Utah’s Hannah Neeleman — aka Ballerina Farm — stepped into the storm caused by a recent profile of the Latter-day Saint influencer and mother of eight, calling The (London) Times story “an attack on our family and my marriage.”
“We had a reporter come into our home to learn more about our family and business,” she said Wednesday on Instagram and TikTok, explaining, “we thought the interview went really well. …We were taken back, however, when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and shocked the world.”
The video statement comes after nearly two weeks of debate that has gobbled up whole sections of the internet and overtaken family and friend text threads. At the heart of the dispute: whether Neeleman, who has won over millions of social media followers with videos of herself milking cows and baking bread, is a victim.
The match that lit the fuse was a profile published by The Times. In it, author Megan Agnew, who spent a day with members of the family on their Kamas farm, depicts Neeleman’s husband, Daniel (son of billionaire airline industry titan David Neeleman), as ever-hovering and someone his Julliard-trained ballerina wife reflexively defers to when asked questions by the reporter.
“I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child,” Agnew wrote. “Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.”
The reactions that followed were swift, and (largely) predictable. For many, Agnew was simply a lefty journalist eager to tear down a woman embracing traditional gender roles (“The reporter was just a liberal single cat lady who is jealous of your beautiful life,” an Instagram user commented on Neeleman’s video statement). For others, Neeleman was a victim of the benevolent patriarchy endemic to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a woman forced to hang up her dreams of dancing professionally in the pursuit of her husband’s “Little House on the Prairie” fantasies.
One voice conspicuously absent from this post-article debate? Neeleman’s.
When her statement did finally come, it arrived as a 90-second video of the pageant queen getting ready for the day and heading to the family’s on-site gym to work out with her husband, kids in tow.
The profile, her voice-over states, portrayed “me as oppressed, with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Agnew did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neeleman does not tackle head-on any of the specific findings, quotes or scenes presented in the story. Among the most hotly debated were Daniel pressuring her to marry him three months after the two met; her husband’s unwillingness to hire child care despite her struggles with bouts of exhaustion so extreme she is left bedridden for days at a time; and a scene in which she tells Agnew, while Daniel is out of the room, voice lowered, that she had an epidural with one of her babies, and it was an “amazing experience.”
(Instagram | @ballerinafarm) Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, posted a video statement Wednesday reassuring followers that she is not "oppressed," and that she and her husband, Daniel, are equal partners.
Instead, Hannah Neeleman takes on the tone of the piece, saying “nothing we said in the interview implied” she was under her husband’s thumb, “which leads me to believe the angle taken is predetermined.”
The day she married Daniel, she said, was “the greatest day of my life.”
“We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diaper changers, -kitchen cleaners and -decision-makers,” she continues. “We are one.”
The two of them still “have many dreams still to accomplish,” including more kids and a forthcoming farm store.
“I’m doing,” she ends, “what I love most — being a mother, wife, a businesswoman, a farmer.”