The Verdict on Natalia Grace

By Alison Lanier | TV | January 4, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | January 4, 2024 |

The Curious Grace of Natalia Grace is yet another viral true crime series detailing the media-storm story: a wealthy white couple, Kristine and Michael Barnett, claimed that the little girl with dwarfism whom they adopted—the titular Natalia Grace—was actually a sociopathic adult. And then they put her in an apartment and moved out of the country after having Natalia’s legal age changed from between 6 and 9 (according to dental records) to 22 years old. When they were caught out, they doubled down and accused Natalia of trying to kill her adoptive family. The first season of the show follows the Barnetts’ narrative and gives Michael centerstage to blow up Kristine as an abusive monster—which she is—and absolve himself as simply a fellow victim like Natalia—which he certainly is not.

Before you can turn around and say franchise, a second season drops, and the story becomes pretty damn clear. Natalia was indeed a child when she was abandoned, and the Barnetts knew it. And that the Barnetts were abusive as hell, didn’t provide medical care, and treated Natalia like she was supposed to be a PR device to make Kristine look like a superstar mom to get a second book deal. And, basically, make a ton of money off their image as saintly adoptive parents.

The drama of the series, as it’s framed, is an “unsettled” question about whether Natalia was somehow a con artist, an adult little person masquerading as a child to be adopted by a wealthy American family. But here’s the thing: nearly from the beginning of filming the story, there’s no mystery—it’s only presented that way. The evidence is overwhelming, to use a cliché, and the Barnetts are guilty as hell.

Michael Barnett is in such deep and self-serving denial it literally raises my blood pressure. Let’s say he was, in fact, in the thrall of an abusive and controlling marriage. Sure. Kristine is by all accounts a horror-show of an abusive narcissist. But he had an active role in the abuse over the course of years and years. He doesn’t just get to shrug that off. But he seems determined to disown any guilt because he, too, was a victim of Kristine’s cruelty.

There’s the refrain hurt people hurt people. It got flung around a lot in cases like NXIVM, when core members of the cult who did things like, you know, branding women with the leader’s initials recounted their own abuse and how they themselves were controlled. That’s not absolution. It’s a psychological explanation. Michael abused and abandoned a little girl and then publicly vilified her to cover his own ass.

Kristine is absolutely the monster at the end of this book. She pepper sprayed a seven-year-old child when she couldn’t do high school math as part of “homeschooling.” She physically assaulted her adoptive daughter and went to mind-boggling extremes to try to get rid of Natalia without damaging her own “famous” image. “Why would someone do that?” is a constant refrain. At the end of the day, it’s because she’s a horrible, horrible person and because she thought she could get away with it.

The largest lesson I took from the two-part docu-series is the one that Michael seems so dead set on not learning: complicity in harm enables harm. Everyone who listened to Kristine and accepted the story of this wealthy, white, influential couple instead of looking closer at what was happening helped to enable the abuse, and it’s cathartic if infuriating to watch Natalia be the one to have to confront them all these years later.

The Curious Case of Natalia Grace is now streaming on Max and Discovery Plus.