#487: The Exploitation of Natalia Grace

Real Crime Profile

Real Crime Profile / Wondery

True Crime, Society & Culture, Exhibit C, Documentary

4.2 • 10.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the very start of her life, Natalia Grace has been passed around like a human football and exploited. From the moment of her birth in Ukraine when doctors encouraged her mother Anna Volodymyrivna Gava to give her baby up due to her diagnosis of dwarfism, Natalia has been denied a stable, loving home and instead been placed with people who had no business caring for her and had no capacity for loving her. Today we examine Natalia’s complex and convoluted case, made only more confusing by the docu-series “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace”. We examine the many narrators in this story including Michael Barnett who along with his wife Kristine adopted Natalia, appeared to abuse her both physically and mentally, coercively controlled her and then bizarrely sought to prove Natalia was not a child, but an adult woman pretending to be a child, legally "re-aging" her. Jim and Laura analyze the evidence and try to discern who is telling the truth and what actually happened. Can there be any excuse for traumatizing and abandoning a dependent person with a severe disability (be they a child or an adult) to fend for themselves with no means of care? Join us for this discussion.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening ad-free on Wondry Plus.
0:10.0	Hello, hello and welcome to Real Crime Profile. I'm Lisa Zambeti. I'm a casting director for Criminal Minds and a board member for Higher Survivors Hollywood. And with me today is...
0:21.0	Laura Richards, Criminal Behavioral Analysts, former new Scotland Yard and host of the podcast crime analyst
0:27.1	And I'm Jim Clemente retired at FBI Profiler former New York City prosecutor writer producer of criminal minds Today we're talking about a very convoluted, very complex,
0:39.5	incredibly frustrating type of case that's depicted in the series, the curious case of
0:48.9	Natalia Grace.
0:50.1	Yes, this is one everyone's asked us for for a long time and we have watched what you've said. We have debated covering it and then there's been a follow-up which most people well it looks like most people are aware of it because it seems to have had a lot of publicity and that was the curious case of Natalia Grace Nat Natalia Speaks, and that was a three night event that premiered
1:16.4	on New Year's Day and concluded on January the 3rd, and we've all been making our way through it. So what did you both think?
1:26.0	So, you know, this certainly has a victim who desperately needs her voice heard in my opinion,
1:32.0	but this documentary, which has made such headlines as you say Laura in my
1:35.9	opinion is a fetid rotting pile of garbage. I mean I'm conflicted even talking about it because
1:41.6	you know the worst thing about it in addition to
1:44.1	its exploitation in addition to its histrionic focus on all the wrong narrators
1:48.3	its shoddy assemblage and format ironically the worst thing about it is that it does contain some very important
1:55.1	primary source material, important footage taken at the time of these events that is really
2:00.4	important evidence, but this footage is wrapped around a stinking clickbait pile of a film series.
2:07.0	And that's my little nutshell take of it. I don't know what you felt.
2:11.0	Tell us what you really think, Lisa.
2:13.6	So you love it.
2:14.6	I almost wish that people don't watch the docu series, but read the journalism, the true
2:20.8	journalism about this case and who Natalia Grace is instead of having your
2:25.6	earballs filled with you know narrators who are absolutely not reliable and a film
	...

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