flock, which included families like the Frankies. And then the bishops would recommend that those Mormons having problems go see a trusted therapist, a fellow Norman. And so Ruby did that. Kevin again.

Ruby started to speak with Jody towards the end of 2018.

Jody Hildebrandt was a therapist in Ivins, Utah. Ivins is nearly four drive away from where Ruby and Kevin lived in Springville, so those first meetings with Jody were most likely remote. I can imagine Ruby opening up her laptop and logging on, waiting nervously for the video to load. Maybe she checks her hair, takes a sip of water, anxious to meet this woman who comes so highly recommended. Then the screen flickers and up pops a smiling face.

Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Jody Hildebrandt. Welcome to another episode of the Connections podcast, where we help you create joy in your life and in your relationships.

Jody's around 50, with light brown hair and a stocky matronly build. She's a strict mormon. And she always dresses extremely modestly with her arms and legs covered. But if you met her in person, you might think she seems a bit like a high school gym teacher. Like you'd expect to see her with a whistle around her neck, hands on hips, calling out plays. So Ruby and Jody start talking.

Jody always had a larger interest in communicating with the parents more than with the actual patient, which I always found curious. But her theory was, if you want to help your child, you have to help yourself first, and then you'll know how to help the child.

Maybe for Ruby, it's a relief to get a second opinion, to talk to a licensed therapist about her child and how she can best help him. Because Jody and Ruby begin speaking more often on the phone and over video chat. And Jody starts working with Chad directly.

The first conversation that Jody had with Chad was in June of 2019 while we were on a trip to the East Coast.

I had a phone call yesterday with my therapist, and she taught me about truth and distortion. Mom probably talks about Jody time. I've mentioned Jody a few times. She has a podcast called Connections with an X. Anyway. What did you learn? Well, I learned about the three different types of pain, and we can feel pain in ways of our own choices, other people's choices, and just random events. And it's our way to choose to see things in truth.

Now, Jody wasn't just a therapist. She was something of a multi-hyphenate, an influencer, as I said, in her own way. In addition to her therapy practice, she owned an LLC called Connections Classroom, which held workshops, had a series of workbooks, and eventually even made a podcast, which you heard a little bit of earlier.

You buy into lies, you cannot live in truth. You can't love because love requires truth. And so all of this fear that you have of offending someone is another lie. You can't live like that and then claim to be in truth.

Jody did one-on-one therapy and couples counseling, working on all sorts of family and relationship issues. Now, Jody herself was divorced. She'd been married previously and had two kids, but it didn't last long, according to a family member. Still, other people's marriages were her specialty, and her real focus within them was sex and pornography. Here's a clip of Jody from some of her online videos, which you'll be hearing throughout series.

And it's called Lust. I can lust after anything. And lust is inside marriages between men and women. Lust is inside marriages between men and men and women and women. You can lust after anything. It's a form of selfishness and aggression and hatred.

And it turned out that not only was Ruby having problems with Chad and his behavior, she was also having problem with Kevin and a secret he was keeping, specifically that he was watching pornography.

Jody saw the need for me to get help to face my own addictions with pornography.

What Muslims deem porn or sex addiction, most people would consider totally normal sexual appetite. The religious standard is complete chastity before marriage, and after marriage, sex can only happen between a husband and wife. No porn and no masturbation. In fact, the church's views on sex are so extreme that sexual sin is considered considered a husband and wife. No porn and no masturbation. In fact, the church's views on sex are so extreme that sexual sin is considered considered a sexual sin is considered a sexual sin. Her. And Mormons are even required to confess masturbation to their bishops. So for Kevin to watch porn was a big breach. But Jody had something to offer him. She ran a therapy group for guys with just this problem.

The group? I don't know if you've ever been an addiction recovery group, and that's what it was. That's what it felt like. I mean, there were probably 10 men in there. All of them were working through various stages of sex addiction, porn addiction, drug addiction. It was a 12-step group, but intended just for general addiction recovery.

My name is Scott Burdendone. I live in Saratoga Springs, Utah.

Scott is an attractive guy with short brown hair and a neatly groom beard. We want you to hear about his experience so you understand the men who were in the group that Jody was running and how she was running it, though Scott didn't overlap with Kevin. Scott was introduced to the group via a friend of his wife's.

I was practicing a member of the LDS faith. One thing that I had struggled with was addiction to pronography use. It's a pretty taboo topic to talk about, especially in this church culture. And we get there. It's a really nice office. I've been to a few therapists. It seems pretty par for the course as far as having a nice couch, having blankets, books, and whatnot, and her desk. Pretty typical.

Scott and his wife sat down. He was nervous.

Jody asked me questions that nobody asked before, and I'm just like, Oh, jeez. I was just not prepared for it. She's like, You look at gay porn, you look at child porn. I'm like, Oh, shit, no, I don't do that. I don't know how to say, I feel like it's pretty straightforward and normal porn that I look at. She cut to the chase and it was like, What you're doing here is wrong. She asked me to commit to some things. I just remember, it's like, You're going to have to do this and do I knew this, I knew this, and I'm like, Oh, it's going to be work, and I didn't like it.

But Scott felt like his marriage was on the line. He wanted to save his relationship, so he committed to doing the work.

I jumped right into therapy, weekly group therapy, and weekly couples therapy, as well as individual therapies.

In these sessions and all other parts of Jody's practice, there were lots of the therapy language that's pretty commonplace today, like the concept of boundaries.

She's big on boundaries and holding boundaries. She encouraged very strict boundaries between my wife and I, and also boundaries for me being in my own house.

Jody was also big on personal accountability, on taking responsibility for your actions, which was very similar to Ruby's parenting style. But she also offered a lot of hope to couples in dark times.

What was promised was healing from this addiction a healing of our marriage. Using these principles and learest honesty and accountability can heal this, basically.

That's another patient of Jody's in the men's group. Addison Bates, also raised Norman in Utah.

I remember that first meeting, Jody was very persistent and insistent on wanting to know the details of the porn that I was watching to try and, the air quotes here, but gage the extent of my addiction. The big focus was on eradicating lust. Lust, in her estimation, was the feeling of proceeded acting out on these sexual addictions, like masturbating or cheating on spouse.

Jody had a zero tolerance policy for lust, which Addison says came from scripture.

The whole program is based on the scriptural verse, basically. That's like, he that looketh upon a woman and lusteth after her in his hurt, it would be the same if he did so in the flesh. Or was like, If you do it in your mind, it's just as bad as doing it in real life.

So men like Addison and Scott were desperately trying to eradicate lust from their lives and save their marriages in the process. Scott again.

If I looked at another woman's butt or her chest, then I was lusting. If I had any thoughts that led to some sexuality in my mind about somebody, and this could even apply to my wife, then I was lusting as well.

And this was all considered appropriate by the Norman Church. John DeLinn again.

This is why Jody Hildebrand had a $5 million home in Ivan's, Utah, and that's just the beginning of her assets, is because she got put on some shortlist of therapists that bishops referred members to, and she held herself out as someone who could cure Roman men and women and teenagers of this behavior, this sin next to murder. And so people were willing to pay literally tens of thousands of dollars a year, life savings to Jody Hildebrand because she promised to be able to do what Roman bishops were unable to do, which was to cure these people of their transgressions.

This was the framework Ruby's husband, Kevin, was working within. A strict pedagogy based on scripture that promised to heal his marriage. Or break it completely.

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While Jody was working with Kevin, she was also talking to Ruby a lot. Here's Kevin again.

She would talk with Ruby on the phone or through Zoom quite frequently.

Ruby was a God-fearing wife, working hard to raise her kids in the strict way she saw fit. Maybe in Jody, she found a kindred spirit, another good, strict, Norman woman with morals and values who she could look up to, someone who could provide guidance to her at this trying time in her marriage.

She spoke with Ruby frequently, and the frequency of their communications ramped up.

Now, if you're familiar with couples therapy, you might find this a little weird. Lots of therapists won't see couple clients individually in case it creates a conflict of interest. But Jody did the opposite. She worked with wives like Ruby, both individually and in weekly weekly women's group meetings.

There were weekly men's sessions, and then the companion meetings to those were the waiting for the women.

That's Addison Bates, the former patient of Jody's you heard from earlier. Like Ruby and Kevin, he and his wife started talking to Jody both together and separately.

My ex-wife got bought into this program as Our Saving Grace. The sense I got from my wife at the time was she got this sense of empowerment because she She was given these tools like boundaries, for example. So she started to create her own set of boundaries around what she, quote unquote, would find acceptable behavior for me. Jody had fully convinced these women that lusting is 100% in our control. So if we were lusting, it was by choice. My ex had a boundary that if I lusted, then we would separate.

The whole reason when Addison went to see Jody was because of a one-off incident.

So I had been married for about a year. I approached my then-wife at the time and confessed to her that I had watched porn. And within all that context, it was pretty devastating to her. And I thought initially, our marriage is going to end. She was almost like catatonic for a couple of days. I remember she just sat in this rocking chair and just cried for three days straight.

Addison and his wife went to their local Bishop to confess.

The church is really big on pushing the idea that pornography is extremely addictive and harmful. But anytime porn comes up, it's very much like, Oh, my God, you're a sex addict. You're a sexual deviant. It's this big no-no in the church. So the Bishop recommended that we see a counselor specializing in sex addiction. That was Jody.

Addison started seeing Jody multiple times a week.

I was doing a men's group, one-on-one therapy, and then we had couples counseling as well with my then-wife at the time. The men's group be 5-10 individuals, and they'd be early morning, 6:00 or 7:00 AM. And we would start off each meeting by going around individually and doing check-in, where we would describe how we were feeling in certain categories, physically, sexually, and she defined that sexual check-in as our roles as a male in society. We would then check in on our adherence to the parameters we set up in order to be our sexual addiction. If we had any relapses, we would check in with that. We would also check in with the number of support phone calls that we would make.

The men had to make daily calls to fellow addicts, which mimics AA, where addicts are supposed to call their sponsor to check in frequently. Recently. In Like AA, Jody's program also advocated for full abstinence from lustful thoughts. If men did have a lustful thought, that would count as a relapse.

Lust relapse would be, I see a woman at the gym in tight clothing, and I take a second look, and I indulge in that sexual energy, that sexual attraction.

Jody's solution was to try and prevent those lustful thoughts from happening in the first place.

You'd have to eradicate that desire to lust through strict adherence to boundaries, which I can keep you from putting yourself in that position. So if I was frequently having lust relapses at the gym, well, I don't go to that gym anymore. If I use my smartphone to look up porn, well, I don't use a smartphone anymore.

Now, this is a common idea in 12-step or recovery programs: change your people, places, and things. The basic logic is that if you remove the triggers that drive you to use, like hanging out with other addicts or going to bars or having drugs folded up neatly in your call it, just in case, then you're one step closer to preventing a relapse. But preventing something as intangible as a thought, even a lustful thought, is really difficult.

People went to extreme lengths. I went to some extreme lengths. Now, I wasn't really watching TV or movies or listening to music. I got rid of my smartphone. I used a flip phone for almost the entire time I was in the program. It was so embarrassing. I would have to print off MapQuest. I was so embarrassed. I had to tell people that I was like, I'm doing this as a way to cleanse myself from social media or some bullshit. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Addison didn't use a smartphone for the two years he saw Jody in order to try to avoid having lustful thoughts. But that's not the worst of it. Because it turns out Ruby's husband, Kevin, was about to find out just how bad things could get.

I've heard many people who were in one-on-one therapy with Jody or in these support groups of Jody say that she would explicitly denounce the top Mormon Church leaders. She would refer to them as old men that were clueless. She would say that these men don't know what they're doing and that she's the one who really knows what's going on, who understands mental health. So in some sense, It was revenge on the patriarchy that Jody was claiming so much power within the church, and frankly, bleeding the church financially, because let's just face it, the church was referring people to her and paying to treat these clients. So it was, in some sense, anti-patriarchal what she was doing, and then also just undermining family after family by ensuring that the husbands would become estranged from the wives.

Next time on Infamous.

That was just more fuel to that fire in my mind that Jody Hildebrand was super dangerous. These little people who just want love.

Ruby said, I want a separation from you. And was an in-home separation.