The two-hour finale of 'The Curious Case of Natalia Grace' premieres Jan. 3 on Investigation Discovery.
The first time Natalia Grace and Michael Barnett came face-to-face in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, Barnett exploded, ripped off his mic and stormed off in anger. But in an ET exclusive sneak peek of the two-hour finale on Investigation Discovery (ID), Michael returns and conjures up a Monsters, Inc. scene in an attempt to explain the torment he and Natalia allegedly experienced at the hands of Kristine Barnett, albeit independently.
In this preview clip, Natalia can be seen walking in and her voice can be heard imploring Michael to come clean about anything and everything. "Whatever you gotta say, go ahead and say it," she says. "I'm just praying that it's actually the truth."
Just then, Michael's white Mazda Miata convertible pulls up. He's wearing a red T-shirt with a matching red backwards hat and jeans. After he takes off his sunglasses and walks over to the sitting area, there's palpable awkwardness as he takes a seat and Natalia looks into the camera and smirks. Michael looks around the room before Natalia offers a timid, "Hey."
Unmoved, Michael takes a sip from a glass of water before unabashedly asks, "So, where were we? Where do you wanna start?" Without skipping a beat, Natalia responds, "We can start were you left off." Viewers will remember that Michael stormed off in anger after he was asked why he didn't leave Kristine if she was such a detriment to both him and their children. In an attempt to explain himself, Michael said "its difficult to understand" but in the end he chalked it up to 15-plus years of "being put down and degraded and controlled and threatened." He added that he "didn't have any strength to stand up to her," though he "wish" he did.
Then came the bizarre Monsters, Inc. anecdote.
"You ever see the movie Monsters, Inc.?" he asks Natalia, who answers yes. "You know how the same monster goes through bunches of doors and all these kids around the world have the same monster, but they don't know it? We had the same monster and we didn't know it."
For the uninitiated, Michael and Kristine in 2010 thought they had adopted a 6-year-old orphaned girl from Ukraine. Not realizing she had a form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal, the Indiana couple became suspicious that their newest family member was not actually a child. In addition to claiming that Natalia showed physical signs of being much older than a kid, the Barnetts accused her of trying to harm them and their children. During the two years Natalia lived with them, they claimed that she tried to poison Kristine and push Michael into an electric fence.
Eventually, believing that she was, in fact, an adult, they had her legal age changed from 6 to 22. By 2013, the Barnett family moved to Canada and left Natalia behind in an apartment in Lafayette, Indiana.
Michael and Kristine, who are now divorced, were eventually charged with abandoning Natalia before Michael was found not guilty of three counts of neglect and conspiracy to commit neglect of a dependent in 2022, while charges against Kristine were dropped in March 2023.
Natalia Speaks dives "headfirst into the questions, controversies, and secrets unearthed in The Curious Case, but this time, with Natalia sharing her side of the story."
The two-hour finale of The Curious case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks premieres tonight at 9/8c on ID.
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