Jamie Loftus

It turns out this was a plane that Daniel's father owned, and he specifically requested to be sat on said plane beside Hannah, making it the most expensive predatory meet-cute I've ever heard of. Hannah wanted to date for a year in order to maintain her education at Juilliard, but was overruled by Daniel.

She was engaged a month later and was married and pregnant soon after that, all before graduation. There are, of course, people working on Ballerina Farm and for their company. They were just never acknowledged as existing in the content. However, Hannah is not allowed to have nannies to help her at home. And the article implies that this is Daniel's choice.

And he describes Hannah as becoming so exhausted by caring for the eight children that she will sometimes collapse for a week at a time, which plays into the Mormon and just generally fundamentalist belief that women's suffering is virtuous. But to a modern audience, hearing this dynamic within such a wealthy family felt fucked up.

Hannah and Daniel did not believe in voluntary abortion, something their content suggested but never stated, and that Hannah's identity prior to their marriage, and especially her relationship with dance, had been slowly choked out by ballerina farm and the Mormon lifestyle.

And this story had reach, not only because it was upsetting, but because it seemed to vindicate and sadden a lot of the people who had been asking how Ballerina Farm, quote unquote, did it all. The article suggests that the answer is by sacrificing parts of herself and being exhausted to the point of not being able to function.

Something I thought was interesting while examining the reaction to this story was that non-Mormons tended to find Daniel Nealman as the villain of this story, because it's him who is constantly correcting, negging, and suppressing Hannah throughout the profile as written. But ex-Mormon influencers are careful to add a little bit of nuance to this.

Their suggestion is more, does Daniel come off as an entitled asshole? Yes. But both Daniel and Hannah are playing their role here. It doesn't excuse the behavior, but ex-Mormon YouTubers like Jordan and McKay note that Daniel was playing the part of the devout Mormon husband to the hilt here.

And what I'll say in Ballerina Farm's defense, while I find the details of this story really dark, I do believe Hannah Nealman when she says that she believes this is the correct way to live. And the rest of us can make of it what we will. Hannah has, of course, condemned this piece in a recent post,

and her audience has only continued to grow. Honestly, I think this article might've helped her in the long run. But all this, while fascinating, does not answer my question. Why is this a 10 million follower account? Hannah Nealman has not been acknowledged by the LDS as a remarkable asset, and she doesn't emphasize her religion as she once did. So is she an asset to the Mormon church?

The answer becomes clearer if you start to follow the money. It's impossible to get meaningful insight into this issue without talking to people who have been Mormons themselves, who intimately understand the culture. There is a thriving corner of the internet that is built around ex-Mormon content, primarily on YouTube and TikTok as I'm writing this.

There are plenty of creators who have left the church explaining their personal experience with the various indoctrinations, cultural stigmas, and oppression experience within the LDS, often accounts of their childhood and their mission and why they ultimately left.

Like pro-Mormon content, ex-Mormon creators appear to be very successful, and I've watched quite a bit of it in preparation for this episode. Some resources I've used are the long-running Mormon Stories podcast, which has been going since 2005, and a number of YouTubers, especially Alyssa Grenfell, who I'll be talking to in the next part of this episode. Here's what I'll leave you with.

If Mormonism is nowhere near the country's most popular religion, but is disproportionately represented on our social media, then what is there left to look to than money and the algorithm? Alyssa Grenfell explains in part two. See you then. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer, Anderson, my cats, Flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Bye!

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Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the internet's characters of the day to see how their moment affected them and what it says about the internet and us. My name's Jamie Loftus, and this is part two of a series trying to answer a question that I honestly thought would be easier to answer. Why is the internet so dominated by Mormon mommy influencers?