Woman who ‘posed as six-year-old girl’ speaks out about 'trying to poison' adoptive mum

Natalia Grace has hit back at claims she tried to poison her adoptive mother by pouring cleaning chemicals into her coffee.

A new documentary series, titled The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, tells the bizarre story of the Ukrainian-born Natalia who was adopted by Michael and Kristine Barnett from the US in 2010.

The couple went on to claim the six-year-old girl they had adopted was actually a 22-year-old woman - a claim which is disproven in the new series after Natalia undergoes medical testing.

The Barnetts went on to allege that Natalia, who has a rare bone growth disorder, had plans to ‘kill everyone’ in the family.

Amongst the claims made by the Barnetts was one incident in which they said Natalia had attempted to ‘poison’ Kristine by putting a cleaning product into her coffee - the couple even recorded footage which they say ‘proved’ the incident happened.

Speaking in 2022, Michael said: “Kristine goes to the other room for a moment, and she’s got a coffee cup sitting on the counter. Natalia put Pledge into her coffee cup that had coffee in it.”

He went on to claim that when Kristine returned she drank the coffee and ‘instantly tasted’ the cleaning product.

ID

After hearing his wife’s ‘scream’ Michael ran out and said he heard Kristine ask Natalia if she had put the cleaner into the coffee, to which she replied: “Yes.”

He said that when Natalia was asked why, she told Kristine: “Because I want to kill you.”

However, in upcoming ID docu-series The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, she challenges Michael’s claims saying: “It’s not true. None of it is true. That's not who I am.”

She explained: “The story about that is something completely different. I was helping Kristine clean up the kitchen. It was one of the good days, you could say.

“And she had this table cleaner, and she was spraying it on the table and I was helping her wipe it down.

“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?’

Investigation Discovery

“I was like, ‘Nothing’. Like, you could have looked in that coffee, there was nothing wrong with it.

“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 airs across three consecutive nights on ID from Monday 1 January.