The Ukrainian child who was believed to be a 22-year-old woman has explained what really happened when she supposedly ‘tried to poison’ her adoptive mother, claiming there's another side to the story.
The saga of Natalia Grace truly has been one of the most baffling cases in recent years – so much so, that we’re still looking for definitive answers.
The youngster hit headlines after being adopted in 2010 by Michael and Kristine Barnett, who were told she was a six-year-old child with a rare bone growth disorder.
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However, the Barnetts later claimed she was an adult posing as a juvenile, and eventually managed to get a judge to legally re-age her as a 22-year-old woman in 2012.
The only thing is, it may turn out that she wasn’t a grown adult after all.
The wild story as the subject of an Investigation Discovery documentary released earlier this year, in which the Barnetts and others shared supposed ‘proof’ that Natalia wasn’t who she said she was.
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We now have a follow-up docuseries, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, which premieres on 1 January and sees Natalia speak out about the matter for herself.
In the first season, we heard about claims that Natalia had once tried to ‘poison’ Kristine by putting cleaning product in her coffee – with footage of her appearing to do so featuring in the documentary.
"She tried to poison and kill my wife," Michael said of his adoptive daughter.
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But Natalia has insisted that the scene had been completely ‘staged’, saying: “It’s not true, none of it is true. First of all, at this point, Kristine was beating me for months and then everybody thinks that I’m some crazy person trying to pour something into her coffee – or in their drink, whatever it is.
“That's not who I am. I think Kristine was just trying to find an excuse to say I was crazy.”
She explained: “The story about that is something completely different. I was helping K clean up the kitchen. It was one of the good days, you could say.
“And she had this like table cleaner, and she was spraying it on the table and I was helping her wipe it down.
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“She had walked out for a second, I noticed a spot that needed some more, so I moved the chair, climbed on it, I scooted her coffee away, sprayed it, and as I was wiping the table Kristine came back in and was like, ‘What did you spray in my coffee?’
“I was like, ‘Nothing.’
“Like, you could have looked in that coffee there was nothing wrong with it.
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“She poured the coffee out, refilled it, went to go get her camera and made me do it.
“And I was like, ‘I didn’t do it.’
“And she was like, ‘You’re lying, do it.’
“And then she literally grabbed my hand, made me spray it in the coffee.”
Natalia added: “I think that Kristine tried to create that video to try to have some sort of ‘proof’ that I did something that I didn’t do.
“She staged that whole thing. I’m not crazy. I did not try to poison her.”
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks premieres on Investigation Discovery on 1 January 2024.
Topics: TV And Film, Natalia Grace, Documentaries
Jess Hardiman