Full Episode for THURSDAY September 3, 2026

0:00Honey, what are you listening to? Mom! Your team might not share everything with you, but teens share everything with each other, and certain everyday behaviors like sharing food, drinks, or kisses could mean sharing bacteria that can cause meningococcal disease known as meningitis. Although meningitis is uncommon, about one in ten who develop it will die. Ask your teens doctor about missing meningitis vaccinations. Learn more at meningitis.com. Vaccination may not protect all recipients, sponsored by GSK. This is Nightline. Tonight, welcome to the Dollhouse, elaborate nurseries like this. Victoria here has beautiful, here's the ears. Not full of babies, but of incredibly lifelike dolls. Inside the big business of reborn dolls. So this dolls were ten thousand dollars. And the people who collect them. They are going to their home and join a embarrassingly large clutch.

1:01What some say they get out of treating them like real children. First, I get them out of bed and make them all breakfast. What do your daughters say? They think I'm crazy. Plus, the whore of ballerina farm. This is the first time we've invited people onto something very near and dear to us. Our team's cameras, the first ever inside the viral husband and wife lifestyle empire. Lots of urine coming from out of state, even out of country. Why fans are flocking to the farm that more than 20 million followers can't get enough of. And what she has to say about some online pushback. When people say things like, Treadwife. How does that make you feel? And remembering Gloria Steinem. The journalist turned feminist icon, passing away at 92, which she was still working on and when the world will see it. From ABC News headquarters in New York, this is Nightline. Thanks for joining us.

2:08You're about to enter the surreal world of reborn dolls. Incredibly lifelike and costing thousands. Many who collect these high-priced dolls create intricate nurseries and treat them like actual children. What they say motivates them. May surprise you. Here's ABC's Melissa Adon. So this is my nursery. I call it butterfly nursery. Victoria has beautiful pierced ears. So he has this little fade going on. And actually curl her hair straight in her hair. Just like I do mine. She's one of the only ones that can take a full pacifier. He has gorgeous hair, gorgeous curls. I think I bonded with him because he has a very like mama's boy face. In Sherylwood's nursery, the babies don't cry. They don't grow. They're called reborn dolls. So this is a dimple sculpt. Here's these cute dimples here. And gorgeous smile.

3:08There's veining that will be added sometimes on the arms or even on the face. I love smiling grumpy, serious, anything. It just kind of adds life to the nursery. Tape was a custom. I got to pick his eye color, skin tone, his hairstyle, his hair color. For me with tape, I think he really reminds me of my boys when they were little. These are hyper realistic hand-made and high-priced dolls. I have 38 reborn dolls. So Lakones will start at about 1800 and they go all the way up to 10,000. She was 3,000. She has what we call armatures because she has the wiring in her arms. I can make her look even more lifelike. Cheryl is a mother of three teenagers, but the reborns are giving her a different kind of joy. It kind of really boosts the dopamine to bring you a feeling of calmness and peace. It brought back the spark of my love for dolls when I was younger, but it also has helped immensely with my anxiety over the years. Reborn dolls are now a global phenomenon. Cheryl is just one of 10s of thousands of women collecting these dolls.

4:11Staying in a life of taking care of my reborns part one. I guess I get them out of bed and make them all breakfast. Filled by social media like this doll mom who goes by the dolls aren't real on Instagram where she treats them like real kids pretending to handle everyday routines. Change your diaper. Taking them to Target. Or even giving one a spa day. Their appeal has also played out on TV. M. Night Shyamalan's Apple TV thriller Servit portrayed a reborn as a source of solace for a grieving mother. It was the last year when he was 13 weeks. It was the only thing that brought her back. We're inside the West Coast doll show and there's dolls just like this. Reborns. This one's Logan. He's worth $1,500. It's the largest doll show here in California. Here in Los Angeles.

5:14Hundreds have come to buy. Those are little nano premium diapers. Sell. Great places. It's kind of like a kick and I just take them off. And show off reborn dolls. This is the baby that I sculpted, the real baby I sculpted. We're playing with dolls is serious business. I bought her hair from a barber. He's going to go home and join a embarrassing, enlarged collection. Some people traveled across the country like Suhadi Nemus, a reborn doll influencer who has 2.8 million followers on TikTok. I have a whole room for the boys and I also have a whole room for the girls too. That turned into my job. I don't know where when I was 16 I started making money. The price tags can be staggering. My last doll I bought was $50, $400. I have hundreds so we do the math. So together they were about $2,500. This reborn doll is $10,000.

6:15Janie Scott is the founder of the West Coast Doll Show and a reborn artist herself. Women get the stigmatism that they can't collect, that they can't have anything. You know, they're home makers or workers and they do everything for everybody else. And this to me is for them. Now for many this may seem confusing or just plain weird. Why do people take these dolls everywhere they go? Many tell us these life-like dolls can be a source of comfort. You're having a bad day and you look at this and it just makes everything better. What is it that initially drew you into collecting? My daughter and she left. I kind of like lost my way and I ended up getting into the doll world.

7:20One turned into two, two turned into five, five turned into ten. I couldn't stop. Holding a doll, it releases oxygen. It is the hormone that makes you feel happy. I don't have kids. So this is and they don't cry. And I don't send up the college. So it's perfect. Susan Gibbs, a silicone artist, turned her childhood dream into a career, even making reborn dolls for Hollywood movies like Ron Howard's Island Thriller Eden when Sydney's Swedish character gives birth. Outside of the doll world, there'll be comments like, oh, that's freaky. It looks so real, but then as an artist, oh, thank you. That was my goal. The hyper-realistic detail goes deep. Even the details on the back of the hand, like, it's got little veins and the little nail tips. These are silicone tongues. These are tongues, yeah. The hair rooted one strand at a time, sometimes from actual human hair.

8:20Her hair is human. It was cut from an actual real child. Okay. And the smell. What is baby perfume? Baby perfume is usually made by an artist and it's different oils and stuff that they put in the bottle. And you spray it on the baby and it gives the smell of a baby. It really brings an nostalgia back to people, especially if they save their children's baby clothes. And collecting them has become a serious business, just like la vuvus or sneakers or even baseball cards. Daily, there's about 50 transactions. There's 600 artists and sellers. Dave Stack is the founder of Reborns.com. One of the largest market place in the US to buy and sell Reborn dolls. Now a younger generation is giving the craft a new look. When I first got into it, it was a lot of like older demographic. But now you see people like me, people in high school, people in college, also into this. And I feel like it's erasing that stigma that it's something like weird or something odd. It's actually cool. Dea Johnson, an LA artist, discovered Reborns on YouTube.

9:24She creates and sells her own through bonnet babies. There are comments that we see when she's putting the dolls to bed or what not. People react really strongly and negatively to that. What is your take? I feel like people always find things strange that they don't know. Are they like not familiar with? But it's the same as any other content. People record themselves just laying down in the bed and pretending to go to sleep. So what's the difference between doing that same thing with the dolls? For Cheryl Wood, she hopes this increased popularity leads to more understanding of why people collect these dolls. So we're at the Seamy Town Center. A little outdoor mall will come to sometimes. Now Cheryl brings her dolls out every week, no longer worried about hiding them from people. I would keep a blanket over and keep them covered. And I've gotten to the point where I do this, where I go out and they're not covered at all. I used to be nervous and I just do my thing, then I, you know, I don't really care what people think.

10:27As it should be, our thanks to Melissa. When we come back, we're the first ever to bring TV cameras into ballerina farm. We're with Hannah and Daniel Nealman. The husband and wife duo taking the sun up to sundown a farm life so viral. What they have to say to the skeptics. When people try to label you, they try to say things like, try a wife. How does that make you feel? Welcome back to our exclusive access to ballerina farm. Hannah and Daniel Nealman began dating in New York City. But when a simpler life beckoned them from Hannah's native Utah, they answered the call and turned it into an empire. 20 million followers can't get enough of. Why? Here's ABC's Cana Wentworth. Tucked away in this little corner of rural Utah is the heart of an unexpected online sensation.

11:31OK, we are making dinner right now. I'm going to show you what I'm making and I am about to make some homemade cinnamon toast crunch cereal. Sheep smuggles really, really creamy. This is ballerina farm. Home to Hannah Nealman and her husband Daniel and their nine children. They have transformed the chores of everyday life into a social media phenomena and now a growing lifestyle empire. This summer, they're opening the gates to the ranch and have invited us to an event featuring Hannah's first love, ballet, along with the farm to table dinner. This is the first time we've invited people onto something very near and dear to us. The couple share almost everything with their more than 20 million followers from day to day tasks with a buccolic background to homemade makeup routines, inspiring the audience to try their hand at making their own sourdough bread. Come with me to ballerina farm. She's basically the queen of sourdough and to be frank, my Taylor Swift.

12:34If I'm not really behind my content 100%, then I don't want to share it. In 2024, she took social media by storm when she competed for the US in a Mrs. World Pageant only two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. Their lifestyle has brought both praise and criticism which they address head on. When people try to label you, they try to say things like, try a wife. Why does that make you feel? We try to just do our own thing. If we pay too much attention to the noise that sometimes the internet can throw at you, it's stifling. It's a distraction that we can't lean into. And then I feel like if when I do lean into that noise, the things people are labeling you or whatever, I feel like as a content creator, you almost try to respond to those things. And I really hate responding to, I just want to be authentic to what's really happening

13:35here and our farm and our team. Hannah grew up in Utah, the second youngest of nine kids. She left to study ballet at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City, where she started dating Daniel. In 2017, the couple bought a 300 acre farm in Camus, Utah, what started as a small family operation selling their home raised meat quickly grew into a full blown empire, two stores in Utah, as well as a website that ships some branded products all over the world. I knew that social media was going to be the most beneficial way for us to grow our business. It was a small farm. We had very little to sell and so we needed to go direct to customers. And so I really tried to share the stories that were actually happening. We've been at it for nine years now. It's every day. It's every day. It's uploading stories. It's working hard. It's doing all the things and we're just, you know, chippewa at it. What does it mean to you to be authentic? Hannah and I, we whip our phones out and we're just, we're taking footage of things that

14:39are just happening real time. Not everyone wants to tune into like box tractors and cows. But there's enough people out there that I think do. And then it's just a good segue to one teach them about what we're doing in agriculture. Six months ago, they started offering tours of the dairy once a week. Now it's four days with hundreds that paid for the up close look. So it's so important to us that we're watching how much she's eating and how much she's being milked. We're reading about the statistic of how many people have been on a farm and it was less than one percent of the population in the world, I think, had been on an actual dairy farm. There's so many children that are like, wait, this is where milk comes from. A larger part of their business comes from online sales from farmer protein powder to electrolytes than even bone broth hot chocolate. Many of these items going viral. What I'm most excited about is these sourdough chocolate chip cookies.

15:39I was intrigued by this flavor. This is great food ginger. As this company grows bigger and bigger, how do you decide what's over sharing, what's not over sharing? Up to this day, it's always been a matter of prayer. I feel like God has led us to where we are. And it's a continual conversation with him of like, what do we need to share? Now their lifestyle has become a tourist attraction itself. Yes, also, we looked at the phone and I was like, oh my gosh, wait, she's ballering farms is right here. So we took a turn and had to kind of pull in really quick. Twenty miles down the road is one of the farm stores in Midway. Okay, and where did you come from? You're from you traveled in from Florida, Arizona. Many shopkeepers in Midway credit the ballerina farm phenomenon with bringing in much need of visitors to this picturesque Swiss looking town. It's trying huge crowds of people. They love ballerina farm. All sorts of women in milk for different reasons. Yeah, which is really fun because they will make a day out of it or they'll come to

16:41the weekend. When people come to our retail locations, they follow us online. They've gotten their mind, you know, what it's supposed to look like. What it's supposed to feel like. Their expectations are really high. Yeah, that's true. So we talk about this as a team all the time. Like, we don't want to shatter anyone's dreams here. Like, we have to deliver. Thank you for being here. Like Daniel said, this is the first time we've had people here in our homestead. Lots of you are coming from out of state, even out of country. And we're honored to share this evening with you. Our expectations are high for the crowd of 150 back at the farm for the sold out night of ballet and food. It's a perfect, stature ballet. I think it's really fun to see where food comes from. I'm like, I need to get my booty over it. You talk. Yeah. It is just absolutely beautiful. For Hannah, a way to celebrate her passion for dance. It was like such a cool circle moment.

17:45Like, the first one to be here, to be in collaboration with Ballet West and their beautiful dancers. Despite a little bit of rain, no one is missing the meat roasting over the open fire under the supervision of the farm's culinary director, Chef Tiffin. He moved to Utah after teaching the family at the prestigious Ballet Maloo Cookery School in Ireland. The relationships, though, that you must have created in that short time with Hannah and Daniel to be willing to leave your country, bring your family over here and come into rural Utah. Yeah, what can I say? Just, they're the real deal and I hit it off them straight away. He's bringing his 40 years of cooking chops to the farm while implementing modern techniques. Zero waste. I want to use everything that we grow. I want it to be the best they can be. The evening, just the latest chapter in the Ballerina Farm story. So hopefully this is the first. First of many. Hopefully this becomes a tradition on the farm. Our thanks to Cana. When we come back, remembering pioneering activist and feminist legend, Gloria Steinem,

18:51passing away at 92, what she was last working on and when the world will get to see it. Finally tonight, remembering Gloria Steinem. She was feminism's north star for decades. The journalist turned change make, tackled politics, marriage, abortion. There are only two ways that women can get into official Washington. One is to march in and the other is to marry in. How we decided that this was easier. Finding notoriety for her undercover expose as a playboy bunny, which she later came to regret. The world will get one more chance to read Steinem. Her memoir, An Unexpected Life, is set to be published later this month. Gloria Steinem was 92.

19:53And that's nightline. Thanks for staying up with us. Good night, America. A new podcast series from ABC Audio in 2020 goes inside a case that has captivated the nation. To many people, Luigi Mangione is a modern day Robin Hood. People were cheering the demise of this person they'd never met. It was a father of two and a husband and had a life and was just doing a job. From the manhunt, ending in a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, to what authorities are saying about a possible motive. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burnin' a Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts.