Why Orphan Natalia Grace Doesn’t Want Relationship with Birth Mother

The Ukrainian orphan reveals why she has no desire to “open that door” with her biological mom, before sharing traumatic memories from her time at an overseas orphanage before being adopted.

Natalia 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 6-year-old 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.

As part of his investigation into the case, Detective Brandon Davenport actually traveled to Ukraine in 2019 to interview Natalia’s alleged mother, Anna Gava. They did a DNA test, which is said to have confirmed they were a 99.999% match.

Gava appears briefly in the new ID docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, before Grace herself reacts to her bio mom’s wishes to have a relationship.

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“Frankly, I would like her to be here with me. I understand, of course, that 19 years is a significant period, but I would like her to be with me,” Gava said in the footage, after Natalia shows off a photo of her parents to her new adoptive family, the Mans, with whom she’s lived for more than 10 years.

“I don’t want to open that door of a relationship with Anna. I get it, you probably do want to see me and everything like that, but I have a family here. I have my parents who raised me,” said Natalia.

“It’s different with Anna. She only gave birth to me, but she let me go pretty much that same day,” she continued, adding that she hasn’t been in Ukraine since she was a child. “The things that I remember from being in the orphanage in the Ukraine are not great. They’re scary memories that I really don’t like to think about anymore,” she continued.

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Natalia then shared some of what she could recall about her childhood, including how the orphanage employees alleged scared the kids to keep them in line and how one doctor left her with some hazy memories.

“One time we were playing, we heard stomping and everybody ran to the bedroom,” shared Natalia, saying she was left behind because of her size and speed, so she hid behind a couch.

“There was this big black cloak and this green mask, to me it was like the monster under the bed. It heard me crying and it turned my way and I literally panicked. I remember hearing it stomping, coming towards me and it peeked behind the couch,” she continued. “I was so scared. It just stared at me. I’m like, I don’t know what to do. That was like the scariest moment of my life that I remember from that age. I don’t know why anybody would want to scare a bunch of kids. A lot of stuff happened that just should not have happened.”

She also said she recalled someone once “coming up and covering my face” before she “blacked out.” According to Natalia, she came to in a doctor’s office, before getting another shot in her arm and blacking out again.

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“Next thing I know, I’m laying on a couch. This memory has always been a mystery to me. I can’t remember anything about what he looked like,” she continued. “The next memory I have after that is me back in the orphanage.”

“I know more happened than what I remember, but I can’t figure it out,” she said, before being shown a photo of her on a doctor’s table as a little girl. “Seeing that and not being able to remember is frustrating, but it’s also scary because I don’t know what he did, I don’t know why I was with him. I don’t know.”

Gava spoke more in depth while appearing on ID’s other The Curious Case of Natalia Grace docuseries earlier this year.

She was adamant that Natalia was born on September 3, 2003, her original birth date before the re-aging process. Claiming Natalia was her “biological daughter,” she recalled having a “difficult” childbirth, before opening up about why she gave the child up for adoption.

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“When I regained consciousness, after anesthesia, the next day the doctor came and said there is no sense to take her home. They said that she won’t be able to walk at all and she will be of very short stature,” said Gava, via a translator in the docu-series. She claimed she was told it would cost $100,000 for surgery and she didn’t “have any finances” to cover that at the time.

“I didn’t initially want to leave her but the doctors said there is nothing you could do for her. ‘You are young,’ they said, ‘You are 24 years old. Don’t ruin your life, you will have other children,'” she continued.

“[Natalia] was promised piles of gold and it turned out the opposite,” she added, before addressing the girl’s life in America. “When I found out what happened, that she was abandoned at the age of 13 alone in an apartment, I was simply shocked, obviously.”

The interview then cut out, due to rolling blackouts in the area amid the Ukraine war.

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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