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.
Read the full story at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.