Ballerina Farm: Hannah Neeleman Hitpiece Misses the Point about Her Autonomy

The Times recently profiled the “Ballerina Farm” enterprise and its face, Hannah Neeleman. Neeleman is a Juilliard-trained ballerina and member of the LDS Church who now competes in beauty pageants while living on an expansive Utah farm with her eight children and billionaire husband Daniel, the heir to several commercial airlines. She shares her unconventional life on social media to millions of followers: Video snippets show her milking cows, attending rodeos, preparing for pageants, cooking from scratch as little children assist as sous chefs, and dancing ballet. The footage is aesthetically pleasing because the Utah landscape is stunning and because Hannah is effortlessly beautiful, which very few women can accomplish while tending to sheep.

Since Neeleman appears to be perfectly happy practicing religious and conservative values with her large family, the Times wrote a hit piece to destroy her. It is unclear why the journalist, Megan Agnew, bothered traveling to Utah to conduct an interview, since she obviously had a predetermined conclusion and an unwillingness to hear the answers to her questions. The headline calls Hannah the “queen of the ‘trad wives,’” yet Hannah states that “I don’t know if I identify with that [trad-wife label]” because “I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.” Aside from the contrived effort to frame Hannah as a dangerous “trad wife” whose values threaten society, Agnew portrays her as a victim of a controlling husband who constantly interrupts and has never respected her boundaries. Agnew suggests that the family’s lifestyle is entirely determined by Daniel. Supposedly, Hannah made significant sacrifices while he made few, if any. The biggest tragedy, in Agnew’s framing, is that Hannah ended a professional ballet career to become a rural farmer — thereby abandoning her lifelong dream and instead following Daniel’s.

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Abigail Anthony

Abigail Anthony is a staff writer at National Review.

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The Times recently profiled the “Ballerina Farm” enterprise and its face, Hannah Neeleman. Neeleman is a Juilliard-trained ballerina and member of the LDS Church who now competes in beauty pageants while living on an expansive Utah farm with her eight children and billionaire husband Daniel, the heir to several commercial airlines. She shares her unconventional life on social media to millions of followers: Video snippets show her milking cows, attending rodeos, preparing for pageants, cooking from scratch as little children assist as sous chefs, and dancing ballet. The footage is aesthetically pleasing because the Utah landscape is stunning and because Hannah is effortlessly beautiful, which very few women can accomplish while tending to sheep.

Since Neeleman appears to be perfectly happy practicing religious and conservative values with her large family, the Times wrote a hit piece to destroy her. It is unclear why the journalist, Megan Agnew, bothered traveling to Utah to conduct an interview, since she obviously had a predetermined conclusion and an unwillingness to hear the answers to her questions. The headline calls Hannah the “queen of the ‘trad wives,’” yet Hannah states that “I don’t know if I identify with that [trad-wife label]” because “I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.” Aside from the contrived effort to frame Hannah as a dangerous “trad wife” whose values threaten society, Agnew portrays her as a victim of a controlling husband who constantly interrupts and has never respected her boundaries. Agnew suggests that the family’s lifestyle is entirely determined by Daniel. Supposedly, Hannah made significant sacrifices while he made few, if any. The biggest tragedy, in Agnew’s framing, is that Hannah ended a professional ballet career to become a rural farmer — thereby abandoning her lifelong dream and instead following Daniel’s.