Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm on TikTok, has responded to the controversy surrounding her family after an interview by The Times. Posting a video online defending her lifestyle, Hannah also published a lengthy ‘about me’ section on her website where she details the course of her life and how she came to become the internet’s most famous ‘Trad Wife’.
If you’re unfamiliar with BallerinaFarm, it’s an account where Hannah posts videos cooking meals for her eight children from scratch, farming with them on their 328-acre land in Utah and living a seemingly blissful life as a caregiver. She has almost 8million followers, 127million likes, and has gone viral for countless videos including one where she professed to competing in the Mrs World pageant just 12 days after giving birth. The unofficial matriarch of the Trad Wife movement, Neeleman’s content projects her life as the ultimate conservative fantasy.
When journalist Megan Agnew was invited into the Neeleman’s home for an interview about Hannah, she made many an observation about the life she’s come to lead and ultimately left readers to decide whether she was truly happy. Noting that she was rarely left alone with Hannah, her husband Daniel often with them or answering for her, Agnew implied that Daniel was quite the domineering force in the home. Then, when she asked Hannah if this was the life she always wanted, her answer broke readers hearts. ‘No,’ she says. ‘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.’
Other controversial moments in the interview include the moment Daniel confesses that Hannah is often so exhausted from caregiving that she will spend a week straight in bed, and that Hannah had almost all of her children at home but the one birth she did have in hospital – where her husband wasn’t present – she received an epidural she called ‘kinda great’. While Agnew noted that Daniel doesn’t consider himself the head of the household, nor does Hannah consider herself a ‘Trad Wife’, the impression on readers was clear: this is not the fantasy life it seems to be online.
Now, Hannah has responded to the controversy saying she feels The Times angle was ‘predetermined’ before visiting their home. ‘We thought the interview went really well,’ Hannah said. ‘We were taken back however when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and the world by being an attack on our family and our marriage – portraying me as oppressed and my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth.’
On their website, Hannah went into more detail about her life experience and what led her to what we see today online. Defending their decision to get married after three months and have children quickly, Hannah’s writing lays out the shared reasoning behind every decision that led to her quitting ballet to live on a farm with her family. Hannah was in her final year at Julliard when she met Daniel and was the only ever pregnant undergraduate.
‘At different parts of my life, I’ve had different dreams–dance; marriage; motherhood; dreaming of building a business,’ she says. ‘I had left school for summer break single and dance focused, when I came back to school in the fall I was married and thinking about a different future. My family, Daniel and I sacrificed a lot in those first years of marriage, dedicating ourselves to one another. We were all in.
‘When we first met, Daniel was playing collegiate lacrosse at BYU,’ she continues. ‘He decided to end his athletic career early and move to New York to support me as I finished my final year at Juilliard. We lived as newlyweds in uptown Manhattan. While dating we had talked about when to start a family. There was no hesitation from either of us. We came from big families, (we are both one of nine) and wanted a big family. So we left it in God’s hands. I thought he would want me to finish school before sending me our firstborn Henry. We plan, God laughs.’
Her full response can be found here, where she picks apart the narrative that her life was in any way a result of Daniel’s control. What do readers make of it? According to her TikTok comments, they’re still unconvinced.