YouTube parent pranksters learn the joke’s on them at custody time

The videos on DaddyOFive's YouTube channel were hard to watch. In one, parents Heather and Mike Martin scream at 9year-old Cody, accusing him of spilling ink on the ground. (He didn't spill anything, and the stains on the carpet were from trick ink). Another shows Cody being shoved into a bookcase. In a third, the dad encourages one of his sons to slap 11-year-old Emma, the only girl among the five children in the family. He does, hard enough to make Emma cry.

When the broader YouTube community found out about the channel, there was an angry uprising. And now, the once-estranged birth mother of Cody and Emma has emergency custody of her two kids.

"Emma and Cody are with me," said a visibly nervous Rose Hall in a YouTube video posted on Monday to her lawyer's channel. "They're doing good," she said. "They're getting back to their playful selves."

Hall's lawyer, Tim Conlon, who appeared in the video with her, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that they asked the Frederick County Circuit Court in Maryland to grant Hall temporary emergency custody on Friday. Hall, Cody and Emma will remain in Frederick County while a Child Protective Services investigation is ongoing, Conlon said.

The Martin family had five children; Hall has said she is the biological mother of two of them, from a previous relationship with Mike Martin.

The saga of the Martin family and, eventually, Hall's attempts to regain custody of her two children, became a matter of collective viral jus- tice a couple of weeks ago, after YouTuber Philip DeFranco posted a video about the content that was featured on DaddyOFive's channel. The channel had 750,000 subscribers and posted content almost daily. Many of the videos documented cruel "pranks" that the parents pulled on their children, particularly on Cody. DeFranco's video highlighted some of the more disturbing moments from DaddyOFive's archives, and led many to conclude that the children in the family were being abused on camera, for the sake of clicks (and, in turn, the ad-generated revenue that came with it) — an accusation that the Martins have denied.

Less than a week after the outrage over DaddyOFive went viral, the couple posted an apology video — with the help of a crisis management and PR firm — announcing that the entire family was in counseling. "We realize we have made some terrible parenting decisions, and we just want to make things right," Heather Martin said in the video.

The couple had previously said that the prank reactions were "faked."