Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon influencer known as Ballerina Farm, has long been the subject of controversy.
The 34-year-old has eight children and competes in beauty pageants. Her social media accounts reference the intense ballet training she experienced at the Juilliard School and the Utah farm she runs with her husband. Onlookers frequently debate whether Hannah should be praised or criticized for the perfectly manicured life she has been broadcasting online for nearly a decade.
The debate bubbled up once again after U.K.'s Times newspaper published on July 20 a profile that called her the "queen of the tradwives" and again when she issued a rare response to the story on July 31.
Here’s what you need to know about the latest controversy surrounding Hannah.
Who is Ballerina Farm?
Hannah has more than 20 million followers combined across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. She posts about dancing, pageant preparation, parenting her eight children and life with her husband, Daniel Neeleman, who is also an influencer known as @hogfathering. The couple owns Ballerina Farm, a brand that sells meat and home goods.
Her social media accounts show her doing ballet with the sprawling farmland in the background, making complicated meals from scratch with a baby strapped to her chest, showing her young children how to milk a sheep and walking across a pageant competition stage in a swimsuit. Intermixed are posts about the family business: flowers for sale ahead of Mother's Day or Ballerina Farm-branded raw milk.
Though she’s been called a “tradwife,” a term that describes a woman who sticks to “traditional” values by serving as a homemaker while her husband acts as the family breadwinner, Hannah says she and her husband are business partners.
She has been criticized for rarely showing imperfections or talking about struggles, creating unrealistic expectations for already stressed-out mothers and women. Countless influencers and social media users treat their feeds like a highlights reel, sharing only their best moments, but some say that needs to change.
Hannah's father-in-law, David Neeleman, is the founder of multiple airlines, including JetBlue, and their apparent general wealth is also frequently discussed in conversations about how much work Hannah does around the house.
In 2023, Hannah went viral when she competed in the Mrs. World pageant just 12 days after giving birth to her eighth child — without pain relief and in her home. Her post about the competition, in which she made it to the top 17, garnered comments about her body and concern about why she went back to competing so quickly after birth. Glamour's Stephanie McNeal wrote that some people might look at the perfection of Hannah's experiences and feel "attacked" by their own "less idyllic" circumstances.
She's one of many homemaking influencers, like fellow Mormon creator Nara Smith, who have grown in popularity in recent years through posts about raising children and cooking from scratch. Both have faced backlash over how they present their lives online.
Profile reignites discussion
Since Hannah is so selective about what parts of her life she shares with the world, the Times profile introduced a few apparent cracks in her flawless facade, which generated concern from the audience.
“Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?” the article asked. Writer Megan Agnew spent a day on the farm with the influencer and her family.
Hannah met her husband the summer before her final year at Juilliard, a prestigious school that accepts only 24 new dancers into its program each year. They got married and quickly decided to start a family, first living together in New York City as she finished school before moving to a ranch 30 miles outside of Salt Lake City. She ultimately left her dance career behind, which some readers assumed wasn’t her own choice, given her enthusiasm for the craft.
“My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina,” she said, according to the Times profile. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.”
Agnew wrote that Daniel and the children frequently “corrected, interrupted or answered for” Hannah. One such instance repeatedly went viral:
"Our first few years of marriage were really hard, we sacrificed a lot," she says. "But we did have this vision, this dream and —" Daniel interrupts: "We still do."
Agnew noted that the Neeleman family doesn’t have a nanny, though they do have child care when the couple go out on dates. At one point, Daniel said Hannah sometimes becomes so sick with exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.
Another point of contention for readers is how Hannah and her husband talk about her births. Of their eight kids, six were born at home without pain medicine. When her husband was not present during her Times interview, Hannah said she received only one epidural, which she described as "great." Some expressed concern that she was being subjectedtounmedicated births against her wishes, which is a growing concern among professionals.
The profile resurfaced one of Hannah's earlier posts in which she unwraps a present from Daniel. She repeatedly said she hopes the package will contain a "trip to Greece," but it's an egg apron. Commenters discussed how that appeared to show her sadness.
On TikTok, posts saying Hannah "deserves better" than her husband and that their "heart breaks" for her have generated millions of views.
"Ballerina Farm is a reminder that if you marry a rich man, you will work for him and earn every cent," one viral post read. "Don't envy a gilded cage," another TikTok user wrote.
However, some people said that Hannah has chosen to live like this — reframing her ballerina dreams in favor of motherhood aligns with her chosen values — and that onlookers should not feel bad for her. Hannah made a choice to be a mother and a homemaker, and now that choice is on display.
"Why are we so enraged by a woman who chooses a traditional marriage/lifestyle? … Motherhood is self-sacrifice. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's bad," one TikTok user wrote.
Neeleman’s response and backlash to the Times profile
On July 31, Neeleman said in a short video posted on her social media pages that although she thought her time with the reporter went well, she was "shocked" by the Times article and called it "an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed and my husband being the culprit."
“That couldn’t be further from the truth … which leads me to believe that the angle taken was predetermined,” she said. “Together, we have built a business from scratch. We've brought eight children into this world and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diaper changers, kitchen cleaners and decision makers.”
After Agnew shared recordings of her interview with Hannah on the Times' podcast, some say it reveals that the influencer's words were taken out of context.
“We’re in a partnership now, you know,” Hannah says in the recording. “I don’t feel like I’m at home raising kids by myself … we really carry the mantle together.”
In a viral video response to the profile, one TikToker said "the reporter clearly had an agenda."
“There are so many comments from women … who have been so corrupted by modern feminists that they just cannot fathom that a woman could actually find it very empowering and freeing to lean into her femininity and the things that make her special,” she said.
In a follow-up article published July 29, Agnew wrote that the debate her profile inspired "confirmed what was known before: [Hannah] … has become an avatar through which people hotly debate motherhood, womanhood and freedom to choose either."
“I think this is the reason she inspires such strong opinions: the trad life makes women feel threatened by one another’s choices,” Agnew wrote. “It is as if one lifestyle is going to inhibit the other. That our freedom — however we interpret ‘freedom’ — is being undermined by the existence of someone else’s.”
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