Couple Claims They Adopted an Adult Posing as a Child… but Is It True? 23:24

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. So today I have another very interesting case for you. One that is really, really weird. And once again, I know your opinions will be all

over the place and I do invite you to share your thoughts and I'm sure a lot of you have kind of heard bits and pieces of it. It's been very scattered on gossip type magazines and tabloids and just social media and people have been requesting that I talk about this for a really long time. I kind of wanted to wait till the dust settled a little bit and we could really gather the facts here. Although that has actually been pretty hard to do. I do want to give a bit of a disclaimer.

This story is extremely complicated. It's very hard to figure out what's true and what's not true. I tried to follow the story as accurately as possible, but it is possible I have something wrong in here. But if you've never heard of this and you're totally lost already, let's go ahead and dive in. A couple months ago back in 2019, a story came out to the public that

had been going on for a while, but it just surfaced last year. It was about a couple from Indiana who were charged with neglect because apparently they had moved to Canada and left behind their 11 year old adopted daughter named Natalia. - This was from day one, a mission of love. We were told

in the medical paperwork that we had that she was six years old. Now with that wild story about an Indiana couple charged with abandoning their adopted daughter who has a rare form of dwarfism. They say she's really an adult con artist who threatened them. So as far as we know, in 2008, Natalia came to the U.S. from an adoption program in the Ukraine. They believe that she was probably in a group home before she came here.

At first she was adopted by a different family, a different couple, and they soon decided that it wasn't a good fit for whatever reason and they returned her to the adoption agency. So then in November of 2010 another couple adopted Natalia and their names are Christine and Michael Bennett. They love children and Natalia was going to be a new addition to their family. Now when the Barnetts adopted her they say that they were told that she was a six-year-old girl

and that she was actually born with a form of dwarfism. Now she had a specific type of dwarfism, however, I am not gonna be able to say it. So I'm going to play a pronunciation for you guys.

Spondyloepiphysial dysplasia congenita. Now this is a disorder that affects the bones and the growth of a human. And she also suffered from scoliosis, which can be very painful. So clearly Natalia did not have it easy when it came to her health. When they adopted her, they were told that she might have some trouble walking, but they didn't mind that. Now, one thing that is just not clear here is Natalia's history with the adoption agency before she was adopted by the Burnett.

Christine, the adoptive mother, actually said that she was with 30 different families before she came to them, which is kind of odd. I mean, that's a lot of families. And Natalia actually thinks that she's making this up, but she doesn't remember being with that many families. She only remembers being with

We got a phone call from an adoption agency in Florida. They had reached out to us and they said, hey, we've got the perfect child for you. We think you should adopt this girl, Natalia. At first, you know, I didn't think that that was strange. But obviously, looking back, you shouldn't be getting cold called. You shouldn't be getting a phone call out of nowhere from somebody trying to send the child.

Oh, pardon me, the child to you. We're not gonna give you any information about the child. We're not gonna give you any information about the former family. Here's all we're gonna give you. Here's two pictures. Here's a Ukrainian language birth certificate. And here is one doctor visit from two years before. You have 24 hours to tell us whether or not you want to adopt her. If you don't adopt her within 24 hours, we're sending her directly to foster care. We were sitting in a little itty bitty office room in a strip mall.

And next thing you know, the door opens and Natalia comes running in smiling ear to ear saying, "Mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy."

You know, she was just given up for adoption by her old family five minutes before that. We should have recognized that there's no six-year-old on the planet that would be happy in this situation and immediately start referring to Christina and myself as mommy and daddy. We only were in the room with her for five minutes to meet her. And after those five minutes, the adoption agency pulled Christina and I out of the room. We went and signed paperwork. And the next thing you know, Natalia was ours.

So Natalia claims that when she was adopted by the Barnetts, everything was fine at first. She actually felt love with this family. Eventually she said she felt safe and comfortable and happy and was enjoying herself. However, Christine says that they started having issues with her literally right off the bat.

Day one, they said that right away they thought Natalia was acting strange. The alert started before we even got home. That very first night when Christine was giving our new daughter a bath, you know, she shouted to me, Michael, and it wasn't just a shout. It was...

It was one of those tones of voice where you knew something was very wrong. I came rushing into the bathroom and I found Christine white as a ghost. She was truly shaken. I had no idea why. And Christine simply said, "Look." And I looked and I looked down and Natalia, at age six, had full pubic hair. They immediately thought she was actually older than she was saying she was. One of the first red flags that they say they saw was that

They went to the beach with their family and the boys ran to the ocean, just ran right in and Natalia wanted to be carried to the water. And Michael and Christine were really tired and just needed a second to collect themselves before carrying her down. But she got impatient and actually ran towards the water herself. Now they were kind of shook after this because they were like,

I thought you couldn't walk and now you're running towards the beach. And they thought this was really strange. They also noticed that Natalia didn't really care for playing with toys when it came to playing with other children. She preferred older children, even teenagers. They also thought her vocabulary was pretty,

well developed and sophisticated for her age. They also claimed that she couldn't speak or understand even her native language from Ukraine. They had a Ukrainian friend actually speak in their native language and she didn't understand it at all. And they thought at this point, maybe she didn't even come from Ukraine.

Christine also ran a home daycare for a living and she said that one day Natalia walked up to her and said, "These children are exhausting. I don't know how you do it." And she thought that was a really weird thing for a kid to say to their mom. I was putting her into the bathtub and I noticed that she had full pubic hair. Christine did not say anything about bloody clothing or anything to me.

and she said that I had one and she had me use a tampon and there was spotage, I guess, I don't know why. And she's like, "See, that's blood." - Natalia would do things like place clear thumbtacks on the stairs face up so that when we would walk up the stairs, we would be stepping on thumbtacks to pain and injure ourselves. - Now keep in mind that Natalia tells a completely different version of events.

So Natalia was going to need several surgeries in her lifetime, will probably always need surgeries to continually correct problems caused by her dwarfism. And as adoptive parents, you are financially responsible for the surgeries. So she had her first surgery and she said that's when things changed. She said that Christine and Michael started treating her completely different after this surgery. As time went on, things apparently got really bad in the home.

The Barnetts actually claim that Natalia became extremely aggressive and threatening towards them and even threatened to kill them multiple times. Christine claims that Natalia would make these weird statements about wanting to harm them, wanting to harm the entire family, drawing pictures of this violence happening, saying she wanted to roll them up in blankets and toss them.

toss them into the yard and this is the craziest part and remember we don't know if this is true or not and Natalia just completely denies this but Christine claims that they would wake up in the middle of the night all the different family members and sometimes Natalia would just be standing over them watching them sleep if I ever went in the room it was to wake them up because I was either scared of a nightmare or something like that but I never went in their room I didn't

She also claims that she hid knives all over the house. She was hiding knives in her couches. She was talking about she was going to kill family members. She's standing in the middle of the room and she would say, I'm waiting for the right time. Which Natalia denies as well. She said that...

I hid knives on top of the fridge. - How did you get something on top of the refrigerator? - I can't even reach it, not even with a chair, I couldn't reach it. - And then Christine and Michael also claimed that Natalia tried to poison Christine with lemon pledge. - She put chemicals on the coffee.

Did that happen? No. So we had missed a spot. So what I did was I scooted the chair over so I could get up there and I scooted her coffee back. She came out and was like, what are you doing? And then she claimed that I tried to spray it in her coffee. You could look in her coffee. There was nothing.

But Christine claims that when she had asked her what you're doing with the pledge that Natalia said, I'm trying to kill you. They said things were getting so out of hand with her that she was just destroying the home. She was wiping bodily fluids, they said on mirrors in the house. And she would also sometimes jump out of the car while it was moving. And then the biggest claim of all is Christine says that one time Natalia tried to push her into an electric fence.

which is interesting because Natalia is only two feet tall. - The DePaul's say that's not even physically possible. - If me and my wife tried to push an average height person into an electric fence,

I don't think it would really go that well. - Can you imagine somebody struggling to walk and then pushing an average height woman? - So one thing that's really strange here is back in 2012, only two years after the adoption, the Barnetts filed a motion with the Marion County Superior Court regarding Natalia's age. They requested that her age actually be formally changed.

And the judge actually followed through with this and ordered that her birth year be changed from 2003 to 1989 on her birth certificate, which put her at age 22 instead of nine. Now to this day, no one knows how old Natalia actually is. Currently she claims she's 16, maybe 17. I'm not sure when she claims her actual birth date is, but I think

I think Natalia really doesn't know how old she is because, you know, she's from a group home. It's possible that they don't even know her birthday. Oftentimes in group homes, they celebrate all their birthdays at once. And, you know, there's plenty of reasons why someone may not know their birthday if they came from a sketchy situation and they were adopted.

So that's been the big debate here is how old is Natalia? So eventually the Barnetts decided to take Natalia to a doctor for a psych evaluation and have her working with some therapists as well. And they claim that she openly talked about how she wanted to kill Christine and the kids with the therapist and the doctor.

Apparently Natalia gave the doctor an exact plan of how she would do it and exactly what she would do with their bodies. And they also claimed that she told the therapist that she was lying about her age. Now, Christine has given the court a actual copy of this note from this doctor. We don't have any real information about this and cannot confirm that it's real, but apparently in this note, it talks about how she was actually diagnosed as a psychopath and a sociopath. It says that her birth certificate is clearly a

fake and basically that she's way older than she's claiming to be. The doctor wrote that Natalia was well over the age of 18 and this was back in 2011 that this was written apparently. And they said they were able to come to this conclusion by doing an exam on Natalia's teeth, looking at her sexual development and by using a bone density

exam. They claim that she had a normal menstrual cycle as well. So all of this is in this doctor's note that we have not been able to see. So with all this info, Christine and Michael were able to get the court to agree to change her age to 22. Now, Michael actually said that one of the benefits of getting her age change was to get her into a psychiatric hospital because if she was a minor, she wouldn't be able to be lawfully admitted.

So there have been several different attempts by media outlets to get that letter from that doctor. They've reached out to the doctor, but their office says that they refuse to have any involvement in this because it's a violation of patients' rights. Now, side note, it was also around this time that police first started asking questions and trying to figure out whether an immigration fraud actually took place before the Barnetts had involvement with Natalya.

They thought something sketchy was going on with the adoption. The Westfield City Police referred the case to the FBI and ICE because they suspected that there was false age reporting prior to her leaving the Ukraine.

It was then in 2013 that the Barnetts made the decision to leave Natalia here while they moved to Canada. Their oldest son, 12-year-old Jacob Barnett, was actually getting a ton of media attention because he was somewhat of a child genius and they were really proud of him. Our standout student is a true academic scholar. I just, I really like numbers and calculus. They've always intrigued me.

This is the Barnett kitchen. As you can see, I'm watching Ellen here while I do daycare. And we've got Jake eating a sandwich. So I was going through one of Einstein's equations, you know, the one that says mass equals rest mass divided by square root of 1 minus v squared by c squared. Eventually, I did manage to get out of that f equals mdbt, which is the definition of the force. But the thing that kind of concerned me was how come you can accelerate? I mean, you can't.

Light travels at a constant speed, but as in it doesn't accelerate forward or backward, but it does accelerate exactly sideways in certain cases. He was super good at physics and he was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes and even gave a TED Talk.

And then in 2013, Jacob was accepted to the Perry Meteor Institute for theoretical physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And because of this, the Barnett's decided they're going to move to Canada with him, but they decided to leave Natalia back at home. Now this is where all the controversy has come in and why the Barnett's are now in trouble. According to them, they left Natalia completely set up and good to go. They set her up with her own apartment and they agreed to pay her rent.

her rent. They also set her up with a social security number and put her in other welfare programs. So she was well taken care of. She was on food stamps and apparently at her first apartment, Natalia actually caused some problems and was evicted. But from afar, they paid for that and paid for her to get into a new place. Christine claimed that she was communicating daily with Natalia.

She said she even came up with a plan for Natalia to enroll in college to study cosmetology. The Barnetts told her that they would pay for her rent for one more year, which is what they did with all their other kids. And then she, you know, had to figure it out on her own. Now this is maybe okay if she was 22, but if she's a minor, this is very illegal. When you adopt a child, that child becomes your child completely. You know, you can't just dump them off somewhere.

And it's like, okay, let's say she is 22 or older. The Barnetts claim she's a lot older than that. She still has dwarfism. She still needs probably a caretaker or help. She can't reach a lot of the things. It's not like the place was completely set up to fit her needs and her handicap. And they have taken legal responsibility for her. And I feel like there's other ways to deal with the issues that they're

having than to just leave her off in an apartment, kind of pay her off. Eventually the family stopped talking to Natalia randomly. Eventually Christine claimed that she got a letter in the mail saying that Natalia had changed the beneficiary on her insurance policy to someone else instead of Michael. Eventually Christine claims that she could not get in touch with Natalia anymore.

At this point, she was really worried that Natalia was fooling some other family into thinking that she was a child. But there was nothing that she could do at this point because they had changed her age to a legal adult. So eventually, Natalia went to the police and told them what had happened. In September of 2014, they got involved because Natalia told them that her adoptive parents just left her

in an apartment by herself and went to Canada. Now it's very confusing what happened in the years after this. Natalia lived alone for quite a while. She, I think, bounced around out of a few apartments. Apparently she was evicted in 2014 from one apartment and then somehow got back.

into it by neighbors paying for her. And then eventually she moved in 2016 because she wanted to start attending this one school. And it was actually a tuition free school for high school and young adults or older youth called Excel Center. And eventually Natalia was actually taken in by another

family. Recently, this family did an interview for Dr. Phil. Natalia was on Dr. Phil. The Barnetts were not on it because they are currently facing court charges so they can't speak about this. And listen to this interview from her new adoptive mother, you can say. It's not legal, but her

- My friend called me and was like, "You need to come down here right away." So I go over there, she's telling me she's 22. Like, look at her. And I go, "Are you 22?" She said, "Yeah." But you could tell that it was just like, "Yeah," because I was told, "Yeah." Okay? And she said, "I have my own apartment."

I was like, well, you know, I have a couple kids at home. Come on down. You can play with them, talk with us. So she came to our house, hung out down there, and she never left. So they think that Natalia is like 16, maybe 17 at the time I'm filming this. And in 2016, they actually petitioned to become her new legal guardians.

but they weren't able to do this because legally she's not a minor. She's an adult. She's, you know, listed in the system as 22. So they had to try to change her age to prove that she was a minor. But in order to do this, they need her birth records, which are like impossible to get. Adoption paperwork is considered confidential. So this stuff was not ever released to them. So the petition to become her legal guardian was actually dropped. But despite this, they say they see each other as family. Natalia claims she loves living with them and

that they love her back, but her age has totally been up for debate still. There are people out there, there's tons of people out there that think she is like 30, that she's this really smart psychopath scam artist. And I'm sure a lot of you will think that, and I'm not sure what to think. A lot of people see Natalia as

a disabled adopted person who's been through a really hard time in her life, who was neglected by her adoptive parents. Of course, Natalia claims that everything the Barnetts said about her wasn't true, but they still claim that it all was. Now the Barnetts claim that they did not know that Natalia was a minor or that they truly thought she was an adult when they left. They still think that to this day, I believe, but the investigators submitted an affidavit saying that they think that

they actually did know that she was a minor and they knowingly did this. Investigators said they were able to confirm all of this because they found medical records that show how the Barnetts actually had Natalia evaluated twice by doctors at the Peyton Manning Children's Hospital. The first doctor's evaluation took place in 2010 and it was determined that Natalia was a minor child

and her age was estimated to be around eight years old. So if that's true, and that's how old she actually is, that means she was living alone around age six,

to seven or eight. A lot of people think that that's just not possible. Like how was she taking care of herself? There's so many things you have to do to live on your own that there's no way a seven or eight year old would know how to do these things. And her new, I guess, adoptive family claims that Christine basically like groomed her for this and they just didn't want her anymore. So they set up this whole scheme. Apparently only months before the Barnetts went to Canada in 2013, there was a second evaluation done on a

Talia. This time she underwent a skeletal survey and those results clearly stated that she was still a minor child. So it was September of 2019 that this story really started blowing up because warrants were issued. They were charged with two counts of felony neglect of a dependent.

Now the two of them are divorced, so they're facing separate charges. Michael Barnett and his ex-wife Christine could face jail time, accused by the state of Indiana of neglecting their adopted daughter, Natalia, leaving her behind after moving to Canada. We were told by doctors, this person's a sociopath,

This person is a con artist. You are all in danger. But according to the Barnetts, Natalia is not who she says she is. They claim she's an adult and that she was attempting to cause them harm. Right now, she could be 16 based on her original birth certificate or

30 based on the revised certificate. But officials believe she was a minor when the Barnetts moved out of the country. Christine surrendered to the authorities and was released after posting a $5,500 bond. And Michael was released after posting a $5,000 bail. And of course, the Barnetts have pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. The Barnetts are facing six to 20 years in prison if they end up proving that they're guilty. So like I mentioned before, Natalia is

doing well now. She's with her new family. Her new family has had no problems with her and they claim that she treats all of her siblings really well. She's doing

doing really well with them. They said that she helps make bottles, she cooks, she cleans, she does plenty of chores and helps out with the other children in the family. Natalia and her new family both believe that the Barnetts should serve some jail time for what they did to her and abandoning her. But ultimately Natalia says that she just wants all of this to end so she can move on with her life.

So I find this to be really, really interesting and I can honestly say once again, I have no idea what to think. So many things cannot be confirmed. It's too hard to make a complete opinion

opinion on this for me personally, but I'd love to know what you guys think. Like I said, you're either gonna think she's a scam artist sociopath that pretends to be a child because of her dwarfism to get adopted by multiple families, or you're gonna think that the Barnetts had abandoned a disabled child, a minor that they adopted.

That is going to be it for me today, guys. Thank you for joining me for another episode and make sure you follow the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts. It really does help me out. If you want to watch the video version of this show, you can find it on my YouTube channel, which will be linked, or you can just search Kendall Ray. I will be back with another episode soon, but until then stay safe out there.