‘I did not know my rights’: Jodi Hildebrandt challenges conviction in high-profile child abuse case

ST. GEORGE, Utah (ABC4) — Jodi Hildebrandt, a therapist who worked with YouTube vlogger Ruby Franke, is challenging her conviction, saying she didn’t know her rights when she pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in late 2023.

Hildebrandt and Franke were both sentenced to up to 30 years in prison on child abuse charges after accepting plea deals.

At the time, Hildebrandt’s lawyers said she was not the person she was being portrayed as but was accepting the consequences for her conduct. She had said one of the reasons she didn’t want to go to trial was so the children didn’t have “to emotionally relive the experience.”

Now, Hildebrandt is calling her plea agreement “unlawful,” with documents saying it was “unlawfully induced or not made knowingly and voluntarily with understanding of the nature of the charge and the consequences of the plea.”

Hildebrandt filed a petition for relief on her own behalf last Monday, March 24, writing, “I did not know my rights and my attorney did not inform me of them.”

The petition listed several other claims, including that her counsel was “ineffective” and the prosecution failed to give adequate notice of the charges.

Attorney Eric Clarke told ABC News that they “weren’t expecting this from Jodi, but I can’t say that we’re super surprised either.”

“I’m super confident that the entry of her plea will hold up, and that she won’t be able to show that she knowingly, involuntarily didn’t enter it,” Clarke told ABC.

Hildebrandt and Franke were prosecuted after one of YouTuber Franke’s children escaped through a window in Hildebrandt’s southern Utah house and asked a neighbor for food and water. State prosecutors would later claim that the offenders put Franke’s children in a “concentration camp-like setting,” regularly denied them food and water, and subjected them to “physical torture.”

The case — which already had a following due to the Franke family’s former YouTube Channel “8 Passengers” — has since garnered greater national attention with the recent release of the Hulu docuseries “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.”

Franke and Hildebrandt will have their first parole hearing in December 2026, approximately three years after they pleaded guilty to the charges.