The arrival of Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story on Netflix feels like a defining entry in the current wave of true crime documentaries. Director Skye Borgman, already associated with careful accounts of domestic secrecy, trains her camera on the arrests of Jodi Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke and opens with an inciting moment that lands fast.
A 12-year-old boy, emaciated and frantic, climbs out of a window in Ivins, Utah, and asks a neighbor for food and water. One act of survival ruptures the polished public image surrounding two people who presented themselves as guides: a famous parenting vlogger and a licensed therapist.
Borgman builds the film around a grim proposition: severe child abuse, framed as religious and moral discipline. Her method stays controlled. The film keeps its distance from lurid framing and moves through the case with a steady, almost clinical attention to how influence and control can curdle into cruelty. It also plays like a bleak mirror of the digital age, where authority can arrive through visibility and confidence, long before it is earned through accountability.
The Architecture of Control
The documentary assembles its portrait of Jodi Hildebrandt as the central designer of what follows, shifting attention away from the more widely known Ruby Franke and toward the person shaping the rules. Hildebrandt worked as a life coach who targeted members of the Church of Latter-day Saints through her business, ConneXions. Borgman lays out the method step by step, and the chill comes from how systematic it looks. Hildebrandt constructed isolation as a practice. She split people from spouses and families, cut them off from support, and positioned her approval as the resource that mattered.
Shame becomes a tool with a clear purpose. The film describes Hildebrandt persuading clients that ordinary human impulses signaled moral failure, then presenting herself as the gatekeeper to redemption. In that environment, dependence stops feeling like dependence. It starts to resemble “progress,” at least to the people trapped inside the logic.
Her partnership with Ruby Franke registers as an expansion of the same power. Franke, already known for her “8 Passengers” YouTube channel, offers the reach that Hildebrandt’s worldview needed. The film presents the pairing as a division of labor: Franke supplies the audience, Hildebrandt supplies the doctrine. Together they launch “Moms of Truth,” a platform that treats abuse as divine instruction and packages rigid control as clarity.
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Central to this ecosystem is the repeated language of “Truth vs. Distortion.” Borgman shows how that binary works as an all-purpose override. Anything outside their doctrine can be labeled “Distortion,” including resistance and independent thought. The result is a permission structure for escalation, where harsh punishments and emotional coercion can be presented as necessary corrections.
The most unsettling material here comes through former clients. Borgman uses their testimonies to show indoctrination as a process of erosion: people being broken down, boundaries thinning out, self-policing taking root. The interviews read like descriptions of psychological reprogramming, where Hildebrandt’s demands move beyond guidance into control over every corner of daily life.
One former client describes Hildebrandt’s shift from therapist to dictator, a figure who expects total obedience. Borgman treats these accounts as essential context. The abuse of the Franke children sits in the film as the endpoint of a philosophy built to crush individual will. The documentary also draws a blunt line to human vulnerability: how easily autonomy slips away when a charismatic authority offers certainty and calls it salvation.
Evidence of the Unspeakable
The film changes tempo once the boy’s escape prompts a police investigation. “Influence” stops being an abstract concept and becomes a documented crime scene. Borgman describes the boy’s condition with painful specificity. He is starving, and his body carries visible evidence of what his mother called “discipline.” The documentary includes details that are hard to hold in the mind for long: open wounds treated with cayenne pepper and honey, a home remedy turned into a mechanism of suffering.
The horror intensifies when police locate a second child in Hildebrandt’s home. She is found hiding in a closet in a room explicitly labeled a “safe room.” She is shaven-headed and emaciated, an image that echoes her brother’s state. Borgman brings in law enforcement voices and prosecutor Eric Clarke at this point, and the film uses their perspective to anchor the facts in space and objects. They guide viewers through the house and point out what they found: ropes, handcuffs, and the safe room itself. The items read as a built environment for abuse, a set of tools kept close at hand.
Borgman stays direct about the acts described. The film says the children were forced into manual labor for hours in the blistering Utah sun, without water or shade. It says they were forced to jump into cactus plants. The documentary uses these details with intention. They remove the soft focus that euphemisms can create around “strict parenting” and force the case into its real shape. The “Truth vs. Distortion” language collapses under the weight of a child made to run on dirt roads until their feet bled.
The evidence functions as the film’s bluntest statement. What Borgman presents reframes the story from a moral panic about parenting culture into a criminal case centered on aggravated abuse. A severe gap opens up between the women’s pious public personas and the dungeon-like reality described inside the home, and Borgman lets that gap speak without decoration.
The Quiet Observer
Borgman’s direction in Evil Influencer is defined by restraint. True crime often leans on breathless narration and insistent musical cues. Borgman prefers silence and room to think. The film avoids a domineering voiceover and lets interviews and primary documents carry the narrative. That choice shapes how the material lands. The documentary places the facts in front of you and lets the emotional reaction arrive on its own schedule.
Her decision to center Jodi Hildebrandt sharpens the film’s argument. Ruby Franke functions here as the visible celebrity, the internet figure whose collapse draws attention. Borgman frames Hildebrandt as the ringleader, the person whose gravity organizes the cruelty. By placing the therapist in the foreground, the documentary becomes a critique of institutional trust and asks how a licensed professional could act with such impunity for so long.
The tone stays calm, and that calm becomes part of the terror. The film avoids staged confrontations and avoids the quick hit of a “gotcha” reveal. The horror comes through a level recitation of events and decisions. When a prosecutor explains the logic behind the abuse in an even voice, the steadiness feels chilling, because it suggests how normalized the cruelty became inside the system Borgman is documenting.
In that sense, Evil Influencer operates as a cultural artifact about unchecked authority. It points to the vulnerability of people seeking guidance inside high-demand religious or social structures, and it shows how digital platforms can amplify certainty until it starts to sound like virtue. Borgman keeps returning to objects and spaces, trusting their plain meaning. A rope in a “safe room” carries its own language. The film presents what it has, then steps back and allows the silence to do the rest.
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story is a true-crime documentary that premiered on December 30, 2025. Directed by Skye Borgman, the film investigates the disturbing partnership between popular YouTube mom Ruby Franke and life coach Jodi Hildebrandt. It details the severe abuse that occurred under the guise of religious discipline and “mental fitness” training. You can watch this documentary exclusively on Netflix.
Where to Watch Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story
Full Credits
Title: Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: December 30, 2025
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 100 minutes
Director: Skye Borgman
Producers and Executive Producers: Fremantle (Production Company)
Cast: Jodi Hildebrandt, Ruby Franke, Eric Clarke, Jessica Bate, Shari Franke, Kevin Franke
The Review
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story
This documentary strips away the polished veneer of social media to reveal the rot underneath. Borgman respects the victims by sticking to the cold, hard facts rather than manipulating emotions. It serves as a potent reminder that evil often wears a smiling, respectable face. The film requires a strong stomach, yet it stands as a vital piece of investigative filmmaking.
PROS
- Restrained directorial style avoids sensationalism and respects the gravity of the subject.
- Centers the narrative on the true manipulator, Jodi Hildebrandt, offering a fresh perspective.
- Effective use of primary evidence and police interviews anchors the story in reality.
- Avoids heavy-handed narration, allowing the audience to process the information directly.
CONS
- The graphic descriptions of child abuse are incredibly difficult to watch.
- Viewers seeking a deep analysis of Ruby Franke specifically may find the focus on Hildebrandt surprising.
