Remember the mind-bogglingness of the Natalia Grace story?
Well now a doctor has confirmed the real age of the woman who was accused of posing as a six-year-old girl.
The 'child’ was believed to actually be a 22-year-old woman after Americans adopted her.
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Kristine and Michael Barnett became parents to Ukrainian Natalia back in 2010 and were told the little girl had a rare bone growth disorder.
However, they later claimed she was an adult pretending to be a six-year-old and managed to get a judge to legally re-age her as a 22-year-old in 2012.
But despite us all getting hooked onto the Investigation Discovery documentary of the case earlier this year, it never really got wrapped up into a conclusion.
The Barnetts claimed she was an 'adult sociopath masquerading as a child' in a bizarre criminal case of fraud and said she had made several attempts to kill the couple.
And in case you’re still baffled, brace yourself for this one: Natalia herself has now come forward to offer her side of the bizarre story for the first time.
A new docu-series, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, is set to premiere on 1 January – the perfect New Year’s Day binge.
During this follow-up, we get to see Grace visiting an age specialist from TruDiagnostics, Dr Halland Chen.
She undergoes various medical and diagnostic tests to confirm her true biological age, potentially giving us the answer we’ve all been itching for.
“I've known the truth for as long as I can remember, that I was a kid,” Natalia says.
“I just want people to really see the truth about my age.”
And as Dr Chen shares the results, she begins to tear up.
“Based off of all the studies and everything being analysed, you’re more closer to 22,” he tells her, adding: “Which is pretty close to what you think, [that] you’re almost 20 – that's within 2 years.”
This ‘proof’ of her ‘real age’ throws ‘every single lie that the Barnetts have said right into the trash’ according to Natalia.
She emotionally says: “This is so big. This has literally been 13 years of just two people lying their butts off, they painted me as some big monster, when they were the ones.”
If what the doc says is true, then it would mean Natalia was four when she went over to the USA from Ukraine.
And therefore, she would have been just seven when the Barnetts adopted her.
Then – and you can see where this is going – she would only have been eight when the petition to change her age to 22 was filed.
The American couple reckoned she was an adult the whole time, so it would have meant she’d have been just nine when they placed her into an apartment alone.
“I always knew I wasn’t an adult,” Natalia says.
She then cryptically adds something else, which seems like the potential opening of a whole other can of worms: “They are hiding something big, I wanna know the answers to these questions and I want people to pay for what they’ve done.”
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks premieres on Investigation Discovery on 1 January 2024.
Topics: TV and Film, Documentaries, Natalia Grace, US News
Jess Battison