Michael Barnett & Natalia Grace

 There is much that I could say about the case of Natalia Grace and the Barnetts, and I have in fact given it a lot of thought.  Right now though, I will start with a couple of things about Michael Barnett.

So Michael Barnett goes to court for his trial and he sees Natalia in person for what may have been the first time in a long time.  You would think that clearly he would be seeing that over the years Natalia has grown to be a young adult that she previously hadn’t been.  How could he not see and know the difference?  And yet after his verdict arrives, he walks out of the courtroom not only relieved about the verdict, but also convinced of his innocence.  He truly believed that the jury clearly knew that he was innocent and he believed that he had been exonerated and vindicated of any guilt.  Did he really believe that he had no personal responsibility for what took place? Had he mentally blocked out the fact that Natalia had clearly grown from a child into an actual young adult?  Did he still believe that the whole re-aging thing was true and accurate and that she really had been an adult all along regardless of her appearance then or now?  Was he in complete denial that he actually dumped and left an elementary school aged child to live alone in an apartment? Did he believe that a jury could actually grant him personal exoneration from being guilty of abandoning a child in an apartment.  The jury made a legal decision based on false evidence that was presented to them about Natalia’s age.  

In addition, a young person of any age with special needs who is abandoned alone in an apartment without any accommodations and without the ability to function well independently, has every right in the world to talk to a social worker.  Showing up and being accusatory and harassing her about it is not the action of a guiltless adoptive father or a decent man. 

And then there is the sincerity issue.  At the end of Investigation Discovery channels program, “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace”, there is a clip shown from the filming of the 2019 interview of Michael.  He asks those interviewing him, “Do you want me to cry?”.  He then calmly and collectedly says, “Because I can bust that out if you want me to!”.  This effectively leaves a person feeling that there is no way of sorting out when he might possibly have been sincere and when he was doing a great job of acting a part in the ID program.  [Maybe I misunderstood his reason for saying this. Maybe he was saying that he could allow himself to be emotional or to remain controlled.  Who knows.  I’m adding extra thoughts here to what I originally wrote.]

He called Natalia an enigma.  To me, he is the real enigma or rather guilty enigma.  A child, who also had special needs, was abandoned alone in an apartment.  Period. 

And speaking of periods, I don’t believe Christine’s story about Natalia having a period, but even if it was true, precious puberty or partial precocious puberty, does not make a child an adult.  In addition, even if Natalia had behavior issues due to her experiences with abandonment and whatever else she might have experienced in her life, that wouldn’t make her a con artist, child impersonating, sociopathic adult.  It’s not that difficult to understand.  But Christine obviously suffered from some serious paranoia, fear, anxiety and antagonism toward Natalia. 

I look forward to watching “Natalia Speaks” when she gets to tell her side of it all.

And I would like to say that, “Yes Natalia, some of us do know that this story about you being an adult at age 6 is the most utterly ridiculous nonsense that anyone ever tried to pass off as a serious possibility.  It just goes to show how easily some people can be persuaded to believe utterly unbelievable nonsense.

#thecuriouscaseofnataliagrace

I have one question to add.  If the Barnetts felt the need to surrender their adoption of Natalia for whatever their personal reasons, why couldn’t they at least have let her have a chance with another set of parents or even foster parents, as opposed to having her age legally changed by 14 years and then dumping and leaving her alone in an apartment as a child???”  

No one recognized or involved themselves in what was going on with Christine.  By the grace of the powers that be, she did find her family even if it couldn’t be legally recognized.  The law is not always what it is cracked up to be though.  It is the re-aging of a child that really takes the cake.  And then there was the court’s inability to even reconsider Natalia’s “legal” age.  That was a serious shortcoming and failure of the legal system.

I’m sorry Michael Barnett, but your former adopted daughter needs advocates for her side in it all.  You weren’t dealing with an adult psychopath.  Or if you were, it wasn’t Natalia.

I have a few final thoughts on this story.  In regard to Natalia being a nuisance to her neighbors, let’s look at the reality of the situation.  She was a young child left to live alone by herself in an apartment.  She was not even attending elementary school because she had legally been re-aged by 14 years making her legally 22 years old.  What was supposed to happen when a young child was left to live alone everyday in an apartment?  Children need to have social attachments and need to be cared for and taught.  Of course she was very much in need of connecting with other human beings.  And children need to learn all manner of things from parents or other caregivers including how to relate socially to others in acceptable ways.  She knew nothing of adult relationships or how to give people their space and not intrude too much in the lives of others.  She had no guidance.  She was just a child wanting and needing human contact.  I would imagine that the neighbors would have had much different things to say had they been given the real facts of the situation.  Of course people would think that her behavior was weird if they thought she was an adult, but this was not the case.  I think it was actually a very good thing that Natalia was an outgoing type of child who was able to attempt to reach out and connect with others.  She was a child.  Of course she needed other people in her life.  Even adults need this.  Leaving a young child alone for a few hours without a babysitter would be a safety risk and bad enough.  Dumping one off to live her life alone with no family or friends is unbelievable.

And one more thing. The person in the Barnett family that I was really impressed with and felt a lot of respect for is their son Jacob.  Oh and course Natalia who also had been a member of their family.

And one more thing again.  I started thinking about something else.  Several years ago I started reading (or rather listening to in audio book form) Christine Barnett’s book the “The Spark”.  I couldn’t and didn’t want to finish it because after a while, I seriously started to doubt the credibility of it all.  There is one thing, though, that sticks out in my mind from what I did read.  Christine wrote in her book that she at one point had suffered a bad stroke.  I don’t really know what from her book can be believed, but if it is true that she in the past suffered a bad stroke, who knows what that could possibly have done to her, or how it might possibly have affected her personality?  I really don’t know much about strokes, but I couldn’t help contemplating this.