The birth mother of the adopted "child" who is believed to be 22 years old has revealed her daughter’s real age.
As previously reported, a Ukrainian orphan named Natalia Grace shot to fame as the subject of a Dr. Phil episode in 2019. In the episode, she said that in 2010 - when she was allegedly six years old - her adoptive parents Michael and Kristine Barnett abandoned her at an apartment.
The parents from Indiana defended their decision, claiming that Natalia was actually a woman who was pretending to be a child - and had her age changed by a doctor who determined she was at least 22 - and even went as far as to say that she had threatened to kill them and their biological sons.
They soon came to the outlandish conclusion that Natalia was not a young child, but actually, a 22-year-old woman with a form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal, according to PEOPLE.
Two years after Natalia was adopted, the Barnetts petitioned Marion County Probate Court to legally change her age to 22, which would then alter her birth year from 2003 to 1989, according to the publication.
The following year, they moved with their three sons to Canada without Natalia and left her alone in an apartment in Lafayette. However, the pair - who divorced later - were charged with neglect of a dependent.
Prosecutors couldn't charge them with neglect of a child because of the young woman's court-ordered age change. In addition to this, Natalia also testified during Michael's trial saying that she didn't want to live in Lafayette.
Now, the parents are featured in a new docuseries called The Curious Case of Natalia Grace by Investigation Discovery, where they opened up about their adoption story and shared further claims about Natalia.
Natalia's biological mother Anna Gava also appeared in the documentary to provide a DNA test. Three years after confirming that she is the parent, she spoke out in a tearful interview via webcam about the bizarre speculations.
Gava revealed that Natalia was born on September 4, 2003, at 6:25 AM in Maternity Hospital No. 1, stating: "She is my biological daughter." This means that Natalia would be 19 years old today.
Furthermore, the biological mom also recalled having a "difficult" birth with her daughter and insisted that she was a child when she was put up for adoption.
"When I regained consciousness, after anesthesia, the next day the doctor came and said there is no sense to take her home. They said that she won't be able to walk at all and she will be of very short stature," Gava said.
She claimed that she was told it would cost $100,000 for surgery and she didn't "have any finances" to cover that at the time, explaining: "I didn't initially want to leave her but the doctors said there is nothing you could do for her. 'You are young,' they said, 'You are 24 years old. Don't ruin your life, you will have other children.'"
She then began to tear up because she "listened to the doctors and left her instead of keeping her," adding: "All this time, all those years, I've been thinking about her, what is her life like what is she doing and everything like this."
"[Natalia] was promised piles of gold and it turned out the opposite," she noted, before expressing that she was stunned that her daughter was "abandoned at the age of 13 alone in an apartment".
Reacting to Gava's interview, legal expert Beth Karas said: "Anna Gava was born in 1979, which means she would have been 10 years old if Natalia was born in 1989, as the courts ruled when they re-aged her.
"So there aren’t a lot of good reasons, besides seeing pubic hair on her, to believe she was born anytime before 2003," she added.
