Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - September 14, 2023


Quick and Dirty Ruby Franke Update

Topics
Ruby Frankie child abuse allegations
Who the hell is Ruby Franke？ A Very Mrs. American Ballerina Farm

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

147.76

Word count

1,477

Sentence count

100

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hello, hello. Hi. So I wanted to do a quick and dirty update on the Ruby Frankie story.
00:00:17.020 I have gotten so many notes from you about the last episode. So many notes. I have gotten
00:00:24.720 messages from people who had never heard of Ruby Frankie before and of people who, like me,
00:00:30.420 went deep into the Ruby Frankie rabbit hole and feel a little bit like they just got slimed by
00:00:36.620 Slimer in Ghostbusters 1. Now, we did a good overview in the last episode, but if I could
00:00:44.820 have updated that episode like an hour before it went live, I would have because so much news kept
00:00:49.980 breaking. But I wasn't here. I wasn't here to do it. I was on a surprise birthday trip. Nick planned
00:00:57.500 this surprise trip for me. I didn't know where we were going until an hour before we went to the
00:01:03.980 airport because American Airlines ruined the surprise by texting me that my flight to Lisbon
00:01:10.720 was on time. We went to Lisbon. We went to Portugal. It was amazing. There were no children there.
00:01:17.040 So we did all the things that I can't do when there's kids around, which is namely walk more than four blocks without someone begging me to carry them, trying on clothes in nice stores without someone climbing under my dress or under the dressing room door like a lizard, drinking at rooftop bars, and staying out until 3 a.m. doing karaoke with a bunch of Dutch college kids.
00:01:47.040 And then sleeping as long as I needed to, to deal with the inevitable hangover the next day.
00:02:00.720 That's why I didn't immediately update last week's episode. So I'm going to do what I'm
00:02:06.500 going to call just a quick and dirty here. The biggest takeaway from the updates from this
00:02:10.940 crazy Ruby Frankie story of allegations of child abuse of a very, very popular mom influencer
00:02:19.720 is that now everyone involved is throwing everyone else under the bus. This is a big old
00:02:28.240 case of whataboutism here. It's the husband, the sisters, Ruby Frankie herself is throwing her 0.98
00:02:37.760 children under the bus. It just seems like everyone involved in this story is kind of
00:02:42.600 terrible, like the Roys are terrible on succession, but without the witty dialogue and inevitable
00:02:50.180 likability. So here's where we're at. Here's where we're at. Ruby, Frankie's husband, Kevin,
00:02:56.700 is now distancing himself from the child abuse allegations. He is claiming the couple has been
00:03:01.400 separated for quite some time, that Ruby demanded they live in separate houses, that he hasn't seen
00:03:06.880 their children, and he is completely unaware of any child abuse going on. Now, this could be true
00:03:14.680 if he had never, ever watched a single video that his wife had made of disciplining their children.
00:03:23.480 Now, yes, maybe he did not know about the level of abuse happening in their home, but he knew 0.99
00:03:30.440 how his wife disciplined their kids. He was well aware, unless he'd been living under a rock for
00:03:38.300 their entire parenting journey and marriage, which it does seem like he may have been.
00:03:44.560 Kevin doesn't seem like the brightest bulb in the bulb box. Kevin is also throwing Ruby's
00:03:52.020 business partner, the elusive Jodie Hildebrandt, under the bus by saying that it was actually
00:03:59.520 Hildebrand's fault that she was spearheading a campaign to destroy the Frankies' marriage, 1.00
00:04:05.960 that she is some kind of crazy, manipulative Svengali, and that she has also done this to 0.99
00:04:12.340 other people. It was Kevin's lawyer who revealed all these things. He talked to something called 0.93
00:04:18.660 the Law and Crime Network, not to be confused with the Law and Order SVU Network, which is my
00:04:26.360 favorite show of all time. Anyway, Kevin's lawyer said that he, quote, kind of came to his senses
00:04:34.060 about how he'd been manipulated and deceived, end quote. Kind of came to his senses. Kind of
00:04:40.640 came to, I mean, what kind of testimony is that? Seriously? He said that his client had no idea
00:04:48.400 that anything untoward was going on and that he's, quote, distraught at hearing these abuse
00:04:53.720 allegations.
00:04:57.420 He also says that he's, quote, trying to make sense of what's happening to him and is, quote,
00:05:01.820 coming out of a fog.
00:05:04.040 He's busy.
00:05:05.460 He's struggling and trying to make sense out of what's happened to him in the last 13 months
00:05:10.920 and kind of coming out of a fog.
00:05:15.180 So in other words, he was completely taken off guard by these allegations, completely
00:05:20.800 shocked?
00:05:22.480 Absolutely shocked. 1.00
00:05:23.720 I didn't know my wife was doing terrible things to our children.
00:05:28.080 I've been in a fog.
00:05:29.380 I've been busy in this fog for quite some time.
00:05:32.040 I don't know how the court is going to take his fog testimony, but God bless.
00:05:38.480 But Kevin is not the only one.
00:05:40.280 Ruby Franke herself has now said that one of her other minor children was sexually abusing another minor child.
00:05:49.420 Now, I don't know if this is her excuse for what she was doing.
00:05:53.720 But can we talk about a mother who would say in a testimony that she knew was going to be part of the public record, that she would publicly accuse one of her children of something?
00:06:08.720 Everyone in this situation is terrible.
00:06:10.160 I guess I think the title of this quick and dirty update should be Everyone is Terrible.
00:06:16.340 And if the Ruby Frankie story reminds us of anything, and these are the messages that I've
00:06:24.160 been getting from all of you, and I love it when you all send me the messages. The messages that
00:06:29.060 you've been sending are saying, we cannot believe everything that we see on social media. We cannot
00:06:37.440 just accept people for who they present themselves to be. We have to dig into who they are. We have
00:06:43.600 a look below the surface, we can't just assume that someone is, one, a parenting expert, or two,
00:06:49.700 a good mother, just because they're presenting themselves that way. There was so much going on,
00:06:56.160 a lot of it in plain sight with this Ruby Frankie story, and a lot of people just blindly followed
00:07:03.180 her. It tells us a lot about influencer culture and how we can very easily be sucked in by
00:07:07.860 influencers. Some quick other updates. Ruby's sisters posted a video on YouTube, of course,
00:07:16.260 saying that they were, quote, sickened by the news of child abuse allegations. Again,
00:07:23.140 doesn't seem like this is something that should be so surprising. My favorite quote actually comes
00:07:29.260 from Jennifer Franke, who's married to the brother of Ruby's husband, who said,
00:07:35.800 Ruby's not really my cup of tea.
00:07:37.520 I've never really liked her from day one.
00:07:39.620 She also clarified that they haven't been involved with Ruby's family for more than a decade.
00:07:43.340 But I love that she felt the need to tell the Daily Mail that Ruby wasn't her cup of tea.
00:07:48.240 Everyone wants to be a little bit famous, friends.
00:07:50.360 Everyone wants to be involved when a big story breaks.
00:07:53.640 And that's another lesson that we should take away from this.
00:07:56.240 If something terrible ever happens to you,
00:07:58.780 every weirdo you've ever encountered will come out of the woodwork with an opinion about you.
00:08:03.940 I would love to know who would talk about me. And last but not least, YouTube has terminated
00:08:09.520 the two channels that are linked to Ruby Frankie, um, apparently in accordance with their creator
00:08:15.700 responsibility guidelines, um, and say that they will not allow anyone to re-upload any of the
00:08:23.380 videos. Uh, I don't know. For me, that feels like a little bit too little too late. Uh, and again,
00:08:31.640 raises a question we talk about all the time. What is the responsibility of these platforms to
00:08:37.700 vet their content? Ruby Franke's videos were clearly about a mother disciplining her children 0.97
00:08:43.880 in ways that in hindsight, everyone can agree were quite abusive. And what responsibility do
00:08:52.980 these platforms have to vet so-called experts, people giving advice? So I guess good on YouTube
00:09:00.880 for not making money off the Ruby Frankie story anymore, but also maybe do better in the future.
00:09:09.040 All of you social media techie platform people, just saying, just saying. Have a great week,
00:09:16.980 everyone. We will be back next week with an interview with Sarah Peterson, one of my favorite
00:09:22.860 authors. She wrote the book Momfluenced, and we will be having a really good chat about Hannah
00:09:29.060 Nealman, Ballerina Farm, winning the Mrs. American pageant. Now, if you've never heard of the Mrs.
00:09:35.860 American pageant, you're not alone. Neither had I. I did not know there was a Mrs. America pageant,
00:09:41.340 much less. Also a Mrs. American pageant. Yeah, two pageants, Mrs. America, Mrs. American,
00:09:48.820 both celebrating women's domestic labor, which should theoretically be a good thing,
00:09:54.100 but they do it in a way that's really weird. That's next week.
00:09:59.060 Bye loves.