Jodi Hildebrandt: Where the 'Evil Influencer' Counselor Is Now

On the morning of August 30, 2023, a 12-year-old boy climbed through a window of a house in Ivins, Utah, and knocked on a neighbor's door to ask for food and water. He was emaciated. There were wounds where duct tape had been wrapped around his ankles and wrists.

The house he escaped from belonged to Jodi Hildebrandt — licensed counselor, founder of a program called ConneXions, and business partner of parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke. By the end of that day, both women were in custody. The full case file on Franke is here; this file is about the counselor — the woman Netflix's documentary calls the Evil Influencer — and where she is now.

Who Jodi Hildebrandt was before the arrest

Long before the case made national news, Hildebrandt was a clinical mental health counselor in Utah with a growing reputation inside her community — and a disciplinary record. In 2012, Utah regulators sanctioned her license after she disclosed a client's private information without authorization. The sanction didn't end her career. It barely slowed it.

In the years that followed she built ConneXions Classroom, a subscription life-coaching operation wrapped around her core doctrine: people live either in "truth" or in "distortion," and distortion must be confronted — in yourself, in your spouse, in your children. Marketed to married couples and parents, ConneXions grew into podcasts, seminars, and online content with Hildebrandt as its unbending central authority.

Then came the partnership that made her famous. Ruby Franke, whose 8 Passengers channel had documented her family of eight to millions of subscribers, folded her audience into Hildebrandt's world. The two produced content together as "Moms of Truth." Franke moved into Hildebrandt's orbit — and eventually, two of her children moved into Hildebrandt's house.

The case: what happened in Ivins

What investigators found in August 2023 is described in charging documents and the women's own guilty pleas: Franke's 12-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter had been kept in conditions prosecutors described as torture — malnourished, isolated, bound, made to do physical labor in the summer heat, and told their treatment was itself an act of love aimed at their repentance.

Prosecutors were direct about the ideology underneath it. This wasn't discipline that spiraled; it was doctrine applied to children — Hildebrandt's framework of distortion and repentance, enforced in her own home, on someone else's kids.

In December 2023, both women pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. There was no trial. Neither woman has appealed the outcome — and because the convictions came by plea, there is essentially nothing to appeal.

The sentence — and why "4 to 60" really means 30

At sentencing in February 2024, each woman received four consecutive terms of 1 to 15 years. On paper that reads like a possible 60. Utah law caps consecutive indeterminate terms at 30 years, so 30 is the true ceiling.

The more important number is the one Utah doesn't write down: the actual release date. Utah sentencing is indeterminate — judges set the range, but the Board of Pardons and Parole decides how much of it a prisoner serves. The board ordered both women to complete full mental-health evaluations and cognitive behavioral therapy before it would see them.

Where she is now

Hildebrandt is held at the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City — the same prison as Ruby Franke, though the two are housed separately. Her professional life is finished in the formal sense: on May 10, 2024, Utah's Division of Professional Licensing permanently revoked her counseling license.

Her first appearance before the parole board is scheduled for December 2026 — the same month as Franke's. The board's options run the full range: set a release date, schedule another hearing years out, or hold her toward the 30-year maximum. Given the board's own preconditions and the profile of the case, that December hearing is the single date that matters on this file. We track it — along with every other major hearing this year — in our court dates tracker.

The documentary

Netflix released Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story on December 30, 2025 — a 100-minute film from director Skye Borgman (Girl in the Picture). Where most coverage of the case centered on Franke, the vlogger with the audience, Borgman's film turns the lens on the counselor: how a licensed professional with a prior confidentiality sanction built an ideology, monetized it, absorbed a family influencer's following, and ended up with that family's children in her house.

It's a useful inversion. Franke had the platform. But the doctrine the children were subjected to was Hildebrandt's.

Why this case file matters

The Franke-Hildebrandt case is usually filed under "influencer culture gone wrong." That misses what made it possible. Hildebrandt wasn't an influencer — she was a credentialed authority, a licensed counselor whose framework gave the abuse its vocabulary and its justification. The camera-facing partner drew the audience; the clinician supplied the system.

The record now shows both of them in the same prison, walking toward the same December 2026 hearing room, where a board — not a judge, not an algorithm, not an audience — will decide how the story ends.

Case status as of this writing: convicted by guilty plea on four counts of aggravated child abuse; serving up to 30 years at the Utah State Correctional Facility; first parole hearing scheduled for December 2026; counseling license permanently revoked May 2024. This article is based on charging documents, plea and sentencing records, Utah licensing actions, and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: booking photographs of Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt, Washington County Sheriff's Office, August 2023 — public record.