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Hi, you guys.

Welcome back to Killer Thriller Dacu Edition.

I'm your host, Jen Fessler, and we are going in depth and behind the scenes of the most watched and most binge true crime documentaries and docu series. And today we're diving into the Netflix documentary Evil Influencer, the Jody Hildebrandt story. This is a story that I remember hearing about and and it was and is a horrific story about, in my mind, crazy people, evil people, but we will get to that.

Ruby Frankie was a well-known parenting YouTuber. Behind the scenes, she had fallen under the influence of another evil person.

And in my humble opinion, Jody Hildebrandt,

a therapist who preached extreme religious-based beliefs,

teaching the children who misbehaved were evil,

if you can imagine this, and needed to be punished.

So in August 2023, one of Ruby's young sons

escaped from Jody's home.

This scene in this documentary is so devastating. He was malnourished.

He was injured. He was bound with duct tape on his wrists and his ankles. And he ran over to a neighbor.

And I think he knocked on three neighbors' doors and begged for help. Finally, finally,

a man came out and helped him and called the police. And when they

arrived, they went back to the house and found another child inside in a similarly horrific, disgusting

condition. So what followed exposed a pattern of severe abuse, hidden behind the language of

discipline, faith, and control. It is wild. Both women were arrested and later pleaded

guilty to child abuse. And today, I'm speaking with licensed marriage and family therapist, Natasha

Helfer, who appears in the documentary and also overlapped in that same therapy community as Jody

Hildebrandt saw a lot of her ex-clients.

...