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A helping hand. Little People, Big World star Matt Roloff promoted a GoFundMe page for Natalia Grace Barnett shortly after her adoptive father, Michael Barnett, appeared in a new ID docuseries about her.
“Hello everyone. I was very touched by the story on Natalia Grace (Google it),” Matt, 61, captioned an Instagram post on Monday, June 5. “For those that don’t know, she has the same type of rare dwarfism as me. A variant of diastrophic dysplasia. You can help her and her new family on this gofundme link [sic]. Let’s help get the new van and send them on a fun vacation.”
In the screenshot that the Roloff Farms owner shared, social media users saw a group shot of a family with several kids, titled, “Family vacation and a new van.”
In response to Matt’s post, several of his Instagram followers praised the reality TV star for speaking in favor of Natalia.
“Finally someone showing kindness for this girl who was treated so terribly by everyone who entered her life,” one person commented.
However, countless others slammed Matt for taking Natalia’s side.
“No thanks. Maybe if it was for something meaningful and really needed, not her,” one commenter wrote to which Matt replied, “You must not have watched the show.”
Another Instagram user chimed in, “This girl? All over the news? Natalia Grace, an orphan from the Ukraine who was accused of pretending to be a 6-year-old girl by her adoptive parents,” and Matt responded, “Wrong. Watch the series.”
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The docuseries in question is the ID network’s The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, which was released on May 29. The three-part series focuses on Michael’s allegations against his adoptive daughter.
In April 2010, Michael and his then-wife, Kristine Barnett, adopted Natalia through an emergency adoption process. After bringing her back home to live with them and their biological sons, Jacob, Wesley and Ethan, the Barnett family began to suspect that Natalia was actually an adult posing as a child, living with a form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita.
Throughout the true crime series, Michael alleged that Natalia tried to “stab” the family members while they slept. Additionally, he claimed that Natalia tried to poison Kristine’s coffee with a cleaning chemical and attempted to push her into an electric fence.
In 2013, the Barnetts moved to Canada and left Natalia in a rental apartment in Lafayette, Indiana, on her own. Despite having her birth year legally changed from 2003 to 1989, Michael and Kristine were both charged with several counts of child neglect in September 2019.
However, Michael was found not guilty of the charges during his October 2022 trial, and Kristine’s charges were dropped less than a month before her trial was scheduled to start in March 2023.
After The Curious Case of Natalia Grace aired, ID released a trailer for a new documentary focusing on Natalia’s point of view.
“It’s very frustrating to hear everything that’s being said from Kristine and Michael because I already don’t know who I am, and I want to know who I am, what happened to me,” Natalia said in a clip from The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, which is set to premiere in the late summer of 2023. “But I’m hearing all this stuff that never actually happened from Kristine and Michael.”
