Natalia Grace Accuses Adoptive Mother of Trying to ‘Overdose’ Her, Pepper Spraying Her

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. The parents — 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.

While one of those parents, Michael Barnett, spoke out at length in the ID docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, the Ukrainian orphan herself gets the spotlight on the network’s new 3-night event, “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks.” TooFab has already screened the first five episodes of the six-part series, in which Grace make a number of new claims about the alleged mistreatment she experienced from the Barnetts — Kristine especially.

It should be noted the episodes included a slate reading, “Kristine Barnett did not respond to the producer’s multiple requests for comment regarding Natalia’s allegations.”

At one point in the series, Grace accused Kristine of trying to kill her with medication she was put on for mental health issues.

While the specific medication isn’t named, Natalia said she remembered taking it and feeling “sleepy.” An hour later, Grace said Kristine came into her room saying she didn’t believe she had taken the pills and told her to do it again. Natalia said she did, before Kristine had her then repeat the dosage a third time.

“She left and I remember getting in the bathroom, coming out I literally fell. I was so dizzy. I couldn’t even walk straight. I couldn’t even see straight. I felt so sick, I was dizzy. My eyes were going cross. Then I fell asleep, I blacked out. For like hours until 2 in the morning,” Grace claimed.

“Thinking back on it, it felt like she really did try to overdose me. I really could have died that day. I was 7 years old, taking an adult drug. And taking it three times that day, it was like three different pills each time. That’s scary,” she continued. “The fact Kristine tried to say she tried to murder my family, but then she tried to pretty much murder me … and nobody would have known, nobody would have cared.”

Elsewhere in the series, Natalia also claims Kristine “literally trained” her to lie about her age, so she would tell everyone she was 22 and not a child.

“People don’t know what happened in that house. They tortured me, I was abused. Kristine is the real monster. Michael is an accomplice to the monster because he went along with everything Kristine said. I was so terrified of Kristine,” said Natalia. “When she told me to tell people I was 22 years old, that’s what I did.”

As for how Kristine allegedly scared Natalia, Grace claimed she was threatened with pepper spray.

“One time Kristine told me, like, ‘I’m gonna show you what it’s gonna feel like, if you do something wrong, I’m gonna pepper spray you,'” she claimed. “Kristine told me to keep my eyes open and she just pepper sprayed me. I couldn’t do anything about it. She made me sit there for 10 minutes until I could go wash it out. And even then, it still hurt. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care.”

She also said she was pepper sprayed again after having a hard time doing a physics paper at a time she believed she was just child, while the Barnetts claimed she was an adult.

“For not knowing high school math, I’m getting pepper sprayed. I was 7 years old, I was supposed to be in first grade!” exclaimed Grace, who, in tears, said it “really hurt” because Kristine was “supposed to be my mom, but she didn’t act like a mom to me.”

During a confrontation on the special between Michael and Natalia, he refused to answer any questions about re-aging her, while others in the docuseries speculate they changed the age to 22 because she was their dependent, meaning they’d be legally and financially responsible for Natalia until the age of 21.

Natalia came to the Barnetts through an adoption agency in 2010 and were told she was six at the time. They began to doubt her age and, in June 2012, Marion County Superior Court agreed to legally change the girl’s birth record to indicate she was born in 1989 and not 2003. Shortly after, the Barnetts set her up with her own apartment, before they were arrested and charged for neglect in 2019.

Michael was cleared of all four neglect charges he was facing on October 27, 2022, while the charges against Kristine were dismissed in March 2023. Both Michael and Natalia appear in the ID special, sharing their differing perspectives on what went down those years ago.

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!