my interview with ruby franke's daughter

Shari Franke

In case you somehow missed it, a new documentary series just dropped about the entire Ruby Franke disaster. (If you’re interested, I covered episode 1 here, episode 2 here, and the finale here.)

The series left me thinking about the conversation I had with Shari Franke, the eldest child of Ruby and Kevin Franke, for Rolling Stone in which we discussed where she stands with her parents after her family’s tragedy, what role she thinks family vlogging played in it, and what’s next for her.

I hope you go read the full story. In the meantime, here are a few excerpts:

1. Shari saw writing the book as a way of taking back her voice after her over-exposed childhood of being raised on a family vlogging channel

“Writing the book was a way to take back my privacy, as strange as that sounds,” Shari tells Rolling Stone in a wide-ranging, hour-long phone call. “Just because it was Ruby who took my voice away… and then with the arrest, it was the media then that picked a side of me to portray.” The book is Shari’s way of correcting the record: her opportunity to share what she’s comfortable telling the world about and keep the rest to herself.

2. Shari looked through old journals and the family’s old vlog content to write House of My Mother

   To write the book, Shari dove into her stash of journals that she meticulously kept during her childhood, and watched old family vlogs. (Though the family’s channel was taken down after Ruby’s arrest, there are compilations and re-uploads all over YouTube and TikTok.) Reading her words and watching the family’s life again was strange. “It felt like it wasn’t my life, in a way,” Shari says. “I don’t like to watch old vlogs because I don’t really remember the things that were filmed, but I can remember the behind the scenes of like, ‘Oh, this was the day that Ruby was yelling, and that wasn’t shown, but that’s all that I can remember about it.” In the videos, the Franke family may appear smiling and joyful when in reality, Shari says, Ruby was yelling at the children to get them to cooperate. “It would cut and then the next clip would be, ‘We’re happy again’,” she says. “She was very selective about when she turned the camera off and when she started.”

3. She doesn’t think family vlogging should be legal – and she doesn’t believe there’s a “right way to do it”

   Because of the experience of growing up in a family vlog, Shari doesn’t believe family vloggers should exist at all, and since the arrest of her mother, has committed herself to activism to eradicate it. “There is no exception,” she says. “Making money off your kids [with] no oversight as to how much the kids are getting paid — there’s no way to do that well for me.” She worries about the privacy of the kids at the center of these channels and their ability to give informed consent. She doesn’t think, as fans claim, that there are family vloggers who do it the “right way.” In a statement to the Utah State Legislature in support of a proposed bill to protect the rights of underage influencers, Shari said there is “no such thing as an ethical or moral family vlogger.” She sees her book, too — the first memoir from a child influencer — as a part of her work to convince the public family vlogging should be put to an end. “It definitely feels heavy, but it’s also something that I feel really driven to do,” she says.

Ruby Franke

There’s so much more in this story and I really hope you read it. In the meantime, tell me what you thought of the documentary. Did you read Shari’s book too? Tell me all your thoughts!