Wednesday night’s unexpected conclusion to The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’s second season raised even more questions for viewers regarding the life of Ukrainian orphan Natalia Grace.
Following up on the 2023 docuseries about Natalia’s adoptive parents, Kristine and Michael Barnett, and their assertion that the child, who had been diagnosed with the rare dwarfism condition spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, was an adult woman who terrorized their family from 2010 to 2013, comes the six-episode series The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks.
Throughout the three-night special, Natalia shares her side of the story to find answers for herself regarding her actual age and the reasons behind the lack of intervention from anyone in the Indiana community where she claims she was victimized by the Barnetts. This includes Michael, whom she first confronts in person in the last two episodes of the show.
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, the newest show on your must-watch streaming lineup, is both fascinating and terrifying. True crime is a trend right now. Natalia and her adoptive parents are the subject of the Investigation Discovery documentary series.
Natalia, a 6-year-old orphan from Ukraine with spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia, a rare congenital bone growth disease that results in dwarfism, was adopted by the Indiana couple Michael and Kristine Barnett in 2010. However, Natalia’s adoptive family soon realized she was much older than she looked.
The Barnett family asserted that Natalia was a grown-up posing as a child and claimed that she had made several attempts to hurt them, including attempts to poison and stab them. Natalia’s legal age was successfully changed from eight to 22 years old in 2012, according to a court order obtained by the family.
This meant that while they were moving to Canada, the family could rent her an apartment close by. To take legal action against the couple for neglect of a dependent, social services investigated in 2019. Whether Natalia was a child or not was the crux of the issue.
However, four of Michael Barnett’s allegations related to neglect of their dependent were dismissed in February 2022, a few months before his trial, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations, which is the maximum period after an occurrence after which legal actions can commence. Instead, because of Natalia’s condition, the sole charges at trial would be those of negligence.
Ending Explained
The most important mystery surrounding Natalia’s identity is resolved in the first episode of the show: how old she is. Natalia’s age was ascertained by TruDiagnostic, a medical laboratory that specializes in biological aging, using a blood sample.
It matches the estimate given by Timothy Gossweiler, the dentist who examined Natalia in 2011 and concluded she was between the ages of 6 and 9. Additionally, it disputes Natalia’s 34-year-old legal age, which came about as a result of the Barnetts’ successful 2012 petition to have Natalia’s birth certificate updated to reflect a 1989 birth year in Marion County court.
The show claims that Kristine was trying to take advantage of their adoptive daughter in the same manner as she had her older son Jacob, an autistic child prodigy, in an attempt to address the question of why the Barnetts wanted the public to think Natalia was a grown lady when they adopted her in 2010.
After realizing she couldn’t make as much money off of Natalia, whom experts determined to be intelligent but not exceptional, as she had from Jacob, legal expert Beth Karas suggests Kristine launched a three-pronged plan to have Natalia removed from their home.
These comprised a $600,000 advance on her 2013 book The Spark about his schoolwork and an upcoming movie deal in which she was set to be portrayed by Rosamund Pike.
Karas suggests that the first action should be to have Natalia re-aged to release the Barnetts from their legal responsibility for her. However, Kristine eventually had to find a means to have Natalia locked up in a psychiatric or prison facility because her genetic disease continued to make her dependent on others.
Natalia disputes Kristine’s 2011 accusations that she tried to contaminate her coffee with a cleaning product and repeatedly threatened to destroy their family. In June 2012, Natalia was admitted to Larue Carter, an Indiana State Mental Hospital, as a result of the event. Natalia was moved to a halfway house after the psychiatric facility concluded she wasn’t mentally disturbed.
Michael claims that when Natalia informed Kristine she was afraid and living with drug users, he and his wife went to fetch her up. “We need to go get her because I’m famous if something happens to her,” he told the producers. “I’m famous if they find Kristine Barnett’s child dead from a drug overdose.”
Later in the series, when Natalia asks why he and Kristine didn’t return her to the state so she might be readopted, Michael responds similarly, stating Kristine was worried about appearances. The Barnetts moved to Canada in 2013 with their three biological sons, leaving Natalia alone herself in an apartment. In 2019, following a five-year probe, they were accused of numerous counts of neglecting a dependant.
However, in 2022, Michael was acquitted of all four counts of neglect of a dependent, including conspiracy to commit neglect of a dependent, neglect of a dependent resulting in physical injury, and neglect of a dependent resulting in significant bodily injury.
The accusations against Kristine were withdrawn a year later. As opposed to the Barnetts’ claims that Natalia repeatedly threatened to harm them, Natalia lists numerous claimed mistreatments by Kristine, including two eye pepper sprays. In a different incident, Natalia says Kristine tried to make her overdose by making her take one of her meds three times the recommended amount, which made her faint.
Natalia also talks about how, when she was just 7 years old, Kristine made her put in a tampon. Natalia believes that after the event, Kristine used the bleeding as proof that she had started menstruation, which is why she looked older than she was.
Due to the absence of a Ukrainian birth certificate, some of Natalia’s age remains a mystery. The adoption documents of Natalia were lost due to a sewage catastrophe that occurred at the hospital where she was born. And just one month later, FBI Special Agent Kenneth J. Maxwell claims that Natalia’s birth records vanished and the judge overseeing her adoption process was removed due to corruption.
According to the interview video, Natalia’s birth mother, Anna Cava, never wrote or saw her daughter since she didn’t know where she was and was just informed that she had been sent to the United States. Cava denied her parental rights because of her child’s illness. In an additional 2014 interview, Natalia discloses that, while in the Ukraine, she was inappropriately touched by a man who covered her face with something.
The interview was conducted by an FBI Child Crimes Specialist investigator. “Would it surprise me if Natalia was given to other individuals for evil purposes, such as being trafficked? “I wouldn’t be surprised by anything,” said Veronica Maxwell, a retired FBI Special Agent.
The final ninety seconds of the second season finale featured possibly the most surprising revelation to date in the show: Bishop Antwon Mans and his wife Cynthia, Natalia’s new adoptive parents, said their daughter was now ruining their life.
As a court proclaims Natalia to be legally adopted by Man’s family, who supported her throughout the series, the family is seen giving each other a heartfelt embrace in one of the final shots of the episode. Bishop Mans even defied Michael in a difficult initial effort at a sit-down, defending Natalia.
But two weeks before the series launch, six months after the adoption, the Mans furiously contacted the show’s producers. In one audio tape, Bishop Mans is heard remarking, “Something ain’t right with Natalia.” “This girl is adjusting.” She seems to be the house’s antagonist, in my opinion.
She then informed us that we were holding her captive. Cynthia supports her husband’s allegations by stating, “We’re done,” to which the Bishop responds, “Natalia is stabbing her family in the back over a complete lie.” We’ve had enough of her.
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’s third season has not yet been publicly announced by ID, but they have shared behind-the-scenes photos of the shocking conclusion, which begs for more of the narrative to be revealed.
The more we delved into a project, the more nuances and complexities we found. As President of Turner Networks, ID and HLN, linear and streaming, Sarlanis tells THR about Natalia Speaks. Since we honestly believed that Natalia’s story would finish happily with her new family, you can only imagine how stunned we were when the Mans called.
