On Friday, Hannah Neeleman, the influencer better known as Ballerina Farm, shared that she would be on the third print-issue cover of Evie, an online outlet aimed at conservative women. On their respective Instagram accounts, Neeleman and the magazine shared a soft-focus video taken at sunset on Neeleman’s ranch in Kamas, Utah. Following The Sunday Times’ profile of Ballerina Farm with her eight children and husband Daniel, which prompted widespread discussion and criticism when it was published in July, Evie’s yet-to-be-released story may be more of what Neeleman had hoped for when the influencer first invited a reporter to her home.
In July, Neeleman said that she didn’t identify with the ”tradwife” label even as her social media presence became associated with the conservative-coded label applied to women who promote supposedly traditional ideas about motherhood and family in their content.
“On her first ever cover, the former Juilliard ballerina turned beauty queen and farmer brings us in for an intimate look at life, marriage, motherhood, and documenting her brand-building journey to an audience of 20 million people around the world,” reads a statement from Evie. It added that its story about Neeleman is a part of its goal to be a “a new vision of American culture—a celebration of Americana, beauty, grounded ambition, and timeless values.”
The issue, which blares the cover line “The Importance of Being Sexy,” also features Vani Hari, a food influencer who has recently praised president-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his Cabinet, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator who promoted conspiracies during her appearances on Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox show.
Evie was founded in 2018 by editor in chief Brittany Martinez (who sometimes goes by her married name, Hugoboom), a model and entrepreneur, and her husband, Gabriel Hugoboom. When the website launched, Martinez said that her goal for founding the magazine was to push more traditional ideas of womanhood. “For decades, women’s publications have tried to convince women they can be just like men, instead of celebrating femininity and what makes women wonderfully unique,” she wrote for Quillette. “It was this gap in the market that made me and my colleagues wonder: “What if there were a conservative Cosmo?”
In 2022, Martinez and Hugoboom also secured funding from Peter Thiel’s investment firm for a menstrual-cycle-tracking app called 28 that Martinez described as employing “science-backed insights that look and feel like a horoscope for all the key areas of your life, only we use hormone science instead of astrology.” In 2023, Vice noted that COVID-19 vaccine skepticism had become a mainstay of content on Evie’s website. (In response to the Vice article, Martinez posted on X, “Truly insane that Vice literally wrote, ‘the many imaginary harms caused to women from COVID vaccines.’”)
In past press coverage, Neeleman and her husband have been loath to discuss their politics, though in the Times interview, Daniel noted that the pair shares traditional Mormon beliefs against elective abortion. Along with the rise of Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter Kai Trump on YouTube and an upswell of criticism aimed at Nara Aziz Smith over a MAGA-related post shared (and later deleted) by her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, Neeleman’s side-taking may be another sign that the age of the apolitical influencer is over.
