We Need To Shut Down Indiana Until We Can Figure Out What's Going On

The curious case of The Curious Case Of Natalia Grace, the most baffling, watchable, infuriating docuseries ever aired.

Jun 30, 2023

FYI I’m going to be discussing what happened in a documentary series, so if you consider those spoilers, this will have spoilers. Also, read on for some general housekeeping, including the latest links, newest podcasts, and assorted ephemera.

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This past week I watched The Curious Case Of Natalia Grace, a six-part series that stands out as one of the strangest, most baffling television binges in which I’ve ever engaged (which I did willingly, and would probably do again, though I’m still infuriated by it). Featured on my Max app (it was originally on Investigation Discovery, so I guess I have David Zaslav’s HBO rebrand to thank) it’s like a Shaggy Dog story with multiple narrators, all of them wildly unreliable and most plainly sociopathic. It feels padded to puff up views, as most docuseries do nowadays, and yet also pathologically incomplete. I accepted the padding, hope for some kind of closure, and my only real takeaway was that we should probably just build a fence around Indiana and agree to never speak of it again.

The series is nonetheless insidiously compelling, with an undeniable hook. Kristine and Michael Barnett of Indiana adopt a 6-year-old girl from Ukraine, Natalia. Only, because Natalia has a rare form of dwarfism, coupled with the Barnett’s early discovery that Natalia has “full pubic hair,” they come to believe that she’s not a child at all, maybe not even Ukrainian. A sociopathic dwarf betrayed by her own pubes is the kind of story I can’t resist, even a thoroughly flawed telling of it, and the show seems to know this, and so I persevered even as the inconsistencies (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) began to pile up. (Starting with the most obvious one: if you were a sociopathic little person looking to pass yourself off as a child, wouldn’t you think to shave your pubes?).

Kristine Barnett, the adoptive mother, says in a soundbite that “it’s a story straight out of the movie Orphan,” a movie I remember fondly from the days when the blogs discovered the movie’s twist and trumpeted “SECRET DWARF HOOKER” in our shoutiest headlines. That our first introduction to her involves her comparing herself to a movie feels like a bit of a tell — both that this person is conscious of her narrative, and because the movie in question is a schlocky horror film about a killer little person, that she may be a bit of a fabulist. (“What can I tell you about my career? Well, have you seen Cindarella Man?”)

These red flags are subtle, almost to the point of being irrelevant compared to the ones that ensue. Kristine’s husband, Michael Barnett, a bearded guy with very wide set eyes who gives the impression of an anthropomorphized monitor lizard raised in the theater, becomes one of the show’s main narrators, a task in which he seems to take far too much glee. In explaining how he had it all and then lost it, and all because (according to him) this alleged secret dwarf came into his life, he references his “big house and a Lamborghini in the driveway.”

Call me crazy, but my mental picture of a “guy who had it all” doesn’t normally include a Lamborghini, a car designed for professional athletes or pop stars. That’s a car that invites follow-up questions (such as: what do you do for a living? did you really keep a $200,000 car in your driveway in suburban Indiana? Are you a drug dealer?) and yet the show never asks any. After six 45-ish minute episodes, I still don’t know what the community theater lizard was doing for a living. This is par for the course in this series, in which baffling facts aren’t so much examined as eclipsed, by the next even more baffling fact.

The most sane person in it seems to be this lady, who has five kids, three dogs, and nine cats and who is interviewed in a windowless room filled with different crucifixes that looks like it was decorated by Jack Nicholoson’s character in The Shining during a particularly religious moment of psychosis.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, we were talking about red flags and baffling facts. Michael’s wife, Kristine, has apparently written a “well-received memoir” about raising the couple’s oldest son. Jacob, we’re told, is an autistic child prodigy who went off to study astrophysics at a prestigious institution when he was 14. Kristine’s book about raising him is called “The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism .”

From Michael’s Lamborghini and general vibe (that of a highly-caffeinated overactor I’d instinctively avoid from 50 paces) to Kristine publishing a self-flattering parenting memoir while the child is barely a teen, everything about these people screams untrustworthy. And this is barely the first 10 minutes.

The show goes onto depict this “nightmare adoption,” from a sketchy, strip-mall adoption agency that seems more like a puppy mill for humans, who allegedly charge the Barnetts a $25,000 adoption fee. With three boys of their own already, Michael handwaves away the decision to adopt with pat explanations of Kristine wanting a girl, and them wanting to share this great life they’d built. (Come on, bro, you had a Lamborghini and a memoir, it couldn’t have been idyllic).

The discovery of the tell-tale pubes ensues, along a flurry of other allegations, like that Natalia doesn’t seem to speak, read, or really know anything about Ukrainian (according to the Barnetts). Natalia frequently soils herself out of spite, Michael explains, with assistance from a random lady (credited as “legal expert”) who seems to be present in the series solely to read from police reports. Natalia poops herself and tries to dirty Sanchez her adopted little brothers, they say. She spikes Kristine’s coffee with Pine Sol, stands at the foot of their bed holding kitchen knives, and says weird things about having evil thoughts and wanting to kill them. Even considering the sources, pretty wild stuff, some of it given the sheen of corroboration by cell phone footage of Natalia dispassionately saying weird things to the camera (always with Kristine prompting her).

Jacob (the autistic prodigy) seems to corroborate other parts of this depiction of Natalia as a tiny terrorist, as do some orderlies at the state psychiatric ward where Natalia is eventually sent. The anonymous orderlies say (through phone interviews that shield their identities) that Natalia was hypersexual, to the point that she seemed to brag about sex a lot and was sorta-kinda propositioning some of the other patients. Weird!

Michael Barnett goes above and beyond with metaphors, allusions, and more unnecessary act-outs than a YouTube comedian, all to explain how this little girl (or maybe just little person?) was making their lives a living hell. He even convinces us that this girl with a rare form of dwarfism who walks with leg braces (and seemingly only with moderate difficulty) is actually VERY STRONG, and once tried to shove Kristine into an electic fence at some kind of tourist farm. Yadda yadda yadda, they go to a court and get Natalia “re-aged,” from nine years old to 22, all given legal sanction on her official documents.

Those documents in turn provide legal sanction for the Barnetts to stick their now-22-year-old daughter in her own apartment, which Michael explains is actually such a great place, in a perfect location, near everything Natalia needs — despite it plainly not being little person-friendly in any way let alone ADA compliant.

Arguably the most entertaining bits of the series are the interviews with Natalia’s neighbors at the apartment complex, all of whom seem to have PTSD from living near the ultimate nightmare neighbor, a little girl (person?) with no boundaries and no other friends or companions, who is always showing up unannounced, sneaking in, stealing food, trapping them in conversation, and generally making them afraid to go outside, not to mention allegedly being weirdly sexual around little boys.

Natalia eventually becomes so infamous with the apartment management, local police, and social welfare agencies that the Barnetts (who by then have moved to Canada to support their oldest son’s astrophysicism education) rehome Natalia to a different county in a slummy part of town, to an even less little-person-friendly second-floor walk-up. All this seemingly out of spite (if you can’t find a ground floor dwelling in Indiana, where can you?).

Kristine’s apparent spite seems to blind her to an often-misunderstood truism of modern American life though, which is that people in poorer neighborhoods tend to feel a greater responsibility to their neighbors than people in richer ones (probably because poor people have much less means to wall themselves off from each other). And so it’s there that Natalia actually finds some champions (including the aforementioned crucifix lady), including a shirtless guy with a visible hernia who explains that their neighborhood is not a great place for a young girl, or someone who looks like a young girl, to be walking around alone. Which he knows full well, as he himself is convicted sex offender.

Some police investigators and a prosecutor get involved, and eventually we track down Natalia’s birth mother, confirmed by a DNA test. Natalia’s birth mother reveals that she was born in… 1979, which would’ve made her 10 years old when she gave birth to Natalia, according to the Indiana courts. Natalia’s mother says Natalia was indeed born in… 2003, the age claimed by the original adoption agency. The show tracks down the family doctor whose “expert advice” the court relied upon in Natalia’s original re-aging. He says that Natalia actually told him her age and that he basically just took her word for it. An age of 22 conveniently put Natalia just outside of the age at which Indiana requires adoptive parents be financially responsible for their adopted children, which is 21.

By this point, the Barnett’s are going through a messy divorce, and Michael is suddenly willing to divulge that Kristine was abusive to Natalia (conveyed in an act-out so committed that he seems to hurt his own hand punching the floor). He also tearfully claims that Kristine was “sexually abusive” towards him, on account of her “being withholding” and “using sex as a weapon.” The latter supposedly includes her sending him naughty pics and texts even after they’d filed for divorce, which the show helpfully includes “censored” versions of, which apparently doesn’t count as revenge porn for some reason (not that anyone is crying for Kristine Barnett at this point).

Meanwhile, Michael is the first to go to trial on neglect charges, during which the judge rules that Natalia’s age cannot be broached as an issue — despite the DNA test, and professional medical witnesses, desperate to testify under oath that Natalia was indeed a child. There is footage from a taped deposition, during which a spine doctor tries to explain that Natalia’s growth plates were still open, while Michael’s lawyer angrily objects, this, and any time someone dares imply that Natalia was any less than the court-ruled age of 22. He goes so far as to try to claim it as a personal affront to his honor for anyone to imply that Natalia isn’t her court-sanctioned age.

The jury eventually comes back not guilty, and in an interview with the jury foreperson, she says that they all thought Michael was guilty but were so bound by the conditions imposed by the judge that they felt like they had no choice. And so what began as a horror story about an unusual adoption turns into one about the Indiana legal system (and it’s probably only to comfort myself that I’m using the modifier “Indiana” here). In loudly defending his own honor while plainly acting dishonorably, Michael’s lawyer somehow comes off worse than the shirtless herniated child molester.

The court then dismisses the charges against Kristine Barnett, who, we learn through title text refused to participate in this documentary (pretty obvious now six episodes in), whose only comment was apparently “YOUR NETWORK IS WHACK.” [sic]

How the fuck to end a docuseries like that? Why, with a newly introduced, “sexually-confident little person” character, of course. Interviewed inside his bachelor’s junk pile, Freddie Gill explains how Kristine originally contacted him under the guise of learning to care for a little person, and eventually sexually propositioned him.

His testimony is bolstered by screencaps of Facebook messages from Kristine (who, a friend notes, was “not very tech savvy,” hilariously) which include dirty talk and naughty pictures. The producers ask Gill if he ever had a sexual interest in Natalia and he says of course not, that anyone who did “should have their balls cut off.” We can sort of infer that Gill says this because he believes Natalia was a child, though he does also take what seem like unnecessarily great pains to explain that he’s never been with another little person as well.

The show then teases that Gill makes additional bombshell allegations against Michael. We get a scene of the producers confronting Michael with these allegations, Michael-Jordan-in-The-Last-Dance-style, which Michael prefaces by warning that he’s going to destroy the laptop if he doesn’t like the video on it. (The producers: “uh, please don’t?”)

And then… the show ends. They do not tell us what the allegations were, nor do they promise additional coverage of this clearly ongoing story. (That the show involved an allegedly hyper-sexualized young girl partly raised by a woman whose ex-husband called her sexual abusive and who apparently sexually propositioned a little person does allow one to infer some things). Yet those things inferred are never articulated, nor are we offered any hints about why they’re not (or legally can’t be) articulated. It’s a cliffhanger seemingly without commercial purpose.

Pubes? Was it pubes that brought us to all of this??

A short list of things left unexplained:

Michael’s job, why he had a Lamborghini
Freddie Gill’s allegations against Gill
Why Natalia refused to talk about Ukraine and didn’t seem to know anything about it
How a 6-year-old girl had pubes, or why her family said she did
Why or when Kristine was granted full custody of the couple’s two younger sons
Basically anything about the couple that became Natalia’s new parents, or her original adoptive parents before the Barnetts
What that hernia guy did to become a sex offender
Freddie Gill’s life philosophy, and whether he prefers Creedence or Skynyrd

I’m somehow furious and still hopelessly intrigued. I don’t know whether to be angrier at the documentary-industrial complex or the state of Indiana. Burn it down. Burn it all down.

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Other stuff:

New Pod Yourself The Wire! We’re talking episode 306, “Homecoming,” with Will Menaker from Chapo Trap House. Now available on Patreon.

New Frotcast recording this afternoon, with Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman. If you have questions (especially about Florida ridiculousness, their area of expertise), get them in now — frotcast@gmail.com, 415 275 0030.

News coverage for GQ:

An appreciation of the Righteous Gemstones cast (and especially Edi Patterson)

Liam Neeson is doing Taken meets Speed for the director of Kontroll and Predators (both of which were great).

An explainer of the drama over at TCM (relevant to the Zaslav allusion up top)

Luca Guadagnino, the peach-sex/sexy cannibals guy, has made a tennis movie about threesomes. Zendaya!

Billions is ending after seven seasons. I watched this show for a few episodes, it was shitty in a good way but then I forgot about it.

WB tapping Flash director for a Batman movie. They did this before the box office returns for The Flash came in, so this seems subject to change. As I wrote, The Flash was a soulless concept, but I thought he did a great job directing it. I can’t overstate how bored I am by 98% of action sequences these days, so when I’m not bored, I remember it. (This goes for Extraction 2, which I shut off after 30 minutes, and I loved Extraction 1, for the action specifically. Maybe more on this later).