Warning: This post contains spoilers for Good American Family
Good American Family ends on a happy note, following a harrowing season. The finale finds Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid), who has a rare form of dwarfism, sidled up next to her siblings in the home of her devout Christian adoptive parents Cynthia Mans (Christina Hendricks) and Antwon Mans (Jerod Haynes) after enduring about a decade of family tumult.
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While it’s true that, in real life, the Mans family adopted her in 2023, Natalia ended up moving out of their house shortly afterwards, finding them too strict. Now, she’s living with a different family.
Here’s a look at what happened to Natalia in the last couple of years and where she is now.
Why Natalia Grace left the Mans family
As Good American Family shows, Natalia started her life in a Ukrainian orphanage and then clashed with Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (Mark Duplass), a couple that first adopted her in 2010 when she was about seven years old. They believed she was an adult who should live on her own and had an Indiana court change her birth year from 2003 to 1989 in 2012—a decision that was reversed in 2023 when she was legally adopted by the Mans family.
Read More: The Wild True Story Behind Good American Family
The third season of a docuseries about her life—The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, which aired in Jan. 2025—reveals that Natalia had a falling out with the Mans family. Throughout the second season, the Mans family had maintained that Natalia never lashed out at them, but Antwon Mans claims she was doing exactly that in an angry phone call to the producers that is excerpted in the final minutes of the season.
Natalia says the rift started when the Manses tried to take away her Internet access because she was talking to a boyfriend in the U.K. (The producers weren’t planning to do a third season, but wanted to see the story through.)
In the latest season, Natalia and her boyfriend reached out to Nicole and Vincent DePaul in upstate New York, a couple that had tried to adopt Natalia in 2009, but couldn’t make it work financially. Like a scene out of a movie, Nicole and her daughter Mackenzie, who is also a little person, flew down to the Mans family’s church and picked up Natalia outside of the building.
Natalia Grace today
Natalia has been living with the DePauls since 2023. It took a while for the family of four to find harmony. In the docu-series, Nicole says Natalia’s arrival was like “somebody put a bomb into our house.” But in a Jan. 13, 2025, People magazine story, she said Natalia has never done anything violent and that ups and downs are to be expected.
Natalia hopes that her saga can be an inspiration to anyone with obstacles to overcome. As she puts it in the docu-series, “I want people to remember me as someone who overcame what they went through…and grew.”
Nowadays, according to People, Natalia is taking driving lessons, and studying for the GED, hoping to become a school teacher. In her spare time, she listens to Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. “I feel free,” she told the magazine.
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