6 Shocking Bombshells from ‘Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story’

Hildebrandt bent teachings from the Church of Latter-day Saints

Years before Hildebrandt joined forces with the Franke family, she launched the relationship counseling business, ConneXions, in 2007. The now-defunct organization was specifically targeted towards married couples and their families who were part of the LDS church.

However, Hildebrandt would use the teachings of the LDS church to justify her conclusions and harsh suggestions.

“Jodi was so good at taking vulnerable people who were coming to her because they were not in a great place in their lives and framing it in a religious context that kind of fit enough with other stuff they’ve been taught and then pushing them to do things that I know a normal therapist wouldn’t be encouraging people to do,” Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke explained in Evil Influencer.

Family and marriage therapist Natasha Helfer shared that Hildebrandt “found success in an area of mental health that was very aligned with church teachings” and specifically focused on areas of addiction and sexuality.

Jodi Hildebrandt earned nearly $50,000 a month from counseling services

Through ConneXions, Hildebrandt offered individual therapy with couples and families, as well as group classes, couples workshops, week-long retreats and other online activities that all added up to thousands of dollars a month in income.

“She found a niche, and she marketed it. Jodi was very successful at getting people to give her money,” Clarke said in the documentary.

Her former client, Ethan Prete — who was seeing Hildebrandt for marital counseling — estimated that he spent around $2,000 a month on her services.

“Jodi was making a lot of money,” he said. “I was paying her $175 an hour for every individual session, and then a men or women’s group, it’s $75 per week. Paying for yourself and another person — that was $2,000.”

Investigators later found Hildebrandt’s accounting books, where they learned she was meeting with around 46 individual clients per month. They estimated that she earned around $1,000 per month from each client, which totaled to $46,000 per month.

“We were paying more than our mortgage to Jodi every month,” former client Valerie Jackson recalled. “We ended up in so much debt we had maxed out all of our credit cards. We paid well over $50,000.”

The Frankes first met with Hildebrandt for relationship counseling before Ruby began making content with her.

Some of Hildebrandt’s former clients allege that she ruined marriages

In the documentary, several of Hildebrandt’s former clients said that her work initially seemed “groundbreaking” — until their lives and relationships started to deteriorate.

“A lot of individuals [within the LDS church] have very minimal exposure anything related to therapy, and so when Jodi comes in with these pictures and videos and starts to teach this idea living a life that’s honest, responsible and humble, helping people to live in truth to being like Christ, it feels like it’s groundbreaking,” Prete said.

Prete and his wife met with Hildebrandt for around five months to repair their marriage, but it only worsened after she labeled him a “lust addict” and determined that he was a “monster.” Prete and his wife ended up separating shortly after he left the program, and he believes “100 percent, it’s because of Jodi.”

“My separation was very dark,” Prete said in the documentary, getting emotional. “It was some of the darkest moments of my life. It’s like as if you were being tortured and someone is just beating you down.”

Meanwhile, Jackson and her husband also met with Hildebrandt weekly, and she similarly diagnosed her husband with a “sexual addiction.” She taught Jackson how to “control” him by taking away his phone, internet and streaming services.

“My marriage was not improving, and so Jodi advised that we have a year-long separation with absolutely no contact,” Jackson claimed. “There was no help in trying to get us to reunite. It was just no contact, the end.”

Jackson recalled depending on Hildebrandt “like she was the authority figure of my life,” claiming that she was “acting as a mouthpiece for God.”

“It’s really hard to look back and see areas where I followed Jodi, despite what my gut was telling me,” she said. “Jodi definitely had a huge hand in ruining my marriage. Within a year, we were divorced.”

Hildebrandt allegedly planned to drop off Franke’s children in a desert before her arrest

In the midst of Hildebrandt and Ruby’s abuse of the two youngest children, the duo decided to move to the middle of the desert to further isolate the kids.

Investigators came to this conclusion after locating Ruby’s journal and obtaining property records that showed Hildebrandt had bought “several acres” of property in the middle of the desert in Arizona. Hildebrandt also purchased two tractors for the kids to allegedly use for work.

“The journal talks about how Jodi is getting her house ready to sell,” Clarke said.

In the documentary, Detective Jessica Bate of the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department read from Ruby’s journal, where she allegedly wrote about how the “escalation of the kids is not manageable here.”

“The girl, I will bring into the cool house, and she can sit in the pantry,” Bate read from Ruby’s journal. “They will think they won. They will they they got what they wanted. They will relax, then pop! We will drop them like hot potatoes in the desert.”

Hildebrandt allegedly attempted to hide evidence after running into police

Both Clarke and Bate spoke in Evil Influencer about how they pieced together Hildebrandt and Ruby’s abuse of the children.

On Aug. 30, 2023, Ruby’s youngest son, who was 12 years old at the time, escaped from Hildebrandt’s home. He sought help from a neighbor, whom subsequently alerted authorities.

A local officer drove to meet the boy at the neighbor’s home when he ran into Hildebrandt, who was searching for the escaped child. Hildebrandt asked the responding officer if she had seen a boy.

“I believe that Jodi went back to the residence after she saw the officers,” Bate said. “She took the rope and the handcuffs — which the boy had removed from himself — downstairs into the safe room, put them in the bottom drawer and closed the safe door. I think she did that, because she knew that was clear evidence of her involvement.”

After meeting with the boy, police did a “safety check” on Hildebrandt’s home, where they found Hildebrandt and the boy’s younger sister, who was 9 years old at the time. They later located the other two minor children at a family friend’s home.

Within hours of the boy escaping the house, the police obtained a search warrant to search Hildebrandt’s home for evidence. There, they found physical evidence of the abuse, including ropes, handcuffs and dressings of cayenne pepper and honey.

Hildebrandt still maintains her innocence

In February 2024, Ruby and Hildebrandt were each sentenced to four to 30 years in prison, which was the maximum sentence for their offenses. As Hildebrandt lives out her sentence, she has maintained her innocence.

“The Lord says, ‘That first they’ll lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogue and prison,’ ” she said in a call from prison, as shown in Evil Influencer. “So then he says, ‘And ye shall be betrayed by both parents and brethren and kinsfolk and friends.’ I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what’s going on.”

In another call, Hildebrandt got emotional, proclaiming, “I shouldn’t be here. I haven’t done anything wrong. We didn’t do that. Those pictures, we did not do. He did that to himself.”

Hildebrandt maintained that she “was being set up to end up” in prison.

“The blessing’s pretty clear and it says, ‘The strongest message you will ever teach is the power of your example,’ ” she said in another phone call shown in the documentary. “What’s a better example than to go prison unjustly and then go teach the gospel? Which I plan on doing.”