Ruby Franke: Influencers Dark Family Secrets Revealed

Rating: Four out of five stars

All these people who call themselves influencers — they're just shysters, all of them, online frauds and fakers peddling their veneers of perfection.

We all know it. But how satisfying it is to see proof, when the 1,000-watt facade slips and the nightmare behind the false smile is revealed.

I'd never heard of the Frankes or their channel, though they were apparently famous in the States, a few years ago. 

But I was engrossed by the US documentary The Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke, which showed footage the parents — glimpses of anger, bitterness, violence and control-freakery they never intended the world to see.

Ruby Franke is a blonde-bobbed mother-of-six, whose family was part of the Mormon community in Springville, . 

In 2015, she began filming herself and her children, capturing moments of carefully choreographed cuteness.

At first, America adored them. The channel had two-and-a-half million followers at its peak, and their videos were viewed more than a billion times.

But as the older children, Chad and Shari, hit their teens, their cynical image of wholesome middle-class church-going happiness became more difficult to sustain. 

The children grew tired of being constantly on parade, and Chad in particular rebelled.

Their mother's response was brutal. She hired a draconian therapist, Jodi Hildebrandt — a sort of sergeant-major bellowing psycho-claptrap. 

The two of them imposed a severe regime of discipline to keep the children in line.

Chad was threatened with spending the rest of his teens at an army bootcamp, and banned from his own bedroom for seven months — forced to sleep on a beanbag in the basement.

But when Ruby let slip a hint on camera of how harshly she bullied her family, the online backlash was intense. 

That was the beginning of her downfall. She is now serving up to 30 years in prison for child abuse.

The first episode of this three-part series ended with police breaking down the door to the Frankes' home. Neighbours raised the alarm after one of their children, malnourished and scarred, escaped through a window.

Some of those neighbours helped to tell the story. So did Chad and Shari. Disturbingly, though, Ruby's husband Kevin was one of the interviewees, insisting he had no idea how cruelly his wife mistreated their children. 

He was never charged — even though he sometimes appeared to be holding the camera.

In the clips she released via YouTube, Ruby's broad grin, ringed in a lasso of brilliant scarlet lipstick, always verged on becoming a grimace. She looked exhausted by the sheer physical effort it took to hold the smile.

But when the smile went out, the savagery she unleashed could be terrifying. The woman was a narcissistic monster.

And she filmed the damning evidence herself.