Original subtitles

- Hey, guys, this video might be

a little scary for you younger guys.

If you're not sure, ask an adult.

[static whirs]

[soft music]

♪♪ ♪♪

ZACH: Social media isn't real life.

We have what we portray to people in the outside world

versus who we really are.

As a parent, you never know

what's happening behind closed doors.

This was a nice neighborhood.

You had two-story homes,

lot of families on the block.

Kids seemed to be happy.

CHILD: Three, two, one, go.

♪♪ ♪♪

ZACH: Fantastic Adventures was a channel

with nearly a million subscribers

and videos that have hundreds of millions of views.

They were essentially influencers.

That does not happen by accident whatsoever.

YouTube was a huge part of this family's life.

- In a community, you can have influencers.

You can have stars. We don't know that they're there.

♪♪ ♪♪

It's not like they have a banner outside of their house.

They actually want to live in relative anonymity.

When they can curate their image,

it gives them the ability to really hide behind it.

ZACH: The prevailing sense I got was that no one knew

what was going on inside that house.

KENT: It was the most horrible things,

the most egregious things that we've encountered.

She was a monster.

And I wanted her to spend every waking moment

of every day the rest of her life behind bars

thinking about what she did to these children.

MEGAN: Do you think any of the kids should live there?

CHILD: No. I think they're not safe there.

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

- My name is Zach Crenshaw.

I'm a reporter and anchor

for the ABC 15 station in Phoenix.

In local news, you never know

what you're gonna get on a daily basis.

That's kind of the fun of it.

Live in Scottsdale tonight, Zach Crenshaw,

ABC 15, Arizona.

I'd only been in Phoenix for less than a year

when I get a tip from a source about Fantastic Adventures,

the popular YouTube channel that was filmed

in a nice neighborhood in a suburb of Phoenix.

[rock music playing on computer]

- Good game.

♪♪ ♪♪

Yes, yes, we won!

- It was a story that would resonate with our viewers.

- Hey, guys, thanks for watching.

ZACH: Fantastic Adventures was massive.

They had nearly a million subscribers

and hundreds of millions of views on these videos.

Now, as I was finishing up my reporting on this story

and getting ready for the piece to air...

I had my first daughter.

Everything changes when you become a parent.

Every parent before they have kids says,

"Oh, well, I'm not gonna let my kids watch YouTube."

But in reality, it's a modern-day pacifier.

YouTube is

a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry.

There are tons of content creators

essentially working full-time jobs,

churning out content that lives on sites like YouTube.

RYAN: Welcome to Ryan's toy video.

- Fantastic Adventures

was far from the only family channel out there.

There are many lucrative channels on YouTube

with millions of views

that feature kids and target that audience online.

That's subscribers

and influence and reach with the young demographic.

- Look, there's a shopping cart.

- What does it do? - I don't know.

All right, get in.

Let's do this.

[screaming]

ZACH: Adults were not sitting down

and watching Fantastic Adventure videos.

The reality is these videos were geared toward kids

and consumed by children who wanted to see maybe kids

their age going on adventures and activities.

- There's definitely several subcategories

of parent influencers.

There's the daily family vloggers,

like the Shaytards, OKbaby,

and the LaBrant Family who post a video every day

and their whole thing is that it's all really real.

I'm Camryn Turner, and I'm an influencer.

[laughs] I hate that word.

It just makes me sound like I think I'm this big deal,

but it is my job title.

I'm a YouTuber, and I have 1.6 million subscribers.

There's a lot of responsibility

that comes with having

such a loud voice that is heard by so many.

At any second, I could go live

and instantly be talking to a ton of people who care.

You have to choose what to do with that voice.

♪♪ ♪♪

Hi, guys. Welcome back to Cam & Fam.

I started my channel as Cam & Fam.

I run the show.

Let go of my hair.

I'm my own producer, editor.

She's hungry.

It's a one-man-band type of thing.

Motherhood is already, like, almost a competitive space.

And so when you add vlogging to that

and numbers and comments, it is intense--

way more intense than anyone could really imagine.

It is time to get started for breakfast.

We are having pancakes.

- Mmm. - Mmm.

We made sure that every second of our day

was mostly accounted for.

Good morning.

First thing in the morning--

"Oh, we got bedhead, and we're just snuggling in bed.

Good morning, everybody."

You know, the picture-perfect family lifestyle.

There was constantly a question

with every video posted, like, "Will this get views?"

You have to ask yourself that.

Where you going, Coco?

When I announced the pregnancy of my second daughter,

for a few weeks straight,

every single video I posted had at least a million views.

- [laughs]

CAMRYN: I was making around $30,000 a month.

[dramatic music]

It became addictive.

♪♪ ♪♪

There was definitely a lot of incentive

to follow the trends,

to keep up with what other people were doing.

Certain channels started to gain a lot of traction.

- There, the trap is set.

It's not working.

CAMRYN: The kids had these big personalities,

and the parents really encourage

these big reactions.

- Just pick me up. We're gonna lose.

- There's the content that is very scripted--you can tell.

- I think I threw it too far.

- You think?

CHILD: Fantastic Adventures.

CHILD 2: And we've been searching and searching...

CAMRYN: Those videos are 100% scripted.

There's no doubt.

Everything is centered around getting those shots,

planning for it.

- Wow, we won.

- I knew we would.

CHILD: You have nowhere to stay?

LEAH: Fantastic Adventures

is a very highly curated slice of life.

As a parent, and I imagine for many other parents,

nobody's kitchen is that clean when they have kids.

My name is Leah Plunkett, and I'm the author of the book

Sharenthood: Why We Should Think

before We Talk about Our Kids Online.

If you want to be an influencer,

social media allows families to bypass production studios,

to bypass professionals of all sorts

and take matters into their own hands.

The rise to fame is an experience

that for many can be really complicated.

Traditional child-performer laws

were written before the YouTube era

to protect kids in Hollywood or on Broadway.

We know, tragically, that in some cases,

even those laws are not comprehensive enough.

There are a lot of challenges for kids later in life.

[applause]

On the other hand,

the commercial sharenting sector is largely unregulated.

- Gee, Mickey, we don't know how lucky we are

and how much we have to be thankful for

with our health and our happiness.

LEAH: Child internet performers

are really at the mercy of their parents

in ways that are ripe for exploitation.

Fantastic Adventures-- those kids might be called

kid influencers or "kidfluencers,"

but you do not have an eight-year-old,

no matter how talented they might be,

on camera without a parent somewhere in the background.

There are many sharenting parents

who are not exploitive in the least.

They are doing right by their kids,

but there's also bad actors out there

that may be criminal and dangerous.

♪♪ ♪♪

- [gasps] There's the team.

Psst. Hey, come over here.

ZACH: For nearly a million subscribers,

Fantastic Adventures was a daily part of the routine.

- Good job. We got that team.

- And the real influencer was Machelle Hobson--

the mastermind behind all this.

She essentially had a production company

in the form of her children.

Machelle has four biological children--

two sons, two daughters.

And then she had seven fostered,

then adopted children.

- We're gonna get him with a snowball.

- Me first.

ZACH: YouTube was a huge part of this family's life.

She had her older, adult biological sons

writing, filming, and directing these things.

And these fostered and adopted children were essentially

child actors.

- I'm out of darts.

- They look happy. They look healthy.

They're having fun. - [speaking indistinctly]

- I think people look at that, and they don't want to say,

"But what are we missing?"

- Get her.

ZACH: Machelle had an endgame in all this.

She wanted to climb the YouTube ladder,

and she had the means to do it.

She was a very ambitious, intelligent person

when it came to marketing, branding,

and she knew where she wanted to go with this operation.

She knew she had reach and influence

when it came to children and their parents,

and she leveraged that

by partnering with these large toy companies.

♪♪ ♪♪

Ultimately, she wanted to work with Disney.

♪♪ ♪♪

Her adult children said

that they thought she was gonna move to California

to get closer to that company

and the largest child brand in the world.

♪♪ ♪♪

You think you know somebody

because you've consumed hours of their life.

But it's not reality.

Machelle created an illusion,

and it couldn't have been further

from what was actually happening.

♪♪ ♪♪

Her real power came

at home when the cameras weren't rolling.

♪♪ ♪♪

- [laughs evilly] [electricity crackles]

KENT: The Fantastic Adventures videos are all about playtime.

[dramatic music]

You would think that these kids

were just living their absolute best life.

CHILD: It's done.

KENT: I mean, quite frankly, if my kids watched that

they'd be like, "Dad, why don't we get to do that?"

- Let's do this.

- They start to believe

that that's how everyone's life should be all the time.

[quirky music]

My name is Kent Volkmer, and I'm the Pinal County Attorney.

Before I took this role, I was in private practice,

dealing with kids that were struggling.

Sometimes I would be the person

that would actually file the petition

to have children put into the system,

where hopefully they would be safe.

Adoption, it's a long process.

You're typically looking at six months

to potentially a year with a thorough background check

and a home study.

Machelle Hobson had been vetted by DCS,

and she took the children

that a lot of other families did not want to take.

Some of these were kids that have special needs

that already have a tough road ahead of them.

They have greater doctor's needs.

They have great supervision needs.

And there are very, very few homes in our community,

in our state, frankly, that can take

seven high-needs children all at one time.

And she was able to portray herself as this savior

for these kids that needed so much.

[whoosh]

[whistling, bell dings]

CHILD: Uh-oh. What did you just do?

GINO: Making YouTube videos--

they look like they're having fun.

- You think?

GINO: But beyond that,

to me, when they speak their lines

in the back of their heads,

they're going through their files and saying,

"Did I do that right?

Did I say that right? Was that right?"

It's almost as if they are scared to fuck that up.

♪♪ ♪♪

My name is Gino Valerio,

and I married Machelle back in...

'95?

Me and Machelle went to high school together.

We weren't in the same crowd.

I just knew of her.

And she was, like, the smart students,

you know, the sexy, good-looking gals.

They stay away from the nerdy guys like me.

[laughs]

Uh, no.

After high school, I went into the Marine Corps.

When I got out,

I was suffering from PTSD.

You know, always on guard and always defensive.

So I just got into drugs and drinking and gambling.

[voice breaking] I didn't know what to do with my life.

♪♪ ♪♪

Mutual friend of ours... [sighs]

Got me on this blind date with Machelle.

And when she walked into the room,

you knew this woman was in charge of something.

Her control, her power, her natural charisma--

I loved it.

She talked to me all lovey-dovey, you know?

"I got you. I'm here. I'll protect you.

I'll take care of you." That kind of thing.

She started pulling me out of the gutter

slowly and surely.

She got me clean and sober. She got me a job.

I love her unconditionally for that.

We got pregnant...

and so me and Machelle got married.

[dramatic music]

That's us taking our vows, okay?

♪♪ ♪♪

After me and Machelle got married,

literally the morning of it,

I found out she had two children before me.

There's two boys hanging out with her.

"Who are these boys, Machelle?"

"Oh, they're my sons." "Wait, what?"

Completely shocked.

I didn't know she had an ex-husband either.

But he had custody of the boys.

We've been together for, like, a year.

Every day when we got together and we started dating,

she would physically take off the pictures

with her and her sons off the walls.

She withheld pretty much everything she could.

We have a daughter together. That's why I stayed with her.

But after a while, she starting getting

more "controllative" and more "controllative."

I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't even breathe until she told me to breathe.

Eventually, after me and Machelle got divorced,

she got remarried, moved to Arizona,

and then she adopted all those kids.

Her brain--she knew how to find loopholes in everything.

She knew how to get around certain things.

Creating a business like this...

making YouTube videos...

not shocked at all, not at all.

♪♪ ♪♪

ZACH: When reporting this story,

I talked to a lot of neighbors...

people in Machelle's orbit,

and the prevailing sense I got

was that Machelle was very secretive.

They kind of thought, "Well, we knew there were kids

"in this house, but we never saw them out riding bikes.

"We never saw them going to the park.

"We didn't hear playing in the pool much.

We do not know what went on on a daily, hourly basis."

But it's pretty clear,

YouTube was a almost full-time job.

They were making a living off Fantastic Adventures.

♪♪ ♪♪

KENT: So, for a period of time,

the children were enrolled in the local public school.

One of the children reached out to an authority figure.

Somebody that the child trusted, which was her teacher.

She said, "Hey, this is what's going on in my house."

ZACH: Machelle's daughter told her teacher

that her mom took her toothbrush,

which is why she had a bunch of gunk in her teeth.

The teacher went out on a limb to disclose this to DCS

and say, "I've seen general neglect in this child,

"and she needs to be taken care of

in a way that's not happening at home."

- The Department of Child Safety came out,

did an investigation,

and Machelle Hobson was specifically told,

"Hey, this is the allegation that this child made."

DCS looked at the history of the child,

looked at some of the experiences,

and, yes, relied on the fact

that there was a thorough background investigation

that evaluated her, evaluated her home,

spoke with other kids in the home.

ZACH: DCS had a relationship with Machelle.

She had dealt with DCS caseworkers

for years and years.

And a lot of these kids

already have some form of trauma,

being removed from their biological parents.

So the state has a responsibility

to ensure that they are put in the care of good parents.

In Machelle's case,

there has to be a level of trust in the home.

She fostered a lot of kids over years.

Machelle always seemed calm

and said the right things at every turn.

So DCS left that little girl in Machelle's care.

♪♪ ♪♪

At the end of the day,

these kids were pulled from school so they could act 24-7.

The parent has a lot of power there.

KENT: In Arizona, we have a fairly robust

homeschooling community.

All of those are completely sanctioned

and actually very common.

Once they were pulled out of school,

once she could really focus her efforts

into generating content,

that's when the YouTube channel

really started to rise to prominence.

She was really doing all of the groundwork

to set up an empire.

Machelle put a lot of money into her equipment.

She had just purchased a house in California.

Out there it gives them more opportunity

to have more outdoor filming.

♪♪ ♪♪

This was their entire world. This was their universe.

♪♪ ♪♪

Social media, Facebook, anything like that--

new technology, new freedoms inherently come with new risks

and new problems that we didn't anticipate.

On YouTube, there are those people that are really just

documenting their everyday family life.

[all screaming]

When done right, that's a great thing to do.

When done wrong, you get Machelle Hobson.

- The Grinch!

- Whoa, good job.

I had no idea that bush was a player.

There's only one more team left.

Let's win this.

- Watching any content from Machelle Hobson,

you have to ask yourself, "Is this exploitative or not?"

What the difference is, for me,

it's like, can you post a video on your channel

without your kids in it,

or are they the backbone of your channel?

- [gasps] Look.

There they are.

CAMRYN: It's really a game you play,

because young kids just don't really know what it means

to be filmed, and they cannot consent to that.

BOTH: Welcome back, Camily.

- We're gonna start getting ready for our day

When I was in the height of my popularity on YouTube...

All right, I am all ready.

I was spending more time filming than I was parenting.

I would spend the whole day in bed on my laptop,

adamant about seeing every single comment

that got posted,

and I wanted the validation more than anything,

the praise.

But anytime I complained about the struggles

with being an influencer,

I would get people saying, "You chose this life."

And I did, but I think there's a question of,

at what point is it a decision,

and at what point is it your only option?

The only thing that made me me was...

being a YouTuber

and being a mother and being a wife.

- It's really delicious, though.

CAMRYN: At a certain point,

certain people could tell

that what I was selling was a lie.

It's so much harder than we let people believe.

What a productive day. - Yes, it was.

CAMRYN: Every family vlogger

has something that they're not sharing with the audience.

There's always room for lies and secrets,

and there's always things to hide.

And...

- We'll see you in the next video, Camily. Peace.

- Why do you always say "peace" now?

- Peace.

♪♪ ♪♪

♪♪ ♪♪

CHILD: What are you doing?

CHILD 2: I'm trying to find a werewolf!

CHILD: Are you okay?

When is the last time you slept?

- [laughs] I don't know, last Tuesday.

♪♪ ♪♪

- It is ironic that this video has a monster,

a giant werewolf that these kids are hunting down

and shooting with their guns.

- He went upstairs. He's cornered.

There's no escape.

- Sort of fitting for this case.

- You go in that room, and I'll go in this one.

KENT: I was about 2 1/2 years into my career

as a prosecutor when I actually received a call

from the Maricopa Chief of Police

and just said, "Hey, Kent, you need to be aware of this one."

There were allegations so horrific,

we knew the media was going to be involved

and every move that we made

was gonna be under a microscope.

Machelle Hobson's empire, if you will,

was entirely ran by her immediate family members.

Her daughter, Megan, did some of the merchandising

and, frankly, helped a little bit of the babysitting.

She would make sure that things were running smoothly.

Megan needed to take one of the children to the dentist,

and the child's teeth were in terrible decay...

just rotting.

She started asking some questions,

and some of the answers really shocked her,

so she got her cell phone out, and she recorded

the conversation she had with the child.

MEGAN: What about Mom?

CHILD: How--where she locks me in a room,

doesn't give me blanket.

MEGAN: What kind of room is it?

CHILD: A closet, and it's a tile floor--

no carpet, just an empty green room.

And she has a lock on it, so we can't get out to have to pee,

if we have to pee or anything.

KENT: So Megan hears this little child,

her adopted sibling,

say that if they're not performing

like they're supposed to,

they're getting locked in the green room.

And then if they continue to screw up,

then the punishments actually get worse.

CHILD: If we do something wrong,

like drop something on the floor or something,

she doesn't let us eat

for at least two days straight or maybe more.

MEGAN: What's the longest she's ever made you go

without eating?

CHILD: Four days, straight four days.

MEGAN: No food and no water? CHILD: No food, no water.

KENT: Megan did not live in this house,

but she had suspicions.

And as she's driving,

Megan's starting to put two and two together.

She's starting to say, "I know the exact room

that they're describing."

She had no choice but to come forward.

She then reaches out to law enforcement

and says, "I have a video that you really need to see."

CHILD: When we are bad, my mom gives us ice baths,

many ice baths--not just one, many ice baths.

KENT: The allegations were so, so detailed

and coming from such a small child,

The Maricopa City Police Department

immediately began investigating.

♪♪ ♪♪

They discovered that the kids

were removed from school and homeschooled.

They did speak with some of the teachers

and some of the nurses.

They recalled some bumps and bruises--

nothing that rose to the level to suggest

that they were enduring the kind of abuse described.

CHILD: If we do anything wrong, she pepper-sprays us,

and then she makes us sit with the pepper spray on us

for a whole entire day straight.

KENT: They would talk about pepper spray.

And then Megan is also confirming these same things

to law enforcement, saying,

"Yeah, I remember seeing pepper spray in the room.

"Yeah, I know that, you know, when they're offered food,

like, they just scarf it down, and they gobble it all down."

It's potentially life-threatening.

So we needed to get in there immediately,

and we needed to start hearing from the kids individually

and find out what's actually happening in this house.

MEGAN: Do you think any of the kids should live there?

CHILD: No. I think they're not safe there.

♪♪ ♪♪

[doorbell rings]

KENT: Law enforcement goes to the Hobson residence.

Machelle Hobson's in the house

and also her two adult children,

who were males in their 20s.

And then the seven adopted children were all in the home.

[door closes]

KENT: Machelle was very calm, saying,

"Oh, that's problematic, that's troublesome,"

but did not seem to be riled, did not seem to be concerned.

She had all of her ducks in a row.

She had established--"Social workers have looked at me.

The DCS system has looked at me, the state."

In her mind, it was, "You can believe this child

with all these problems, or you can believe me."

They find children sporadically

all throughout the house in various rooms.

Some of the rooms were locked.

Some of the rooms didn't even have mattresses.

Most of the children were in Pull-Ups,

which struck them as a little bit odd,

given the age of the children.

Law enforcement, oftentimes, when they first make contact

with kids, they want to find some level of connection,

but they were clearly very, very afraid.

Just hearing those kids in the background,

that's heart-wrenching.

[child sniffles, cries softly]

- You have these kids that are truly petrified.

Even eating the food, they were very hesitant,

and they were still quivering.

After listening to the children speak,

it was very clear that, hey, when it comes to

Machelle's voice versus another authority's voice...

Machelle's voice wins out.

We almost immediately got these children

into these forensic interviews,

where she could not get ahold of them

and we could actually hear directly from the children

what they experienced, what they saw,

what they went through, and they're all recorded.

We've got multiple sources

saying essentially the same thing--

just horrible, traumatic, monstrous abuse.

The kids all described

a very similar sort of pattern.

Filming days--they were rewarded with snacks.

They were rewarded with food. They were celebrated.

The rest of the time they were isolated,

they were essentially prisoners

that were locked in this house.

We reviewed receipts

of money that came in from Google.

We saw some of them that were in the six figures.

Machelle Hobson, she had over 800,000 followers

and had over 250 million individual views.

The Fantastic Adventures--

that's not what their real life was.

You see these kids doing these really fun

and exciting things that would make every little kid jealous.

- What's up, guys? You're the best.

KENT: When in reality, they never left their backyard.

They did everything out of pure, unadulterated fear.

- A mother now under arrest tonight.

Prosecutors have charged that mom

with abusing the children.

REPORTER: Police also accuse

Hobson's two biological adult male sons

of failing to report the abuse,

despite knowing about it.

The on-camera scenarios chillingly similar

to what police say was the reality.

- See? We're trapped.

♪♪ ♪♪

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

- One week ago, Maricopa Police got the call--

reports of children being starved, pepper-sprayed,

even locked in closets.

Police say Machelle Hobson had the world fooled...

- This mother was a master manipulator.

ZACH: With YouTube videos

showing happy and healthy kids.

- Hey, guys, this video might be

a little scary for you younger guys.

If you're not sure, ask an adult.

And for the rest of you...

[deep, evil voice] Enjoy the show.

- People look at that, and it's a visceral reaction.

You feel so angry.

It was sickening to hear

what was happening to them behind closed doors

and then to see them on YouTube

and the appearance or facade of happiness.

- Hmm.

ZACH: I covered it

as a general-assignment reporter.

And I'll never forget--

you know, driving down there, I read the police report.

And they had physical signs of abuse on their bodies...

♪♪ ♪♪

Burn scars, bruising,

even bruising around the neck.

All of the physical evidence corroborated the kids' story

about the abuse that was happening

behind closed doors.

- So did you guys have fun at the water park today?

- It was awesome.

KENT: The law enforcement community

was just as outraged that two adult children in the home

could be in that same household

and do nothing to intervene.

ZACH: If you spent any serious time in that house,

you would've noticed a lot of red flags.

♪♪ ♪♪

The kids' rooms were filthy.

There was stuff piled up--

neck high in some cases of just clothes and trash.

There's the fact that were locks on the outside of doors.

Why is that necessary unless you're locking someone inside?

♪♪ ♪♪

KENT: We did review the case

against Machelle's two adult sons.

When we evaluated the law that we have here in Arizona

and we compared their actions to the law,

we found that they had no duty

to those children for caregiving.

Their mother was always there.

So we dismissed all charges against the two.

Machelle Hobson is certainly the mastermind.

♪♪ ♪♪

This is greed. This is money.

We're talking potentially millions of dollars of income

on an annual basis.

We reviewed a lot of the documentation--

looking through mail,

looking at various negotiations

with all kinds of advertisers.

There was dialogue with Disney,

trying to get Disney to be an advertiser.

It was clear that she thought that that was her pot of gold.

You could clearly see the escalation,

and it was really when the money started pouring in

and the need to do more production,

more elaborate productions to get more air time--

that's when it appears

that the physical abuse really started to escalate.

The only way she could've been an influencer

was using these children.

They were chattel.

They were goods that were being used.

♪♪ ♪♪

- She was good at that.

She was really good at making sure

that people saw what she wanted them to see

and nothing else.

♪♪ ♪♪

[indistinct shouting]

We were split up,

and she was so brutal towards me.

She threatened...

our daughter several times.

"You cannot talk to Gino. You cannot"--

So that's why I could never see her.

All I knew-- she was in Arizona.

And, really, that was it.

Like everything else that Machelle did,

she controlled it all.

And then in 2019,

my daughter called me.

It was great to hear her voice.

"Wow. How are you? What's going on?"

"Well, did you hear about my mom?"

[scoffs] "No."

"Well, here's the information."

Boom.

I get the news article,

you know, and the video.

I'm looking at that, thinking...

"Holy shit."

She never talked about adoption

when we were together.

I had no clue she would do that, you know,

no clue.

Machelle wanted everything, and she wanted it her way.

She picked the easy marks.

She loved that power.

She would've taken it and taken more and more and more.

I felt bad for them, all of them--

not just my daughter, for everyone.

They were POWs. They were prisoners of war.

- Look over there.

- No child should ever be put in that position.

♪♪ ♪♪

ZACH: I got a tip from a source on this story

that kind of told me I need to stay on it.

He said, "Hey, you know that story you reported?

"The Maricopa Police Department

got a call at that exact address two years prior."

Right after I got that tip,

I filed a blanket records request

for the police reports, the photos,

the forensic interviews, the body-camera video.

♪♪ ♪♪

We found out that December 2017,

one of the children who had been in these videos

ran away from the house.

This child was found in the backyard

of a different person's home completely naked.

[siren wails]

Police took him to a hospital,

and they allowed Machelle to show up

and be by his bedside relatively quickly.

♪♪ ♪♪

So, after that child ran away from home,

he told them, "I'm being abused.

"I'm being starved, and I'm being pepper-sprayed.

Please do not take me back to that house."

KENT: We actually have a protocol.

We don't just go in guns blazing,

call the SWAT team, kick in doors,

and just assume everything

that the child said is accurate.

It's so important that everybody be spoken to

and everybody be spoken to separately.

Law enforcement at that time confronts Machelle

and says, "Hey, you know, what's your side

of the story on this?"

And Machelle says, "I'm the foster parent.

"This is a child that has severe behavioral issues.

"I run a strict household.

"They got out. That's on me.

I can do a better job of locking things."

This is somebody

from a middle-to-upper- middle-class neighborhood

who had hundreds of thousands of dollars

either in the bank or recently spent.

You don't look like a monster.

You don't look like a person that could commit

these just horrific atrocities on little children.

She was able to put the concerns

of that patrol officer at ease.

- Instead of categorizing that as criminal child abuse

in the report,

they allowed it to stay categorized

as a child runaway welfare issue check.

And they allowed those children to stay in the home.

♪♪ ♪♪

OFFICER: Mm-hmm.

KENT: It is our belief

that child then suffered the consequences

of coming forward, and Machelle Hobson made sure

that every other child in that household

knew exactly what happened when he went forward to authorities.

ZACH: We found out that this had been going on for years.

Based on police documents alone,

the Arizona Department of Child Safety

had been alerted to Machelle

about abuse and neglect allegations

11 different times.

In this case, both sides thought the other

was going to handle it.

Maricopa Police thought DCS had it.

DCS thought Maricopa Police had it.

And both dropped the ball.

♪♪ ♪♪

- Because there weren't adequate resources,

they cut corners, or they made judgment calls,

and as a result, these children got harmed.

Maricopa PD went back.

They uncovered some stuff that they could've done better.

They said, "Look, we should've seen these signs."

- In hindsight, there was some mistakes.

KENT: What ends up happening is you see this abuse

over and over and over.

You get desensitized to it.

♪♪ ♪♪

OFFICER: Straight ahead.

KENT: Given the severity of the crimes

and the likelihood that she would try

and get ahold of these children...

OFFICER: And take a left.

- We believed that she was a danger to our community

and a serious flight risk.

OFFICER: Go ahead and stop right here.

- Our case rested solely on the testimony of these kids.

If she could convince even one of these kids

to say that everybody made it up,

she potentially could end up beating these charges.

OFFICER: Okay, why don't you step up to the bench?

And go ahead and sit down.

[line trilling]

ELECTRONIC VOICE: Hello, this is a free call from...

ZACH: There was a fear

her attorneys would've pointed to the YouTube videos and said,

"None of this house-of-horror stuff existed

because you have the real truth on video."

She could walk free again.

REPORTER: Tonight, the mom accused of abusing

at least five of her seven adopted children

in an Arizona courtroom,

handcuffed and in a wheelchair.

LAWYER: We'll waive a reading, enter a not-guilty plea, Judge.

REPORTER: Machelle Hobson facing 30 egregious counts.

OFFICER: Okay, I'm right here. Slide this way.

- All right. I can't.

ZACH: At the time of her arrest,

Machelle Hobson was 48 years old,

and she did not take very good care of herself.

OFFICER: Step up.

- There were questions about if she was going to be

medically competent to stand trial.

[line trills]

ELECTRONIC VOICE: This is a free call from...

ELECTRONIC VOICE 2: Pinal County Sheriff's Office.

- We were informed that she had a medical emergency.

Her defense counsel reached out

and said it's very serious. [siren wailing]

She was taken by ambulance to the hospital.

- We drove down to Maricopa for a morning court appearance

in hopes of seeing her in court,

and she never showed up.

She had had some sort of stroke.

[dramatic music]

I was working one night, and I actually got a text

from the same source who tipped me off years ago

and told me, "Keep digging on this.

Keep pulling this thread."

And he said, "Machelle Hobson's just died."

- ABC 15, the first to report tonight--

Hobson died hours ago in Scottsdale.

- I had mixed reactions.

On the one hand, we were looking forward

to exposing her for the monster that she was.

But on the other hand, there was a bit of relief.

These kids no longer have to testify.

They don't have to relive this horrible trauma.

We know that there's consequences to that.

She will never be able to harm them or any other child again.

And that is...

the best justice that we can get.

♪♪ ♪♪

ZACH: So I remember feeling just like

a chapter was over in this story,

but I wanted the people in power who missed these signs

to see what had happened.

These kids were overlooked

and failed at so many levels.

For nearly a decade,

at least seven kids

the Arizona Department of Child Safety

was charged with protecting

said they were starved,

beaten, burned, pepper-sprayed,

and pulled from school.

This news report blew up.

We had a lot of people reaching out to us,

telling their experiences with DCS,

what they went through

either as a parent, a child.

It really resonated with people.

KENT: The community was outraged by what they heard.

The most upsetting thing to me personally is...

the trust that was broken with these kids.

We placed them with a monster

who terrorized and traumatized them.

[child shouting indistinctly on computer]

KENT: We then had to yank them away yet again,

separate them from all of their siblings,

and we had to place them with yet a completely new family

and tell them, "Trust us. This time we'll get it right."

We tried to place them together,

but all the children were not ultimately reunited.

ZACH: I think for everyday, average Arizonans,

they saw this and thought, "I had no idea

"that our government institutions

designed to protect children could fail to this level."

Case workers didn't get one shot to save these children.

They got more than ten.

It's just--it's infuriating.

They refused to give us any records,

citing child-privacy laws,

despite the fact that they could redact those names

and that Machelle has passed away.

If your job is to protect children

and you were the case worker on the Hobson case,

there's got to be a lot of guilt.

If this could happen on their watch,

they need to ask themselves,

"What else have we missed, and why did we miss this?"

Because we don't know

how many Machelle Hobsons are out there.

♪♪ ♪♪

CAMRYN: People like Machelle Hobson...

CHILD: [on computer] What's he doing?

CAMRYN: Bring a negative light

to family vloggers.

But sometimes there needs to be a negative light.

Like, a lot of these moms are living in denial

about what is really going on here

and what the risks are.

Obviously, not all these cases are as extreme,

but there are questions that need to be asked.

In the YouTuber community,

that kind of stuff happens

way more often than you'd think.

And people do a very good job at hiding it.

♪♪ ♪♪

Over the last year, I've really taken a step back

and thought about the potential consequences

of sharing my children's life online to this extent--

taking away all this privacy.

Oh, she's a big girl now.

Oh, you got me. - [laughs]

- I decided to open my laptop and do a deep dive,

and that's when I realized there were predators

liking these videos, saving them,

adding them to playlists for later.

And I was sick to my stomach when I found that out.

♪♪ ♪♪

LEAH: We live in a world already,

where, once a child's image is online,

a parent has no meaningful control over that image.

But also, all of us as parents are still figuring out

the digital world for ourselves.

Many of us post a lot,

some of us a lot a lot.

Some of us make a living posting.

♪♪ ♪♪

Feeling this pressure to get more and more eyeballs on it,

drive up the advertising revenue

may actually then lead to horrific behavior

that the kids are on the receiving end of.

[child on computer shouts indistinctly]

LEAH: In the case of Fantastic Adventures,

it really does seem that without this viewership,

there might not have been the same type of abuse

and neglect happening in the first place.

We do not have labor laws right now

that consistently and comprehensively protect

kids who perform on social media for money.

Core protections would include

making sure the child was still being educated,

making sure that the child wasn't working too many hours,

putting money into a trust account for them.

ZACH: Whether or not you're on a real set in Hollywood

or you're filming for YouTube videos,

there's trauma that goes along

with being famous at a young age.

Children should have the right to say,

"This is my voice, and I should decide what I want to be in."

And they should be able to be a kid

and not a performative cash cow.

YouTube removed Fantastic Adventures

pretty quickly after it came to their attention

that these children were victims of abuse.

♪♪ ♪♪

Bad things happen every single day.

People get scammed and conned, and that's horrible,

and it ruins their lives-- it really does.

A lot of stuff in this world can be replaced.

But what you can't do

is you can't give a child back their innocence.

Machelle robbed them of a childhood

in every sense of the word.

♪♪ ♪♪

KENT: These kids matter.

They spoke their truth. They were honest.

They were straightforward, and they were disbelieved.

I believe them. We believe them.

- We're out of darts. What are we going to do?

- More than anything, I want them to find a family

that will love them for who they are,

not exploit them, not use them,

not see them as a meal ticket, but instead care for them,

love them, give them the family that they deserve.

♪♪ ♪♪

- I hope they don't see the story.

I hope they've moved on to a different point in their life

where they don't think of themselves

as the YouTube Mom kids.

That's my hope.

I just hope they're okay.