Does this look like “an adult” to you?

I watched THE CURIOUS CASE OF Natalia GRACE on HBO Max several times this week. It’s absolutely one of the craziest stories I’ve ever seen on and then some.

Ukrainian-born Natalia Grace, who has a rare form of dwarfism, was offered to an Indiana family, the Barnetts, after they got a very irregular call from an “adoption agency.” Usually it’s the parents who contact the agencies to adopt children. It’s not the other way around, but in this instance, someone at the agency called and offered the child to the Barnetts – IF they could decide on whether or not to take her within 24 hours, IF they didn’t mind it was a closed adoption so they weren’t going to be given much of anything on the child’s backstory, and IF they could pick her up a few days later. In Florida, yet. Otherwise she’d be sent “straight to foster care,” as if that’s some kin dof a gulag.

I can’t imagine anybody in their right mind agreeing to adopt a child they’d never met before , with no information on the kid’s past, under these kinds of high-pressured conditions, but this is the way the child was offered to the Barnetts. Michael Barnett, the narrator of most of the series, don’t think twice about it until later. Furthermore, he says this “adoption agency” was located in a strip mall, and he didn’t have reservations about it until then – after flying to Florida to pick up the girl. Natalia’s previous adoptive parents came and dropped her off there, and a few minutes later, she was handed over to the Barnetts. Unbelievable!

Unbelievable, and the only word for the actions of that adoption ageny is hinky. Something about those methods of theirs methods already doesn’t add up. If they are still in business they need to be investigated posthaste.

When Natalia Grace’s new mother, Kristine Barnett, gives the child, who is allegedly six years old, a bath, she realizes the child already is exhibiting evidence of secondary sex characteristics. She also has adult teeth, not baby teeth. That’s no six-year-old, the new parents figure. If I were to guess, I would say she was maybe about ten or eleven. You can have some of these details going on, and more, at eleven – without being a full-on adult.

The adoptvie parents (who got her at the strip mall) are “suddenly” very “disturbed” by the secondary sex characteristics. They decide Natalia is an adult. And not just any adult, oh, no. A con artist. They beleive she was trying to SCAM her way into being adopted, into living in their beautiful house, and maybe even into getting into this country to get out of the Ukraine, as if an adult would want to pose as a first-grader. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

The parents also claim Natalia’s behavior soon “got violent.” They said she threatened them with knives. They said she wanted to kill them, and kill their other children. Apparently the Barnetts didn’t realize that children often say things like “I’ll kill you” as an expression, or in the course of a fight, not as a genuine threat. This child had been bounced around between several homes, and came from an orphanage first, so maybe she was just trying to act a bit tough, as children do, but no. The Barnetts are “afriad of her.” They even go so far as to say she wants to drag and push her mother into an electrified fence!

This child had dwarfism, she had problems walking, and she had problems with moving her hands, but her new full-sized mommy was afraid she was going to kill her by dragging and pushing her into an electrified fence?

A witness to that whopper told a whole different story, but the tale doesn’t end there. It goes even further, flies off into the sky, and gets even more bizarre, if you can possibly fasten your seatbelt and believe it.

The Barnetts are “afraid for their lives” of this tiny adopted child, yet they are still going berserk about the girl’s age. They get doctors to back up the ridiculous idea that the child is an adult. And all the while they’re still claiming the girl is “a con artist” and “a scammer” who wanted to trick them into letting her live with them, or some such piffle. Again and again they go with with the line that she was deliberately concealing her “real age” to get adopted. This, regarding a child they picked up under hinky circumstances in the first place! Who picked her up? THEY PICKED HER UP! But this is supposed to be the result of Natalia scamming? Please!!!

Tell me, can a child from an orphanage in Ukraine really even know what her real age is? It’s what the officials there tell her it is, if they even know. The orphanage might have lied, not the little girl, and if they didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t put it past that ultra-bizarre “adoption agency” to have changed some of her details on paper just to make her look younger, and more malleable, to prospective parents. They offered her to the Barnetts in such a creepy and high-pressured manner that I’d say they were capable of anything, like Georgia Tan, who got custody of kids in the 1930s just to sell them.

Well here’s a thought, folks. If Natalia was indeed a treacherous, scheming adult, trying to con her way into the Barnetts’ house, if she really was a scammer, posing a kid to enter their lives, why the hell would she start threatening to kill them or harm them once she got there? The whole object of an adult scammer posing as a child would be to live a comfortable life in a nice house with the parents, wouldn’t it? This little girl was doing exactly that, but then the parents started believing she was some kind of “evil agent,” a huge “threat,” out to “get” them. It didn’t help that a quack they brought her to see labeled her a “sociopath,” which was all the cuckoo parents needed to hear.

So in my humble opinion, the most curious thing about all of this is not anything that was done, or allegedly done, by Natalia Grace. It’s the appalling collection of nonsensical and abusive crapola that was done to her – by the hostile Barnetts. It’s the way those out of control adoptive parents leapt to such completely asinine conclusions. Laughably asinine conclusions. About a child. These people started villifying that girl and just didn’t stop, constantly assigning her the role of a “scammer” and a “fake,” using her age as their primary excuse. Again, if anyone misrepresented her age, it was more likely to be the ofifcials involved in her adoption. Yet those “parents” even went so far as to go to court where a judge “re-aged” the girl, who by then was supposedly eight, as “twenty-twoyears old!”

Eleven, maybe, if anything, but twenty-two years?

Next up: they got an apartment for Natalia and dumped her there, alone. After all, her paperwork says she’s twenty-two, so they thought they could get away with it.

And they did. They were tried but acquitted of any wrongdoing or neglect.

Why? Because the judge ruled the girl was an adult, age twenty-two, when they dumped her at the apartment…

If the judge were to rule that Natalia was rich, too, would that make her a millionaire?

I find it hard think of any case that equals the dreadfulness and insanity of this one.

Fortunately there’s going to be a sequel. NATALIA GRACE HERSELF is going to get a chance to speak, and I for one can hardly wait to hear what she has to say. I wish Natalia all the best in all the world. But I can’t help adding I hope you shout what really happened from the rooftops and stick it to ’em, Natalia!