Good American Family is based on the bonkers true story of Natalia Grace

It’s a wild story. A well-meaning American couple, already with children, adopts a young orphan from Eastern Europe. When that girl moves in with the family, she starts to exhibit strange behaviours which concern her new parents.

The parents become convinced their adopted daughter is not who she says she is, especially since she’s trying to kill everyone. In the end, it’s revealed she’s not a child at all but a sociopathic and violent adult woman masquerading as one.

That’s the plotline of the 2009 horror movie Orphan.

It’s also the tale Kristine and Michael Barnett tried to spin about the daughter they adopted in 2010, Natalia Grace. But rather than the bonkers real-life story inspiring the make-believe Hollywood movie, it was the other way around.

Now, it’s coming full circle, with the story of Natalia Grace and the Barnetts as the basis for Good American Family, an eight-episode drama series starring Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass. It’s art imitating life imitating art, except Natalia Grace was not a 33-year-old serial killer, as was the case in Orphan, but an abandoned child.

In 2010, the Barnetts adopted Natalia Grace, a six-year-old Ukrainian girl with dwarfism. The Barnetts, they later claimed, noticed odd things – Natalia Grace was already menstruating and had pubic hair, she had an advanced vocabulary, couldn’t understand Ukrainian, and had a more developed physique than kids her age.

Michael Barnett also claimed in 2023 that Natalia Grace had made violent threats against the family, which also included three sons, and had tried to poison Kristine’s coffee.

They consulted with a doctor who told them their adopted child was actually an adult, and the Barnetts successfully petitioned the courts to have her date of birth changed from 2003 to 1989. Natalia Grace was declared to be 22 years old.

Two years after they adopted her, the Barnetts moved Natalia Grace to an apartment 100 kilometres away and left her there as the family of five left the US for Canada and cut off all contact.

Natalia Grace then met the Mans family, who she lived with from 2013. But she could not be adopted by them because, legally, she was now in her 20s. She has always denied that she was anything other than a small child at the time this all happened.

The story only came out in 2019 when the state of Indiana, where the Barnetts lived originally, charged the then-divorced Michael and Kristine with child abandonment, which is when the couple mounted their defence that they couldn’t be guilty if she wasn’t a child.

Michael was found not guilty in 2022 and charges against Kristine were dismissed in 2023.

During that case, the prosecutors tracked down Natalia Grace’s birth mother in Ukraine, verified through DNA testing, and records showed she gave birth to a baby with dwarfism in 2003. Another DNA test done in 2023 declared she was in her early-20s at that time.

Natalia Grace gave extensive interviews for a 2023 docuseries, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. She said, “I’m hearing all this stuff that never actually happened from Kristine and Michael. It’s shocking and it’s frustrating because that’s not true.

“And people are believing what Kristine and Michael are saying without even hearing my side.”

She told People in January that Kristine Barnett had coached her to lie and say that she was 22 years old and tried to murder her parents, when asked.

As if that wasn’t wild enough, there’s still another twist. After living with the very religious Manses for years, Natalia Grace “fled” from that family after a dispute involving her UK-based boyfriend she met online.

Even in that case, there’s murkiness around the facts with the Manses accusing the boyfriend of having manipulated Natalia Grace against them, while Michael Barnett’s lawyer from the 2019 case has accused the Mans of being “grifters” and “con artists”.

The Mans, at one point, called the producers of the docuseries and said, “Something ain’t right with Natalia, this girl is tweaking. I feel like she’s the enemy in the house”.

She now lives with the DePauls, another family who had met with Natalia Grace before she was adopted by the Barnetts, and has ambitions to be a teacher.

Perhaps to reflect the he-said-she said-they said-they-said nature of this wild story, Good American Family is going to structure its series through Rashomon-style mixed perspectives, with the story to unfold in varying ways depending on who you ask.

Good American Family will be on Disney+ from March 19