Last summer, I wrote a review of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, an Investigation Discovery (ID) documentary series about Natalia Grace Mans (formerly Natalia Grace Barnett, we’ll get into the name change later), a Ukrainian orphan with dwarfism who was accused by her adoptive parents of trying to kill them and their three sons. While I described the series as the “nadir” of its genre, I was also careful to point out that true crime projects, whether they’re well made or not, are exploitative by their very nature. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace may have been particularly egregious and insulting, but any television show that packages the misery of others for entertainment is far from innocent, and anyone convinced that something as good as The Jinx eludes the ethical and moral questions posed by the mere existence of true crime is not being fully honest with themselves.

But after watching The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, I now wonder if treating this particular series as just another morally dubious true crime documentary is a bit too generous on my part. On its surface, this six-part follow up to the original series should right some of the wrongs of its predecessor by virtue of actually allowing Natalia speak about the abuse allegedly perpetrated against her. But as Natalia began to tell her side of the story, it became evident that the necessity of this “season” of the show was, in its own way, manufactured by the series’ producers itself. By lending any form of credence to the obviously fabricated narrative of the first half of its first season, producer-directors Christian and Jackson Conway created a mystery where there was none, controversy when the victims and perpetrators of this particular story are not at all ambiguous, and a perfectly engineered structure that allows them to milk this story for all its worth. It remains disgusting and insulting. 

A Sensationalistic Strategy

To recap for those who haven’t watched the series: in the early 2010s, Indiana couple Michael and Kristine Barnett began to express concern that their adopted daughter Natalia Grace was displaying violent and disturbing behavior, and claimed that, rather than being a child, she was actually a sociopathic adult. Thanks to a letter written by a friendly doctor and social worker, they managed to have Natalia’s birth year legally changed from 2003 to 1989, making her an adult in the eyes of the law and allowing them to move her into an apartment separate from the family home. This attracted the attention of the local authorities, who eventually charged the Barnetts with neglect of a dependent. However, Michael was ultimately found not guilty (and charges against Kristine were dropped) on the basis that, whatever her biological age, Natalia was legally an adult. But both during and after the trial, Michael would go on to claim that Kristine was physically and emotionally abusive towards both he and Natalia.

But more important than the facts of the case are the way they were presented. The first half of the original series takes the Barnetts’ version of events at face value, relying primarily on interviews with Michael and cheap, strategically shot reenactments of Natalia’s alleged crimes to create a sense of menace and mystery. The second half is devoted to Michael refuting the narrative of the first half via his claims against Kristine while he simultaneously defends himself in court against the neglect charges. By the end of the series, Michael (whose histrionic demeanor makes him a hard person to believe in the first place) is painted as a villain thanks to an outrageous cliffhanger in which Freddie Gill, a musician with dwarfism with whom Kristine had tried to arrange a “date” with Natalia, makes some kind of allegation against Michael that’s obscured by a bleep and prompts a typically over the top reaction from the accused.

This deliberate obfuscation of supposedly explosive evidence is what sent me over the edge in regards to The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. Rather than fulfill their journalistic duty and lay all of the facts bare for their viewers, the Conways strung us along twice, first by feeding us the clearly fake story that the Barnetts told about Natalia (its plot points are almost directly pulled from the 2009 horror film Orphan) and then by promising an earth-shaking revelation that they already had in their possession… but not until the promised second season. It’s sensationalism, plain and simple, but worst of all, it worked – there was no way I wasn’t going to watch Natalia Speaks, because I really did want to know what Freddie Gill said, and perhaps even believed that it might shed some light on this already sad story. 

An Unserious Approach to a Serious Issue

One might think that, given the framing of the finale, they would open with Gill’s comments, but instead, Natalia Speaks follows a similar two-part structure to the original series. Its first portion focuses on Natalia refuting the Barnetts’ initial narrative and detailing the abuse perpetrated against her by Kristine, as well as the shady adoption process that brought her to Indiana in the first place. The details are harrowing – in addition to staging Natalia’s alleged poisoning attempts and obsession with knives, Natalia says that Kristine beat her repeatedly with both her fists and a belt, pepper sprayed her at least twice, was generally neglectful of her physical needs, and coached her to tell people that, while she very clearly looked like a child, she was actually an adult. There are also insinuations that she narrowly avoided sexual abuse while living by herself and that she may have been a human trafficking victim while living in Ukraine. 

This step by step refutation of the Barnetts’ version of events is necessary in the sense that it (ostensibly) corrects the record by providing the world with a truthful account of what actually happened while Natalia lived with them. But it’s also unnecessary in the sense that the Conways did not have to lend as much credence to the Barnetts as they did in the show’s first season. Instead, they made a pretty clear business decision – feed viewers a fascinating but ultimately false narrative to reel them in, but then promise them the truth in a follow up series that they’ll have no choice but to watch if they want the full story. 

This approach is as tedious as it is irresponsible. The six or so hours I spent watching the Barnetts and Natalia tell conflicting versions of events could have easily been condensed if the filmmakers took their time to create a more restrained, respectable season of television that was released once they had spoken to all of the parties involved with the story. But that would also mean that ID wouldn’t have been able to take the self-gratifying victory lap of Natalia Speaks’ opening minutes, which features a compilation of online reactions from viewers talking about how the first season left them “shooketh” and how they can’t wait to find out more.1Full disclosure: The Postrider was approached by Hot Snakes Media, a licensing company working for WarnerDiscovery, about the possibility of featuring the headline of my negative review of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace in Natalia Speaks. We agreed to license but never heard back from Hot Snakes after the initial discussion and never received any money from the company. Given the tone of my initial review, I hope you trust that I would have been honest about this series even if we had actually been paid. It would also mean displaying even a modicum of restraint when it comes to the show’s editing style, which gives the series the cheap, low brow pace of reality TV. The success of this show depends, in part, on us believing that the filmmakers are seeking justice. The purity of their pursuit becomes much harder to believe when shocking revelations of child abuse are scored and shot like the first half of a Bar Rescue episode.

The second portion of Natalia Speaks is centered around a one-on-one conversation between Natalia and Michael, supposedly so the two of them can come to some shared version of the truth and, in Natalia’s case, some form of forgiveness. But rather than a tense, difficult attempt at reconciliation, the filmmakers make clear early on that they intend to treat it with all of the grace of a Real Housewives reunion. At the first meeting between Natalia and Michael, the two parties are accompanied by Antwon Mans (one half of a couple that took Natalia in after she had been abandoned by the Barnetts a second time) and Terrence Kinnard (Michael’s attorney) respectively. This attempted summit goes up in flames when Michael refuses to answer questions about Natalia’s re-aging and Mans and Kinnard get into a shouting match over Michael’s profanity, culminating in Michael storming out of the interview. Before they meet up again, Natalia provides more details of the abuse, and flatly denies the long-teased allegations of Freddie Gill that she and Michael were engaged in a sexual relationship (Michael denies these allegations as well). 

On the second attempt, Natalia and Michael meet alone, and the result is tolerable, if not predictable. Natalia asks Michael if he knew the extent of Kristine’s abuse (he’s a little non-committal on that front), asks why he didn’t do anything to stop it (he says he was also being abused and was afraid of losing his other children), and why they even adopted her in the first place (Michael says that, after their autistic son Jacob turned out to be a physics prodigy, Kristine became obsessed with the idea of becoming famous by turning another disabled child into a success story). 

Once again, this meeting is framed by the Conways as a marquee event, with “legal analyst” Beth Karas providing worthless commentary that reads more like a boxing match preview than a true assessment of the legal and ethical questions at play. In fact, Karas’ presence only reinforces how sweaty the producers’ attempts to draw Natalia’s case out into something more mysterious have become. An elderly neighbor of Natalia’s who was featured in the first season and Kinnard are reintroduced as talking heads for the sole purpose of casting doubt on Natalia’s version of events, but by the time we hear from them we’ve also already heard from multiple law enforcement experts who attest that Natalia’s case carries all the hallmarks of child abuse, and from a dentist who shows childhood X-rays that confirm that Natalia was in fact a child while she was living the Barnetts. 

When it comes to the question of child abuse, there is no mystery – Natalia was biologically a child, and she was abused. What the series should focus on instead is how Natalia’s re-aging, which allowed the Barnetts to evade criminal prosecution, was even made possible in the first place. But because that’s harder to dramatize, it’s largely ignored in favor of Michael Barnett’s borderline manic persona and his specious path towards redemption. 

A Contrived Cliffhanger

Natalia and Michael’s conversation ends on what could conceivably be considered to be a high note, with Natalia forgiving Michael and praying over him (Karas speculates that this may be a ploy by Natalia to make Michael eventually admit that he knew she shouldn’t be re-aged, but this possibility is never followed up with again, yet another sign of Karas and the producers’ desperation to squeeze drama out of what is at this point a more or less resolved case). After the meeting, Natalia goes to court and asks to be legally adopted by Antwon and Cynthia Mans, a touching assertion of control for a person who, for so long, was victim to the whims of people who degraded her very humanity.

Or is it? After this happy moment, we’re presented with a title card that says the producers received a “shocking” phone call from the Manses. Snippets of the calls, in which Antwon claims Natalia is “tweaking” and “the enemy” are played, while a drone shot slowly zooms into a sullen looking Natalia sitting on a wooden porch. “Natalia’s story will continue” a final title card promises, hinting at a third season in which this new conflict between Natalia will presumably be explored. 

Whatever the nature of this new controversy (according to Business Insider, Natalia and the Mans family shared public, genial communications with each other via TikTok as recently as December 29), the Conways have once again made it clear to us that they have no interest in telling a complete story. Rather, they’re only interested in a story that’s plotted so as to maximize its length and heighten its buzz so that they can milk this poor girl’s misfortune for all it’s worth. 

In my review of the first season, I bristled at an interviewer’s evocation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s claim that “justice delayed is justice denied” as they tried to coax a confession out of Jacob Barnett. The extent to which a television show can ever truly provide justice is an open question, but if it can, there’s no question that the Conways are delaying it as much as possible. ID may not be subjecting Natalia to the same physical and emotional abuse as the Barnetts, but they are being nearly as exploitative, using her story as a cheap way to generate drama and attract eyeballs to their cable channel and their parent company’s streaming platform. Maybe by choosing to cover this show, I’m playing into their hands. Maybe it’s futile to try and shame people who are clearly shameless. But it needs to be said that Natalia Speaks and its predecessor are trash, plain and simple, and that we – and most importantly Natalia Mans –  deserve better.