Prosecutors agreed Friday to give Michael Barnett immunity in exchange for his unfettered testimony in the neglect trial of his ex-wife, Kristine Barnett, this spring – a case that has drawn international attention, a gag order and a limited series in the works for Hulu.
A Tippecanoe County jury found Michael Barnett not guilty in October 2022 on four counts of neglect of a dependent after leaving the couple’s adopted daughter, a Ukrainian orphan named Natalia, in a Lafayette apartment and moving the rest of the family to Canada a decade earlier.
Kristine Barnett faces similar charges in her own trial, slated for April.
But during a pretrial conference Friday in Tippecanoe Superior Court 2, there were hints that the second trial dealing with how Natalia Barnett – who has diastrophic dysplasia, a condition that causes severe dwarfism – wound up alone in Lafayette won’t be a carbon copy of the first one.
