Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story (Pender Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 27) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story. Directed effectively by Kevin Fair from a script by Alyson Evans and Steve Kornacki (who may or may not be the same Steve Kornacki as the khaki-clad hottie who does election poll analysis for MS-NBC; his imdb.com page is ambiguous), Mormon Mom Gone Wrong is the more-or-less true-life story of Ruby Franke (Emilie Ullerup) who when the show begins is more or less happily married to Kevin Franke (Josh Blacker; a hunky bear-type) and the mother of six children: Shari (Savannah Miller), Chad (cute twink Nolen Dubuc), Abby (Annaston Munro), Julie (Farrah Love Hahn), Russell (Rowan McInnis), and Eve (Amara Sanoy). When the show starts Ruby is the host of a video blog (“vlog”) called 8 Passengers about how wonderful her family is, though Chad is showing signs of typical teenage rebellion, hanging out in his room when the rest of the Frankes are shooting a dinner sequence for the blog and presenting themselves as one big happy family. Then Ruby starts falling under the influence of Jodi Hillebrandt (Heather Locklear, a rare example of an actor in a leading role in a Lifetime movie whom I’ve actually heard of from elsewhere), a credentialed child therapist who runs a center called ConneXions and who claims to be in direct communication with God. Jodi is depicted as outright crazy; I’m guessing she was schizophrenic, though I’m not an expert on mental illness and I could be wrong about that. Jodi gradually takes over Ruby’s life, at one point moving into the Frankes’ home after she gives Ruby a cock-and-bull story about being forced to move out of her own house due to an abusive husband.

Jodi decides that at least some of the Franke children are possessed by Satan, and she does the whole-nine-yards cult brainwashing program on Ruby, including getting her to close out all her bank accounts and take the money in cash, and announcing plans to buy a ranch in Arizona where she will set a combination counseling seminar and boot camp for people with wayward children. An African-American Mormon named Braxton Young (Marc-Anthony Massiah) tries to warn Kevin Franke about the extent of Jodi’s evil and craziness, saying that he and his wife took Jodi in and it wrecked their marriage. Among the demands Jodi makes of Kevin are first an “in-house separation” in which he has to stay in certain parts of their house while Ruby has the rest to herself (a plot device used as long ago as 1915 in Alice Guy-Blaché’s comedy short A House Divided) and then a full separation in which Jodi and Ruby casually and cruelly order Kevin out of his own home. Jodi imposes a “tough love” regimen on the kids (aside from Shari, who luckily is away at college when all this is happening), including tying up Russell – literally – and forcing him to stand outside for hours barefoot in the heat of a Utah summer. When Shari returns home from school during a summer break, she’s shocked at the change in Ruby and how she and Jodi are treating her siblings, including leaving them at home alone for a week without any food. Shari reports them to the police, but absent a search warrant or so-called “exigent circumstances” (i.e., seeing a crime in progress through the windows which the cops could claim they had to stop) the police can’t do anything unless Ruby lets them in – which Ruby, under Jodi’s instructions, won’t.

Ultimately the police find Russell standing barefoot on the Frankes’ back porch, and that’s enough of an “exigent circumstance” for the cops to break in and arrest both Jodi and Ruby for child endangerment. Ruby cuts a plea deal with the prosecutors in exchange for testimony against Jodi, but they don’t need her because Jodi also pleads guilty. Ruby is sentenced to four consecutive sentences of one to 15 years; according to the Wikipedia page on her, she asked that the sentences be consecutive because under Utah law she could stand a chance of being released after four years. Kevin files for divorce from Ruby after she’s busted. The Wikipedia page also states that Shari Franke was against this movie being made because “they were not contacted about the movie, none of the proceeds from the movie would go to the younger siblings in question, and that releasing the film would only hurt the victims more than they already were hurt beforehand.” Overall, Mormon Mom Gone Wrong is a quite good tale of how cult leaders work and the intensity of their religious or quasi-religious brainwashing – at times you wish you could walk into the screen and talk some sense into Ruby, though you know you can’t and the characters in the movie who genuinely love her, like Kevin and Shari, try and fail – and though it’s not without flaws, it’s a compelling tale and Heather Locklear hits all the right notes in her portrayal of a woman with a sure instinct for catching her victims, reeling them in and keeping them in thrall to her madness.