The Shocking True Story of Natalia Grace
Prepare to be shocked, creeped out, and intrigued all at the same time! Welcome to WatchMojo, and today, we’re looking at the facts, accusations, and theories surrounding Natalia Grace.
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00:00 "I still don't have concrete answers."
00:02 "Somebody's not telling the truth."
00:04 Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the facts,
00:07 accusations, and theories surrounding Natalia Grace.
00:10 "I want you to know how old I am.
00:14 I want you to know about my past because I want to know too."
00:18 There are two sides to every story.
00:21 In the case of Natalia Grace, though, people have gone back and forth
00:24 between who's lying, who's telling the truth,
00:26 and whether one person is being 100% honest.
00:29 "You want to have me give you one word that describes Natalia to me?
00:35 Enigma."
00:36 While investigators have been able to pin down some facts,
00:40 much of this story boils down to she said, they said.
00:43 Natalia Grace is either a monster or a victim, depending on who you ask.
00:48 The answer may never be clear-cut, but everyone can agree on one thing.
00:52 This is among the most fascinating and unsettling stories
00:56 to grace the true crime scene in some time.
00:58 "You've adopted a kid and now they're trying to kill you.
01:01 I mean, it's the stuff of a horror movie, right?"
01:05 Natalia Grace was born in Ukraine with spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita,
01:11 an uncommon bone growth disorder.
01:14 Spending much of her childhood in a Ukraine orphanage,
01:17 Natalia was eventually adopted by Michael and Christine Barnett.
01:20 "We're overcome with joy and emotion.
01:22 Oh my gosh, that day in and of itself, without context,
01:26 is one of the five greatest days of my life."
01:29 This wealthy Indiana couple already had three sons.
01:32 Their eldest, Jacob, has autism, inspiring his mother
01:35 to create a non-profit special needs learning center.
01:38 "The Barnett family opened up a foundation,
01:40 a place where parents and kids with autism could go be with other parents
01:46 and kids with autism and feel normal."
01:48 Jacob was also the subject of Christine Barnett's book,
01:51 The Spark, a mother's story of nurturing, genius, and autism.
01:55 Planning to adopt another child,
01:57 the Barnetts received a call about Natalia in 2010.
02:00 Given a 24-hour window, the Barnetts flew to Florida
02:03 and formally made Natalia a part of the family.
02:06 The Barnetts celebrated with a trip to Disney World,
02:09 but things soon took a hairy turn.
02:11 "We went with Natalia to Disney World.
02:15 We were all excited to have her in the family.
02:18 Natalia seemed happy to join our family."
02:21 At the hotel, Christine prepared to give Natalia a bath.
02:24 "Christine's going to give our brand new daughter a bath.
02:28 And I hear a shout from the bathroom.
02:31 [water running]
02:34 This was a 'I'm not playing around, come here right now, Michael.'"
02:37 Although Natalia was said to be roughly around six or seven,
02:41 Christine claimed that she found hair in areas
02:44 that normally wouldn't see development for at least a few more years.
02:47 This wasn't the last time the Barnetts cast out surrounding Natalia's age.
02:51 The Barnetts allegedly discovered signs of menstruation
02:54 and found that Natalia was much taller than another girl
02:57 with the same form of dwarfism.
02:58 "There's no way anybody could look at this picture
03:00 and say those two are the same age."
03:03 Even more concerning, the couple believed
03:05 that Natalia was attempting to harm the family,
03:08 claiming that she put pledge in Christine's coffee,
03:10 hid knives in her room,
03:12 and attempted to push Christine into an electric fence at a farm.
03:15 "Christine's screaming at them, 'She needs to be arrested.
03:18 She tried to kill me. She needs to be arrested.
03:20 She tried to kill me.'"
03:22 "We wanted charges. We wanted her arrested."
03:25 These were supposedly enforced by verbal death threats.
03:29 If you're thinking,
03:30 'This sounds exactly like the 2009 horror film 'Orphan,'
03:34 you're not the only one to draw that parallel.
03:36 Making Natalia out to be a sociopath,
03:38 the Barnetts placed her in a mental health hospital.
03:41 "We had been trying to get her to inpatient treatment.
03:44 We had been begging people to help us.
03:47 We had been told by everybody, 'You need help desperately.
03:51 Your family's in danger. She needs inpatient treatment.'"
03:54 Although Natalia wasn't deemed mentally unstable,
03:57 some did question her age with accusations of her,
04:00 quote, "propositioning men."
04:02 Around the same time that Natalia was in the hospital,
04:05 her adoptive parents petitioned successfully
04:07 to have her legally re-aged from 8 to 22.
04:10 "They gave her a new birth certificate with a new birth date.
04:13 They gave her a new Indiana ID.
04:16 She had everything changes from a year of birth of 2003,
04:21 back it up 14 years to 1989."
04:23 Shortly after Natalia's release,
04:25 the Barnetts sent her to live in a Westfield apartment.
04:28 She was later moved to a Lafayette apartment
04:30 while her adoptive family uprooted to Canada.
04:33 "2013.
04:35 The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
04:38 wants Jacob, who's 14,
04:41 to go there to get his master's degree.
04:43 So we're moving to Canada."
04:46 Natalia would be taken in by Antoine and Cynthia Manns,
04:49 who were skeptical of the Barnetts' claims and actions.
04:52 Who's the true victim and monster?
04:55 Natalia has denied the accusations against her,
04:57 swearing that she was the one being abused.
05:00 "That whole thing was just a big chain reaction from one line.
05:03 But people don't know what happened in that house."
05:09 According to Natalia,
05:11 Christine was the primary source of torment,
05:13 inflicting physical harm and attempting to set her up with older men.
05:17 Natalia further claims that Christine pressured her
05:20 to lie about her age, among other things.
05:22 Jacob Barnett was supposedly instructed by his mother
05:25 to kick Natalia down the stairs.
05:27 "It's okay.
05:28 I feel like I deserve the right to tell my story.
05:31 I did not tell them that.
05:34 I didn't tell them about kicking the stairs."
05:36 "Well, kicking down the stairs, we said we're not going to say, right?"
05:39 Although Natalia says that Michael didn't participate in the beatings,
05:43 she blames him for not stopping Christine.
05:45 Although Michael has spoken ill of his adoptive daughter in the past,
05:49 he's since had a change of tune,
05:51 arguing that Christine abused Natalia and himself.
05:54 In any case, Natalia believes that Michael still played
05:57 a major role in her abandonment.
05:59 "Christine is the real monster.
06:00 Michael is an accomplice to the monster,
06:05 because he went along with everything that Christine said."
06:09 Michael filed for divorce in 2014,
06:12 with his marriage to Christine officially ending in 2018.
06:16 The following year,
06:17 Michael and Christine were charged with child neglect.
06:20 "Prior to this, the Barnetts were on the cover of magazines and newspapers.
06:26 And now, after being arrested and charged,
06:28 being photographed for a whole different reason."
06:30 A jury found Michael not guilty after roughly two hours of deliberation,
06:35 although some key details were excluded from the trial,
06:38 namely Natalia's age when the Barnetts abandoned her.
06:41 It had been determined that Natalia's biological mother
06:44 was Anna Volodymyrivna Gava, who was born in 1979.
06:49 "The DNA test results came back.
06:50 It is a match.
06:53 She is indeed Natalia's biological mother.
06:56 This is a huge deal,
07:01 and may put this whole age issue to rest."
07:04 When the Barnetts had Natalia re-aged,
07:07 her birth year was changed to 1989,
07:09 which would have made Gava a 10-year-old at the time.
07:12 It seemed more likely that Natalia was born on September 4, 2003,
07:16 as her original records indicated.
07:18 Nevertheless, the charges against Christine were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
07:36 In August 2023, a DNA test found that Natalia was roughly around 20.
07:42 Thus, she would have been around 9 when the Barnetts put her in an apartment.
07:45 "It's clear that the prosecution believed Natalia was a child
07:49 when she was left alone to fend for herself in this apartment in Lafayette, Indiana.
07:53 Getting her re-aged to an adult could have been a way for Michael and Christine
07:58 to protect themselves from child neglect charges."
08:01 This seems to conclude once and for all
08:03 that Natalia wasn't an adult pretending to be a child.
08:06 What remains up for debate is whether Natalia was ever violent towards the Barnetts.
08:11 Natalia and Michael have since come together,
08:13 agreeing that Christine put them both through hell.
08:16 "I'm overly sorry about what she did to you.
08:18 I am horrified by what she has done to you.
08:21 I am sorry I wasn't stronger and didn't stop her."
08:26 They also denied Christine's allegations that there was a sexual relationship between them.
08:30 Although Natalia forgave Michael,
08:32 she still believes that he holds some accountability.
08:35 "Michael, I forgive you."
08:41 "You don't have to. I don't forgive me."
08:49 "You should."
08:50 Natalia is especially suspicious of whose idea it was to re-age her,
08:56 a subject that Michael refuses to talk about.
08:58 As for why the Barnetts adopted Natalia in the first place,
09:02 it's been theorized that Christine wanted to exploit and profit off her.
09:06 "I feel like it was a mission of like boosting her ego type of thing.
09:11 I feel like she just wanted people to be like, 'Oh my goodness, like,
09:16 she's this amazing person. She just adopted a little girl from the Ukraine who has dwarfism.'"
09:21 When that didn't go according to plan, they sought to distance themselves from Natalia.
09:26 Cynthia Manns even suspects that Christine took direct inspiration from the movie Orphan
09:31 in an attempt to paint Natalia as a monster.
09:33 "It was all copied off the movie Orphan. Ukrainian girl, Russian girl, check.
09:38 Orphan, check. All this crazy stuff. Standing at the end of the bed with a knife, check."
09:46 After serving as her guardians for a decade,
09:49 Antoine and Cynthia Manns officially adopted Natalia in June 2023.
09:54 Assuming that Natalia really was an innocent victim,
09:57 this might seem like the happiest ending possible.
09:59 "With this adoption, I'll be legally a part of the family. So that way,
10:03 I'll be protected while I do civil suits against the Barnetts."
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10:24 There's just one more revelation that has given people pause.
10:27 Who is Natalia Grace? Natalia Grace has presented her side of the story on Dr. Phil and the docu-series
10:34 The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. Both make Natalia out to be a more sympathetic figure
10:39 than the Barnetts implied.
10:40 "I had to learn a lot of life lessons at an early age,
10:43 but I will forever embrace my past because I feel like it made me stronger."
10:50 However, the Investigation Discovery series ends its second season on a note
10:54 that throws everything into question. In a phone conversation, Antoine and Cynthia
10:59 Manns are heard accusing Natalia of lying, backstabbing, and only caring about herself.
11:04 "She's done other things too, but this was a new low. Natalia does not have emotions for nothing
11:12 but herself."
11:13 While the docu-series exists to inform, its goal above all else is to entertain.
11:18 For all we know, this phone call could have been taken out of context to hook us in for
11:23 a potential third season. That said, we're not sure how else to interpret this bombshell as of writing.
11:29 "We're done. We're done with her."
11:31 Following the season two finale, Natalia posted on social media that she was quote "doing well,"
11:41 but couldn't elaborate because she quote "signed an agreement with the show to keep
11:45 things confidential for now." This won't be the last we hear from Natalia Grace.
11:50 "I just want to stay focused on now because I have a lot of big plans for my life."
11:54 While a third season of the docu-series has yet to be announced, the showrunners have set viewers
12:00 up for more. Natalia's story will also be dramatized in a Hulu limited series starring
12:05 Ellen Pompeo. By that point, perhaps we'll have a clearer answer of who Natalia Grace is.
12:11 "This is a new chapter in the story with just endless possibilities."
12:19 Until then, she remains something of a mystery. Maybe this is due to limited information and
12:24 conflicting accounts. Depending on how much the media truly knows though, Natalia might be an
12:30 enigma by design. "Book two is about to be written by me and that book is going to be an amazing book.
12:38 I already know." What are your thoughts on the Natalia Grace case? Let us know in the comments.
12:43 "This was hard, but I'm willing to do it because everybody deserves a second chance."
12:54 "I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give up."