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We are always aware, I think, of man’s inhumanity to man. The latest true-crime documentary from Netflix is here to remind you that this is an umbrella term. It is undoubtedly rarer, though precisely why is unclear, but women can inflict the most awful suffering too – and here, a pair of them do so on children.
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story is the latest offering from Skye Borgman, who is the undisputed queen of the genre, specialising in high-end takes on the most extreme, the most only-in-America stories of depravity you could (not) hope to find. She made her name with 2017’s Abducted in Plain Sight, about the case of Jan Broberg, who was kidnapped not once but twice by Robert Berchtold, a close friend of the Brobergs and a sexual predator who effectively groomed the whole, spectacularly naive family. The Girl in the Picture, five years later, tells the story of a young woman known as Sharon Marshall, found after her death in a suspicious hit-and-run accident to have been living under multiple aliases as the kidnap and rape victim of a fugitive on the run from the FBI for decades. I Just Killed My Dad completed an unholy trinity of films from Borgman, with an examination of why 17-year-old Anthony Templet shot dead his apparently loving father and waited calmly outside for the police to arrest him. Spoiler alert: Templet’s father was nothing like the man he seemed.
All the films are sober, unsensationalised looks at their subjects. They allow all the witnesses and any living victims time to speak freely and thoughtfully, and they interleave testimonies about the effects of events and perpetrators’ actions with facts, timelines and evidential hurdles faced by police and prosecutors in the cases with consummate skill.
Evil Influencer is no different. It has measured accounts from the police detective Jessica Bate, put in charge of the case when it became clear that the 12-year-old boy ringing at a stranger’s door was not a young prankster but a malnourished escaper from the nearby home of supposed therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, and covered in injuries indicative of severe abuse and torture. When the police searched Hildebrandt’s home they found his similarly starved and terrified sister sitting shaven-headed in a closet, ropes and handcuffs hidden in a safe room and assorted other evidence that supported the boy’s story.
Eric Clarke, the county attorney who would put together the case against Hildebrandt and the children’s mother, Ruby Franke, adds thoughtful commentary to his explanation of how proceedings unfolded. Franke had, with her husband, Kevin, been a popular pair of influencers showing followers how to raise a happy family in accordance with Mormon beliefs. Hildebrandt, herself raised within the faith, was a life coach who specialised in helping members of the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS) who were going through marital difficulties resolve them. She was on LDS bishops’ list of approved advisers and her clients were thus primed to trust her, even when her “advice” mostly comprised inducing shame about sexual desire (especially male) and quickly shaded into all but enforcing separation of couples so, it seems, she could better control them as individuals. Male and female former clients talk about the power she came to wield over them (and the money they paid her in the process) and the damage she did to their relationships with their spouses and children.
Ruby Franke fell under her sway and became her business and possibly sexual partner too, and, with Hildebrandt assuring her that they were doing it all for Christ, participated in the abuse of the two children.
Like Borgman’s previous films, and indeed like any entry into the true-crime genre, what it doesn’t do is escape accusations of voyeurism and exploitation. Evil Influencer lays out an appalling but very simple story of extreme child abuse done in the name of God by someone who was able to convince others – and maybe herself – that He was working through her.
Clarke (an LDS member himself) and others have interesting things to say about how early religious training in “a strong church” can make people more susceptible to being led to extremes, but it is not delved into deeply enough to give the film the heft it needs to transcend its essentially grubby impulses. A new year’s resolution to do better than make or watch more of this stuff might improve us all.
