Her “curious” story isn’t over yet.
The wild Investigation Discovery docuseries, “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,” ended its second season on Wednesday with a shocker.
Titled “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks,” Season 2 features Natalia and Michael (her former adoptive father), having a confrontation in which he entirely blames his ex-wife, Kristine, for the couple’s abandonment of Natalia.
He asks for forgiveness, which Natalia grants.
Natalia was subsequently adopted by Antwon and Cynthia Mans, her legal guardians who took her in after she was abandoned by Michael and Kristine.
But, just when things are looking up for Natalia, the season’s cliffhanger ending reveals her new guardians might not be so different from Michael and Kristine.
In the last few minutes of Wednesday’s episode, a title card appears reading, “Two weeks ago, and six months after Natalia’s adoption, the producers got a shocking phone call.”
An audio recording then plays of Cynthia and Antwon charging they’d been tricked by Natalia.
Antwon says, “Something ain’t right with Natalia. This girl is tweakin’. I feel like she’s the enemy in the house. And she said to us, we have held her hostage. Made us look like we’re the enemy.”
Cynthia adds, “Natalia is stabbing her family in the back over a complete lie.”
Natalia’s strange and “curious” story began in 2010, when Michael and Kristine Barnett adopted her. Natalia, who has a form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia, was believed by her adoptive parents to be an orphaned 6-year-old from Ukraine. However, the Indiana couple then accused Natalia of being a sociopathic adult “masquerading” as a child.
In the first season of the shocking ID docuseries, Natalia’s former adoptive father Michael Barnett alleges, “[Natalia] threatened to stab my sons, drag their bodies outside and bury them under the deck. She tried to poison and kill my wife!”
The Barnetts accused Natalia of emotionally and physically abusing them, as well as of looming over the couple while they were sleeping with a knife in her hand — a claim she denies.
Later, the couple claimed to have discovered she’d been menstruating.
“We don’t know who she is. We don’t know where she’s really from,” Michael said. “Who the f – – k is this person? For all I know, she’d been living in Ukraine for 20 years.
“She’d been taking knives out of the kitchen and hiding them under her bed,” Michael says in the doc. “[She said], ‘I’m going to kill your in your sleep.’”
In 2012, the couple had Natalia admitted to the Larue Carter mental hospital in Indianapolis.
“She’s not a kid. That’s an adult,” an unnamed hospital employee said in the doc.
Natalia publicly denied all of the allegations. In 2019, she went on “Dr. Phil” and said the claims were “not true at all,” and that she was 16 in 2019.
After Natalia was released from the mental institution, Michael and Kristine had her age legally changed to 22 years old and placed Natalia in an apartment building by herself — without customizations for her special needs — in Lafayette, Indiana.
“They dumped her,” legal analyst Beth Karas, a featured contributor in the doc, told The Post in May 2023.
“The idea that they would put her in an apartment that didn’t have modifications or an occupational therapist is heartbreaking.”
Michael says in the documentary that it was Kristine’s idea to leave Natalia alone to fend for herself. He and Kristine divorced in 2014.
That same year, Natalia moved in with Antwon and Cynthia Mans — whom she’d met by chance — when she was struggling to fend for herself.
Law enforcement agencies investigated Natalia’s case between 2014 and 2019, in order to determine if the Barnetts had wrongfully abandoned her.
In September 2019, Michael and Kristine were charged with two counts of neglect.
Michael was found not guilty on both neglect charges in October 2022. The neglect charges against Kristine were dismissed in March 2023.
DNA test results have since shown that Natalia is currently around 22, and she was under 10 when she was first adopted by the Barnetts.
“This one little piece of paper throws every single lie that the Barnetts said right into the trash with a match,” Grace says to Antwon about the DNA test in the docuseries’ second season.
“This is so big. Because literally, this has been 13 years of just two people lying their butts off,” she continues. “They ruined a kid’s life. They painted me as some big monster when in reality they were the ones.”
It seems like Natalia’s bizarre story finally found a happy ending for her, with Antwon and Cynthia Mans — but, not so fast.
In the final moments of Wednesday’s episode, Antwon is heard claiming, “Natalia does not have emotions for nothing but herself. We’re done. We’re done with her.”
The episode ends with another title card, which reads, “Natalia’s story will continue.”
A third season of the docuseries has not been officially announced. The Post reached out to ID for comment.
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