In Good American Family’s ending, we’re made to believe that Natalia was wronged by American law, and despite having lost the case, the public was on her side. The final episode isn’t as gripping as the rest of the show, because it mainly focuses on the emotional baggage felt by each of the parties in this case, but mainly it distances us, the audience, from Kristine Barnett, the alleged perpetrator in this whole situation. Interestingly, the show doesn’t really get into the bits where the Barnetts were charged for abandoning a disabled person. Instead, the show focuses on how Natalia is left feeling when Michael’s attorney makes it so that Natalia’s age can’t be considered a contributing factor in the trial, making it very hard to prove that she was wronged and impossible to say that she was actually a child. With that said, though, let’s get into what Natalia, the Barnetts, and the Mans family are doing now.
Spoiler Alert
Where Is Natalia Grace Now?
During Good American Family’s ending, Natalia returns home to her adoptive siblings defeated, but they’re by her side and tell her that the world is too. They read out comments about how they believe Natalia and how Kristine and Michael wronged her, whereas on the other side, Kristine is left alone, with nobody to support her. Not even her eldest son, Jacob. This is a stark contrast to the beginning of the show, where it seemed Kristine was the victim in all of this. In the final moments, Michael doesn’t apologize to Natalia for not helping her, but he simply says he was manipulated by his ex-wife into thinking that Natalia was an evil adult trying to ruin their lives. Before the credits roll, the actors who play the leading roles announce that the Mans family has also now been accused of abuse, whereas Kristine and the Mans claim to be innocent still. On the other hand, Natalia has finally received an American passport that legally states her birth date as September 4th, 2003, making her only 21 years old today. As per the media reports, she has a rare form of dwarfism and is originally Ukrainian. In 2023, she was adopted by the Mans family after living with them for 10 years, thanks to the Barnetts having abandoned her. In 2022, the court didn’t find Michael guilty of the charges against him, and sometime later, Kristine’s accusations of neglect were also dismissed.
But then came a 3-season docu-series titled The Curious Case Of Natalia Grace, in which we learn that, in 2023 the Mans started physically abusing her (according to neighborhood eyewitnesses), allegedly because she was talking to a boyfriend in the UK. We already know the Mans family are very religious, so that’s probably what pushed them in such a direction. So, Natalia moved out of the Mans’ family home and now lives with the DePauls, a couple with dwarfism who wanted to adopt her back in 2009 but couldn’t because of financial difficulties. It seems Natalia’s living a happy life, because all she ever really wanted was to take control of her own life, and that’s what she’s doing now. It seems Natalia is now happy with her boyfriend, Neil, studying to get her GED and become a teacher, and also living a regular late teen life with her new family.
Where Is Kristine Barnett Now?
The entire experience with Natalia seems to have left Kristine Barnett extremely bitter. She continues to refuse to admit any wrongdoing on her part, arguing that she cannot be held responsible for child abuse when the girl in question was already an adult when she was adopted. Kristine’s divorce from Michael was finalized in 2018, and she seems to have left Indiana in the aftermath, moving to Florida. Michael himself has claimed to be as much a victim of Kristine’s abuse as Natalia was, as seen on the show (word for word in the final few minutes about having the same monster from the docuseries). Even before Good American Family was announced, Natalia’s case had attracted a lot of media attention, and Kristine had not held back from responding on social media. She frequently called out Natalia for falsely claiming victimhood. About a year ago, in March of 2024, she announced an upcoming book about the persecution she’d faced since the media exposure of the case, Witch Hunt: The Kristine Barnett Story, but it appears not to be available online at present. The last she seems to have said about Natalia and the case was in May of 2024, where she suggested that she doesn’t care about her former adoptive daughter, going on to accuse her defenders of simply wanting to bully a mother. I suppose, at the end of the day, everyone is abusing the power of this story by trying to get the best of the media attention it’s received since it came to be known. Natalia with her docuseries and Kristine with her books and such.
What Happened With Cynthia and Antwon Mans?
According to reports, when Natalia left the Mans family, they started saying that she had changed after she was manipulated by her “boyfriend,” Neil, from the UK. They even told the producers of the docuseries that they would not be associating with her any longer because she’d gone against the family and doesn’t care about anything but herself. The outlook on the Mans is worse because it seems Cynthia is listed as the payee for Natalia’s disability money. In the show, we saw a glimpse of Natalia starting a GoFundMe for her surgeries. I wonder if this meant the Mans were trying to extort Natalia, and that’s why they adopted her. It seems any money that was meant to go to Natalia has been going to Cynthia ever since the adoption, or maybe even before that. If you check the Mans family Instagram, it is flooded with comments about the Mans having to pay Natalia back, but we’re not sure what’s happening behind the scenes. They haven’t posted since 2023.
