Is there a more ethically fraught genre of television than true crime documentaries? Reality TV shows may be built on lies and instances of mental abuse but, for the most part, everyone who appears on The Bachelor or Love Island consented to do so. True crime, on the other hand, relies on combing through other people’s personal tragedies in the name of creating a compelling narrative. Sure, no one who was interviewed on Making a Murderer or The Jinx did so against their will – but the things that they talk about did happen to them against their will. They would never have a television camera in front of their face if their loved one wasn’t killed, or they weren’t accused of committing a crime, or they didn’t just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re baring their souls and reliving the worst moments of their life, all for the entertainment of strangers.

There’s also the problem of the maniacal fanbases true crime TV shows and podcasts cultivate. For every Serial that helps exonerate someone who may have been wrongfully convicted (if only temporarily), there are dozens of others others that turn the latest tragedy into something like the fiasco currently underway in Moscow, Idaho, where professional journalists and amateur sleuths alike are literally popping out of bushes in an attempt to figure out who murdered four University of Idaho students in their sleep. Never mind that the case is already headed to trial – there are media careers to be made and personal fantasies to satisfy, and no violation of personal space or interruption of mourning is sacred enough to prevent some people from pursuing either of those goals.

Of course, I’m not a completely guilty observer of this phenomenon. Like everyone else, I devoured Serial when it debuted in 2014, and checked out in the second season when it moved on from investigating a murder on the gritty streets of Baltimore to the much less sordid Bowe Bergdahl abduction story. The same goes for Dirty John, which had the benefit of telling a completed story, and S-Town, which transcended the genre to become what I believe is the greatest narrative podcast of all time, ethical quandaries and all. I also couldn’t get enough of The Jinx, which, with its HBO-production values and apparent confession, is probably the high point of the 2010s true crime boom. I also loved Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, probably the best example of how to responsibly be a true crime journalist, and the rare instance of an author’s investigation actually bringing closure to a case that had been open for decades.

But a few years ago, it became clear to me that the genre was beginning to provide diminishing returns. I had no interest in the second season of Making a Murderer, especially after it turned out the filmmakers may have cut material that cast Steven Avery, who they believed was innocent, in a negative light. Abducted in Plain Site seemed too voyeuristic, the parade of cult documentaries like The Vow and Wild Wild Country redundant, and the briefly dominant Tiger King plain gross. The cultural footprints of these shows seemed to become smaller as streaming began to expand. What once seemed like essential viewing became just another drop in a vast ocean of content.

But I couldn’t stay away from The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, an Investigation Discovery show that, through the corporate machinations of David Zaslav, has been lent a specious sheen of prestige (and a bigger audience) by its relocation to Max. The six-part documentary series tells the story of Michael and Kristine Barnett, an Indiana couple that adopted the titular Natalia, a Ukrainian orphan who suffers from diastrophic dysplasia, a rare form of dwarfism. After bringing Natalia back to the suburbs of Indianapolis to live with them and their three sons, things begin to take a bizarre turn. Despite having a birth certificate that says she’s six, Natalia already seems to be undergoing the early stages of puberty. She also displays a range of behavioral issues, including smearing her feces on one of her brothers, attempting to lure her siblings into traffic, and eventually, stockpiling knives and threatening to kill everyone in the house except Michael. After taking her to a series of doctors and psychologists, the Barnetts come to believe that Natalia is a sociopathic adult posing as a child (a plot literally lifted from 2009 film Orphan). As a result, they obtain an emergency court order “re-aging” her from eight to 22, and relocate her to an apartment in Westfield, Indiana to keep her separate from their other children. 

The first three episodes of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace are devoted to documenting the ways Natalia terrorized not only her family, but her neighbors in Westfield as well. In addition to the shit-smearing and knife plot, there are alleged incidents of Natalia trying to pull Kristine into an electric fence and dosing her coffee with Pledge in an attempt to poison her. Once she moves to Westfield, Natalia immediately begins to take advantage of her charitable neighbors, walking into their homes unannounced and rummaging through their cupboards and refrigerators. Most disturbing are the allegations that she began to sexually proposition both grown men and young boys, a pattern of behavior that had emerged earlier when she was briefly housed in a state-run mental institution, where – according to anonymously interviewed orderlies – she also offered to trade sexual favors for money. 

The bulk of these events are recounted via a 2019 interview with Michael Barnett, the family’s flamboyant and expressive patriarch. Bug-eyed and prone to gesticulation, Michael is a reality/documentary-producer’s dream – someone who’s not only willing to speak on camera but eager to do so, putting a level of emotion behind his statements that somehow both strains credulity and makes you assume he couldn’t possibly be lying. Arrogant and insistent (he boasts in the first episode about owning a “McMansion” that had “13 TVs”), he nonetheless generates a bit of sympathy from the viewer, even if they can’t stand him personally. Sure, he’s tacky and he doesn’t seem like someone you’d want to sit next to on an airplane, but if the stuff he’s saying is real, then you have no reason to not feel sorry for him. After all, wouldn’t you be freaked out if you lived with someone who said they wanted to kill your family?

His presence also serves to underscore the trashiness and near-camp of the show itself – although it appears on the same platform as The Jinx, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace has neither its production value nor sense of good taste. Dramatic, Psycho-style music cues are deployed early and often, as are strategically out of focus reenactments meant to depict Natalia’s alleged crimes. The show also bookends each episode with reality TV style teases featuring explosive, out of context quotes, dangling supposed revelations in front of the viewer, promising that they’ll discover another fascinating angle to the mystery of Natalia if they just watch another episode. Sometimes, it makes good on that promise, but more often than not, it offers us just another opportunity to gawk – at an alleged sociopath, at Michael Barnett’s unhingedness, and – eventually – at the supposed “white trash” of Indiana themselves. Even Beth Karas, the “legal expert” who walks us through the complexities of adoption and child welfare law, does so via an incredulous, almost Mid-Atlantic accent that comes off as Katherine Hepburn playing Jeanine Pirro.

By the third episode or so, the lease on Natalia’s Westfield apartment is up, and because the building’s management has received complaints about her behavior, Michael and Kristine have to find somewhere else for her to live. They eventually settled on an apartment in Lafayette, Indiana, approximately an hour away from the Barnetts’ home. Michael says that he and Kristine chose Lafayette because, as graduates of nearby Purdue University, they were familiar with it, and is keen to point out that Natalia’s apartment was close to a GED center (where Natalia enrolled) and a grocery store that accepted her food stamp card. But as Kyna Weaver, a neighbor who became acquainted with Natalia, attests, it was also crime ridden and dangerous, particularly for a smaller person with mobility issues. 

The apartment Natalia was living in was unaccommodating as well – located on the second floor, she had to climb a number of stairs to even reach the front door, and once inside, would have been unable to reach the stove, washing machine, or bathtub. Meanwhile, the Barnetts left the state of Indiana entirely, moving to Canada after their oldest son, Jacob, a mathematics prodigy, was accepted into a graduate program at the Perimeter Program of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario (60 Minutes recorded a segment about Jacob in 2012). We also learn a bit about the Barnetts’ troubled home life – Michael has an alleged history of domestic violence, and a Child Protective Services agent investigated their treatment of Natalia, both before and after she was removed from the house. Employees of the farm where Natalia allegedly tried to throw Kristine into the electric fence also cast doubt on the Barnetts’ recollection of events, claiming that the threats Michael says Natalia directed at his wife were never actually said, and that the electric fence itself wasn’t even on. Eventually, Natalia has left her apartment in Lafayette and moved in with Cynthia and Anton Mans, a couple who tries to legally adopt her but, given her legal age, cannot.

Fast forward to 2022, and Michael Barnett has decided to sit down for another interview with the documentary team. He and Krstine are now divorced – she still lives in Canada with their two youngest sons, while Michael has moved back to Indianapolis with Jacob. According to Michael, Kristine had psychologically engineered nearly everything about the Natalia situation. Convinced she was lying about her age and origin, Kristine would beat Natalia and force her stand against a wall for hours on end for refusing to confess to her supposed lies. She also apparently coached Natalia to lie about her age, which is offered up as an explanation for her subsequent interactions with her neighbors in Westfield and Lafayette. Michael says that this abuse extended to him as well – allegedly, Kristine would strategically withhold sex from him so he would comply with her schemes, and once they were divorced, would strategically leak provocative photos of herself to him to dissuade him from cooperating with any further legal inquiries, inquiries that ultimately culminated in neglect charges being brought separately against both Michael and Kristne by the State of Indiana.

It’s during the 2022 interviews of both Michael and Jacob that The Curious Case of Natalia Grace goes from being merely trashy to arguably manipulative and exploitative. Jacob, now in his early 20s and living in his father’s basement, provides some details of Kristine’s abuse, but is understandably reluctant to elaborate. In an effort to get him to divulge, a producer invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied” implying that Jacob can provide justice to his father and adopted sister if he tells the crew what they want to hear. Jacob leaves the interview to confer with his father but, just as Robert Durst did in The Jinx, forgets to take off his microphone. Jacob and Michael speak, they believe, outside of the camera’s view, and unknowingly reveal that they’ve agreed not to reveal certain aspects of what happened with the Barnett household, specifically about a “kicking down the stairs.” When Jacob rejoins the crew he recounts a separate, particularly harrowing event in which Kristine told him to urinate on Natalia’s bed as punishment for her urinating on the coach, but does not elaborate on the “kicking down the stairs” incident – and as far as we can tell, the crew never asks him about it (clips of Natalia’s forensic interviews with prosecutors reveal that every other member of the Barnett family “whooped” her).

The bulk of the last two episodes focus on Michael’s preparation for his trial – a fairly tedious subject that features lots of generic scenes of Michael conferring with his lawyers and freaking out when it’s revealed that his wife referred to Lafayette (where the trial is taking place) as a “white trash town.” The most important revelation of the subsequent police investigation into the situation is the discovery of Natalia’s biological mother in Ukraine, presumably confirming via a DNA test that she is in fact Natalia’s mother and that she gave birth to Natalia in 2003, meaning she was in fact a six-year-old child when the Barnetts adopted her. However, because Michael Barnett’s defense was not able to observe this test take place, the judge overseeing the case ruled that it was not admissible in court, narrowing the scope of charges that both of them could face. As a result, Michael is acquitted, and the charges against Kristine are dropped.

The series ends with the documentary crew confronting Michael about another interview they conducted with a man named Freddie Gill. A country singer with dwarfism, Kristine contacted Gill via Facebook messenger ostensibly to ask his advice in raising Natalia, but their messages soon became sexual, with Kristine eventually offering to pimp out Natalia to him – an offer that Gill refused. The documentary crew presents a clearly irate Michael with a laptop featuring Gill’s interview (“Who’s computer is this? How many pieces do you want it back in?” he asks) and asks him to push play. Michael does so, and Gill makes a chilling accusation.

A chilling accusation of what, you may ask? We don’t know, because the filmmakers don’t show us. Instead, the camera cuts away right after Gill begins to speak, and Michael storms out of the room. Afterwards, we get lots of commentary about how his acquittal was a miscarriage of justice and that he may “still have to answer to some of this… in the court of public opinion.”

In almost any context, this would be egregious. But it is particularly galling given the producer’s previous invocation of the “justice denied” quote, because, we can assume, the documentary crew is currently delaying justice by refusing to let us know what Freddie Gill said, all in the service of attracting an audience to the show’s follow up. That last part isn’t speculation – later this summer, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks will air on Investigation Discovery and Max, featuring an interview with Natalia herself and, one would hope, the details of Gill’s interview. 

In most journalistic pursuits, there is a tension between the duty to pursue accountability and the desire to turn a profit. But it’s rare to find something from a major outlet that so brazenly abandons its mission to present the truth the way this series choses to. Any pretense that The Curious Case of Natalia Grace was made with the intent of uncovering the truth about what had actually happened within the Barnett home is completely cast aside to manufacture a cliffhanger ending. It is the fulfillment of every negative stereotype of true crime, confirmation that this series exists solely to give the audience something to gawk at and be titillated by. It is the nadir of the genre.

There’s nothing wrong with packaging the crimes and lies of bad people into digestible narratives. But milking them for cheap spectacle the way the makers The Curious Case of Natalia Grace have chosen to is unforgivable. I don’t know exactly what happened between the Barnetts and Natalia. But it seems likely that, at a minimum, they gaslit an orphan into believing that she was an adult capable of murder and physically abused her. But given lots of innuendo surrounding Michael’s behavior, they may have done much worse. Rather than recognize this tragedy for what it was and behave in a sensitive, responsible way, the filmmakers deliberately concealed what may have been further, crucial evidence of the Barnetts’ crimes, all so they could entice viewers to return to a struggling streaming platform and give David Zaslav a hit series to hang his hat on. A police officer would get fired for suppressing such evidence, as would a defense attorney or prosecutor. We should hold journalists to a similar standard (and whether or not everyone involved with this project intended to be a journalist, they inherited a journalistic responsibility the moment they signed on to this project). Instead, these filmmakers probably got a pat on the back for figuring out a way to turn this story into a serializable, spin-off-able product. That’s more than unethical. It’s morally bankrupt, and we as a society shouldn’t tolerate it.