The biological mum of the ‘adopted child’ who turned out to be a 22-year-old has revealed her daughter’s real age.
Kristine and Michael Barnett adopted Natalia Grace back in 2010, believing her to be a six-year-old girl with a rare bone growth disorder.
However, as time went on, it transpired that she wasn’t who said she was - with the Barnetts saying she was secretly an adult attempting to harm their family.
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Natalia was re-aged by a judge in 2012 after the Barnetts filed a motion in Marion County Court to ‘have her age corrected to something more appropriate’.
In new Investigation Discovery documentary The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, legal expert Beth Karas explains: “The judge had a petition prepared by an attorney that would lay out the arguments for why this person is not the age they believe she is – she is actually an adult.
“Nobody knows quite what age, but she has not grown in four years, so the judge came up with his own little formula: ‘Well, you stop growing at 18 – if she hasn’t grown in four years then she’s at least 18 when she entered their lives. And I’m gonna add four years'.
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“He said, ‘Okay, I find you 22'.”
However, later in the documentary, we hear from Natalia’s biological mother Anna Gava, who is confirmed to be her parent after providing a DNA test.
Three years after proving that she is her mum, she is interviewed via video link from Ukraine, where she explains how she herself was born in 1979, before revealing her daughter’s date of birth.
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“She was born on September 4th 2003,” Gava says.
“She was born at 6.25am in the Maternity Hospital No. 1. She is my biological daughter.”
This means Natalia would be 19-years-old today - well, 19 years, nine months and two days, if we're being exact.
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She continues: “They showed her to me. The childbirth was difficult as well, very difficult. When I regained consciousness after anaesthesia, the next day the doctor came and said, ‘There is no sense to take her home.’
“They said that she won’t be able to walk at all, and she will be of very short stature.
"They said a surgery would cost $100,000, and since ‘you don’t have such finances’, you also have an older daughter – I already had Julia at the time and Natasha came after her...
“She brought me a sample of the waiver on the paper, and I had to write five copies of it.
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“I didn’t initially want to leave her, but the doctors said there is nothing you could do for her.
“’You are so young,’ they said, ‘You are 24 years old. Don’t ruin your life, you will have other children.’”
Anna admits she feels sad that she ‘listened to the doctors and left her instead of keeping her’.
Reacting to what Gava has to say, Karas says: “Anna Gava was born in 1979, which means she would have been 10 years old if Natalia was born in 1989, as the courts ruled when they re-aged her.
“So there aren’t a lot of good reasons, besides seeing pubic hair on her, to believe she was born anytime before 2003.”
Topics: TV and Film, Documentaries
Jess Hardiman