The Ukrainian orphan’s adoptive parents — who believed she was in her 20s and not a 6-year-old girl — said Natalia put Pledge into the mom’s coffee and said she did it “because I want to kill you”; Natalia tells her version of events in new doc.
Natalia Grace is hitting back at her adoptive parents’ claims she threatened their lives.
Grace first made headlines after the family who adopted her changed her birthdate to make her substantially older, before placing her in her own apartment. Parents Michael and Kristine Barnett — who didn’t believe Natalia was actually a child and was instead a woman in her 20s out to kill them and their children — were later arrested for neglect, but cleared of the charges.
In the new ID docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks — which TooFab has screened ahead of its premiere — the woman at the center of it all denies allegations she tried to murder the Barnetts.
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Michael and Kristine previously accused Natalia of putting Pledge into Kristine’s coffee after her adoptive mother left the room while they were doing the dishes together. Kristine said she took a sip of the beverage when she returned and tasted the soap. When asked why she did it, they claimed Natalia told her, “Because I want to kill you.”
“It’s not true. None of it was true,” Natalia says adamantly in the docuseries. “At this point, Kristine was beating me for months and everyone thinks I’m a crazy person trying to pour something in her coffee … that’s not who I am.”
She then shared her side of the story.
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“I was helping Kristine clean up the kitchen and she had this table cleaner and she was spraying it on the table and I was helping her wipe it down. She walked out for a second, I noticed a spot that needed some more, I scooted her coffee away, sprayed it and as I was wiping table off, [Kristine] said, ‘What did you spray in my coffee!”
Natalia said she told her she hadn’t done anything and there was “nothing wrong” with the coffee, which she claims Kristine then poured into the sink, before refilling it and grabbing her camera.
“She literally grabbed my hand, made me spray it in the coffee. I think Kristine tried to create that video to have some sort of proof that I did something that I didn’t do,” she added. “She staged that whole thing. I’m not crazy. I did not try to poison her.”
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Grace also reacted to Michael’s claims that, while he and Kristine were asleep in bed, he opened his eyes and saw Natalia “standing at the foot of the bed with a knife in her hand.”
“It’s hard to believe anything they say, because everything the Barnetts have said is a lie, from the beginning, about all the make believe stuff that they came up with, that they got off a movie,” Grace said in response, referring to the 2009 film The Orphan.
“It’s a lie. For one, their bed [was as high as her head] … y’all saying I was standing at the end of the bed? I could barely see over the bedpost that they had!” she exclaimed. “Second, I ain’t that strong. I’m an 8- year-old, 37 pound little girl. If I tried to stab you, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
“I can’t bend my fingers to even grip a knife like that,” she added. “I never tried to murder anybody. Like I said, anything that Kristine said, she copied off The Orphan.”
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Earlier in the special, she reiterated the Orphan copycat claims, saying there are too many similarities to ignore. In the movie, Isabelle Fuhrman plays a 33-year-old Estonian woman with a growth disorder pretending to be a little Russian girl, who attempts to kill her adoptive family’s kids and mother while seducing the father.
“Ukrainian girl, Russian girl, check. Orphan, check. All this crazy stuff, standing at the end of the bed with a knife, check,” said Natalia, while explaining why she agreed to the new docuseries. “That’s why I wanna do this. That’s why I wanna tell people what really happened, because I didn’t get that chance.”
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks will premiere across three consecutive nights on ID beginning Monday, January 1, airing nightly from 9-11PM ET/PT. See more coverage below!
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