An adopted 'child' who actually turned out to be a 22-year-old woman has spoken out about allegations she tried to murder her adoptive parents.
Natalia Grace shot to fame as the subject of a Dr. Phil episode in 2019, BBC News reports. In the episode, she said her adoptive parents Michael and Kristine Barnett had abandoned her at an apartment when she was just a child, having adopted her nine years earlier in 2010. At that time, they were told that she was six years old.
Michael and Kristine defended their decision, claiming that Natalia was actually a woman who was pretending to be a child and that she had threatened to kill her adoptive parents and their biological sons. The couple soon came to the unbelievable 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.
Now, however, Natalia has spoken out about Michael and Kristine's claims in an upcoming documentary special, stating that they're completely untrue.
Not long after they first adopted her, Michael and Kristine began to doubt Natalia's age and, in June 2012, Marion County Superior Court agreed to legally change her birth record to indicate she was born in 1989 and not 2003. Shortly after, the Barnetts set her up with her own apartment.
Several of Natalia's neighbors at the time took part in a three-part ID docuseries, where they described how they often called the building manager to complain about her strange behavior. One neighbor, Andrew Rice, said: "I didn't necessarily think she was a child at first", and claimed that Natalia had told her neighbors that she was 26. Rice also said she appeared disheveled and "emitted" an "unpleasant body odor" as well.
Other neighbors claimed that Natalia would simply show up to their homes uninvited, allow herself in, and look for food. She also reportedly told her neighbors that she no longer lived with her adoptive parents because they had become scared of her after she pulled a knife on them and tried to poison them.
One neighbor alleged that they witnessed Natalia playing with a young boy, before she "started undoing his pants." The boy's father allegedly confronted Natalia, but he did not wish to comment on the matter in the documentary. After all the complaints against her, Natalia's lease was not renewed when it ended. "They got her out. Everybody was so relieved [...] I think she's a little possessed. She presents herself like a nice person but she's really evil and devious," McCallum stated.
Check out the new trailer for Natalia's side of the story below:
Natalia herself said in a teaser for her upcoming special: "The things that Michael said that I've done is a lie."
Per Entertainment Tonight, she says in previews for the special: "It's frustrating. It's very frustrating to hear everything that's being said from Kristine and Michael. And because I already don't know who I am and I want to know who I am and what happened to me, but I'm hearing all this stuff that never actually happened from Kristine and Michael.
"I'm like, 'It's shocking and it's frustrating.' Because that's not even true. And people are believing what Kristine and Michael are saying without even hearing my side. Y'all have heard from Kristine and Michael and what they have said. But you need to hear both sides in order to know what happened," she says.
"I wanna tell people what really happened, because I didn't get that chance," she says elsewhere in the trailer.
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, will air on ID later this summer.
