Lauren Kanarek: The Netflix Doc, the Facebook Post, and the Lawsuit
She Moved Onto
Someone's Property,
Caused Years of Drama,
Posted About Her
"Other Personalities,"
And Then Sued Netflix
For Telling The Story.
Lauren Kanarek survived being shot. She did not survive Netflix showing the public record of everything she did before the shooting. The internet called her unhinged. Her family called the documentary defamatory. Michael Barisone walked free in 2023. This is Part 2.
Let's do a quick recap for anyone who missed Part 1, because this story requires the full picture to truly appreciate the audacity of what came next. Lauren Kanarek, a dressage rider, began training under Michael Barisone — former Olympian, respected trainer, man who taught Stephen Colbert dressage on television in a bit that was genuinely charming — in 2018. She and her fiancé Robert Goodwin moved onto his 60-acre Long Valley, New Jersey farm. The professional relationship deteriorated. By 2019, Barisone was trying to evict them. On August 7, 2019, he shot her twice in the chest.
She survived. He was arrested. He was arraigned on charges of attempted murder. He sat in jail, then in various detention arrangements, for years while the case worked its way through the New Jersey courts. In April 2022, a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to a psychiatric facility and released in 2023. And then, in April 2026, Netflix released a documentary that showed the public exactly what the lead-up to all of this looked like.
Lauren Kanarek's family responded by suing Netflix for showing it.
This is the part where we put down the coffee and commit fully to the receipts. Because what happened between 2018 and August 7, 2019, at Hawthorne Hill Farm is not a straightforward story of a powerful man victimising a vulnerable woman — and the attempts to frame it that way have not aged well under public scrutiny. The documentary had a 5,500-search-per-month keyword in Lauren Kanarek's name and a Reddit thread called "Lauren Kanarek is unhinged" sitting at position 1 on Google before the Kanarek family even filed their lawsuit. The internet saw the documentary. The internet reached a verdict. We are here to lay out the case the internet reviewed.
Michael Barisone:
Who He Was Before All This
It is worth establishing, for anyone arriving fresh to this saga, that Michael Barisone was not a nobody. He was a two-time Olympic equestrian — he competed at Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 on the United States dressage team. He was one of the most respected Grand Prix dressage trainers in the country. He trained riders who went on to compete at the international level. He was known, by most accounts, as someone who was devoted to the sport and to his horses in the way that serious equestrians are: obsessively, sometimes at the expense of everything else.
He also appeared on national television teaching Stephen Colbert how to do dressage in a segment for The Late Show. This is not relevant to the legal proceedings but it is relevant to the overall vibe: this was a man with a life, a reputation, a career. He had 60 acres in Morris County, New Jersey, a functioning operation, and decades of credibility in a small, interconnected world where reputation is currency.
When Lauren Kanarek and Robert Goodwin moved onto Hawthorne Hill in 2018, Barisone's life was, by external appearances, going fine. By August 2019, he had shot someone in his own driveway and was in handcuffs. How we got there is the whole story — and it is not a story that flatters everyone equally.
This matters as context for everything that followed. Dressage in the United States is a niche sport with a tight-knit community, an intense culture around horse ownership and training relationships, and a social ecosystem where professional reputations spread through word of mouth at competitions, in barn aisles, and — increasingly — on Facebook. When the conflict at Hawthorne Hill began playing out publicly on social media, it was not happening in a vacuum. It was happening in a community where everyone knew everyone and where a bad word from the right person could end a career. Both parties understood this. Both parties used it.
For more context on the world these two people inhabited — and on what made the professional relationship between Kanarek and Barisone go so badly wrong so fast — see our full breakdown in Part 1.
What Actually Happened
Before the Shooting
Here is the part of the story that Netflix showed and that Kanarek's family would apparently prefer Netflix had not shown. The conflict at Hawthorne Hill was not a case of a student being quietly victimised by a powerful authority figure. It was — by multiple accounts, by court testimony, by the paper trail — a sustained and escalating campaign that ended badly for everyone, including the person who started it.
The core of Barisone's defence was not that Lauren Kanarek deserved to be shot. His defence was that the accumulated weight of everything she did — the alleged horse theft, the eviction resistance, the online harassment, the Facebook post, and the timed CPS complaint — drove him to a complete psychotic break in which he had no understanding of what he was doing. Whether or not you accept that defence (and twelve jurors did), the underlying behaviour it was built on is documented, entered into evidence, and now sitting on Netflix for everyone to watch.
The Facebook Post.
Let's Just Look At It.
There are Facebook posts, and then there are Facebook posts. Most of us have written something regrettable online in a moment of frustration. Most of us have not written something that a jury later used to find our attacker legally not guilty of shooting us. Lauren Kanarek achieved this.
Now. Her team says this was taken out of context. That it was a venting moment. That anyone who has been in a high-conflict situation with someone in a position of professional power over them knows you say things in frustration that you don't mean literally. Fair enough. People say dramatic things when they're under pressure. People post things online they later wish they hadn't.
But here is the thing: the specific language she chose when venting was "my other personalities." Not "I'm at my wits' end." Not "I am going to lose it on someone." Not even "I am not responsible for what I do when I'm pushed." "My other personalities." Plural. Possessive. Posted publicly on Facebook during an active eviction dispute, while living on the property of the man she was refusing to vacate. That is not an off-the-cuff complaint about a difficult week. That is a statement with enough specificity and enough menace that twelve jurors, after hearing all of the evidence, concluded it contributed to a psychotic break in another person.
The internet has also concluded something, and it is doing so at volume. The Reddit thread titled "Lauren Kanarek is unhinged" is generating thousands of visitors a month. It is sitting at position 1 on Google for her name. This is the reputational damage the family's lawsuit attributes to Netflix. It might be worth noting that the reputational damage was caused by the Facebook post that Netflix showed — not by Netflix showing it. There is a difference. The lawsuit has not, so far, made a convincing case that there isn't.
"She sued Netflix for showing the public record of her own behaviour. The public record did the rest."
— Brewtiful Living · CultureThe broader question the Facebook post raises — and which the documentary spends considerable time on — is what exactly was going on at Hawthorne Hill in the months before the shooting. The post does not exist in isolation. It exists in the context of an ongoing, documented, escalating conflict between two people who were still sharing a property because one of them refused to leave when the other asked. That context doesn't excuse the shooter. But it does explain why twelve people in a jury box looked at the full record and said: this man did not understand what he was doing.
The Trial, The Insanity Defence,
And Why The Jury Said Yes
Michael Barisone's trial was one of the stranger legal proceedings to come out of the equestrian world — a community that is not, historically, known for producing nationally covered criminal cases. The charges were attempted murder. The defence was not self-defence, not provocation, not diminished capacity in the partial sense. It was a full insanity defence: the argument that at the moment Michael Barisone pulled the trigger twice in the chest of the woman standing in front of him, he was so profoundly detached from reality that he did not understand what he was doing or that it was wrong.
This is a high bar. Insanity defences are notoriously difficult to win in the United States. They succeed in a small fraction of cases where they are raised — estimates suggest somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of cases where the defence is actually mounted. Barisone's team succeeded. The jury was unanimous. The verdict came down in April 2022.
The legal argument was built on three pillars. First: that the sustained conflict with Kanarek — the alleged horse incident, the eviction resistance, the online behaviour, the months of escalation — constituted a course of harassment that progressively destabilised Barisone's mental state. Second: that the Facebook post referencing "other personalities" was not a throwaway comment but evidence of genuine instability in the person he was in conflict with, and that receiving it caused him to fear for his safety and the safety of others on his property. Third: that the CPS complaint — which Barisone's team attributed to Kanarek, a claim she disputes — arrived on the morning of the shooting in a way that functioned as a final trigger, pushing someone already at the edge of a psychotic break into full dissociation.
Barisone testified that he had zero recollection of firing the shots. His psychiatric experts testified that he suffered a brief reactive psychosis. The prosecution argued this was implausible. The jury believed the defence. It was unanimous.
What this means, practically, is that twelve people who heard the full trial record — including Kanarek's account, her lawyers' cross-examinations of Barisone's experts, everything — decided that the totality of evidence supported the conclusion that he was legally insane at the moment of the shooting. That is a significant finding. It is not the same as saying Kanarek deserved to be shot. It is saying that the circumstances were extraordinary enough to meet the legal definition of insanity. These are not the same thing, but they are related things, and the documentary presents them as related things, which is why the Kanarek family objects to it.
What the Netflix Doc
Actually Shows
Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill dropped on April 21, 2026, as part of Netflix's ongoing Untold true-crime sports documentary series — a franchise that has previously covered topics ranging from gambling scandals to doping cases to the kind of athletic drama that doesn't make it into official highlight reels. The Hawthorne Hill episode fits the brief: it is a story from inside a niche sporting community, involving people who were well-known within that community and completely unknown outside it, in which the public record turns out to be considerably more complicated than the initial headlines suggested.
Both Kanarek and Barisone speak on camera. This is important. Netflix did not reconstruct events through anonymous sources or one-sided narration. Both people in the central conflict sat down and gave their accounts. Barisone gives his version of the horse incident, the eviction, the escalation, the morning of August 7. Kanarek gives hers. The documentary lets viewers sit with the contradiction and reach their own conclusions.
What the Kanarek family's lawsuit objects to is that the documentary gives Barisone's account "equal weight." Which is true. It does. This is called journalism. In a case where the shooter was found not guilty by reason of insanity — where a jury, after hearing everything, concluded that the victim's documented behaviour contributed to a psychotic break — presenting only the victim's account while ignoring the documented, court-entered evidence on the other side would not be journalism. It would be advocacy. Netflix made a documentary, not a press release.
The documentary also features, prominently, the Facebook post. It features the CPS complaint — noting the dispute over who placed it and making clear that Kanarek denies placing it, while presenting Barisone's account of how it landed on the morning of the shooting. It presents the jury verdict and the reasoning behind it. It lets Barisone, now free and back in the equestrian community, speak about what he remembers — or doesn't remember — about August 7, 2019.
The result is a documentary that, by all available accounts, does what good true crime documentaries are supposed to do: it presents the full record of a complicated event and trusts the audience to think. That the audience then mostly concluded "Lauren Kanarek is unhinged" and went to Reddit with this conclusion is not Netflix's fault. The audience saw what the jury saw. The audience reached a similar verdict, with less legal precision but more memorable terminology.
This is the most contested element of the pre-shooting timeline, and it is worth being precise. Barisone's team alleged at trial that a CPS worker arrived at Hawthorne Hill on the morning of August 7, 2019, to investigate allegations about children on the property. They argued this complaint was placed by Kanarek — or someone acting on her behalf — and was timed deliberately to arrive during a period of peak tension as a form of pressure or escalation. Kanarek denies placing the complaint.
What is not in dispute: a CPS visit happened that morning. Whether it was placed by Kanarek, placed by someone else, or coincidentally timed is a question the trial did not fully resolve. The jury heard the argument about timing and still returned a not-guilty verdict. The documentary includes the allegation, notes the dispute, and does not draw a conclusion — which is the appropriate journalistic approach when something is genuinely contested. The Kanarek family objects to its inclusion anyway. This is, frankly, a difficult position to defend.
For more on the lead-up to the shooting and what was happening at Hawthorne Hill in the final months before August 2019, see our full Part 1 breakdown.
Suing Netflix For
Showing What Happened
Let's be precise about what the Kanarek family's lawsuit against Netflix and CBS actually claims, because the framing matters enormously. The claim is defamation. The specific allegation is that both documentaries — Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill on Netflix and an episode of CBS's 48 Hours — depicted Lauren Kanarek in a false and damaging light by presenting Michael Barisone as a victim of harassment rather than as the man who shot her.
The legal challenge with this argument is substantial. Defamation requires that false statements of fact be made about a person, causing reputational harm. What the documentaries presented was: the public trial record, including evidence entered by both sides; Barisone's own on-camera account; and the Facebook post, which Kanarek herself wrote and posted. None of these things are false statements manufactured by Netflix. They are documented reality. Showing documented reality is, as a general principle, not defamation. It is documentation.
The lawsuit also has to contend with the specific shape of the harm it's claiming. The Kanarek family argues that the documentaries caused reputational damage — that Lauren is now widely perceived as having provoked or contributed to the situation that led to her being shot. But this perception did not originate with Netflix. It originated with the trial, which was public, which produced a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict, which required the jury to accept that her behaviour contributed to Barisone's psychotic break. Netflix documented a verdict that already existed in the public record. The documentation did not create the narrative; the verdict created the narrative. Netflix just made it accessible to people who hadn't followed the 2022 trial.
The Kanarek family's lawsuit claims Netflix and CBS defamed Lauren by showing Barisone's perspective with equal weight to hers. To be clear about what that means in practice: they are arguing that a documentary about a shooting case in which the shooter was found not guilty should have excluded the shooter's on-camera account, the evidence he presented at trial, and the jury's documented reasoning — because including it caused reputational harm.
The reputational harm was caused by the Facebook post, the eviction dispute, the CPS complaint timeline, and the unanimous jury verdict. Netflix did not manufacture any of those things. They documented them. There is a legal distinction between defamation and documentation that the lawsuit will presumably have to navigate. The court of public opinion has already filed. The verdict there was also unanimous.
It is also worth noting that the lawsuit names CBS alongside Netflix, for a 48 Hours episode that covered the case in 2022 — before the Netflix documentary even existed. This suggests that the family's objection is not specifically to the way Netflix handled the material, but to the existence of accurate media coverage of the trial at all. That is a difficult argument to make in a legal system built on the premise that court proceedings are public.
The broader irony of the lawsuit is that it has functioned as its own publicity engine. Before the Netflix documentary, the Hawthorne Hill case was known primarily to people who had followed it in 2019 and 2022 — a relatively contained audience of equestrian community observers, New Jersey local news readers, and true crime enthusiasts. The Netflix release in April 2026 brought it to a mainstream audience. But the subsequent coverage of the family's lawsuit against Netflix — which generated its own round of news articles, Reddit threads, and social media discussion — has kept the story and the Facebook post in circulation far longer than the documentary alone would have. The attempt to suppress the documentation has produced more documentation.
Where Is Lauren Kanarek Now in 2026?
Lauren Kanarek lives in Florida with her fiancé Robert Goodwin. She is in her mid-forties. She has recovered from two gunshot wounds to the chest — the bullets punctured her lung, required emergency surgery, and left her in a medically induced coma in August 2019. By all available accounts, she made a full physical recovery.
She is pursuing her dressage career. The equestrian world is small and the story followed her when she moved to Florida — the documentary has reintroduced it to anyone who hadn't been paying attention since the trial.
She and her family are actively pursuing a lawsuit against Netflix and CBS. No substantive public statement has been made about the documentary's content, the Reddit thread, or the ongoing internet verdict about her character. Her Instagram @laurenkana has since gone private.
Michael Barisone was released from the psychiatric facility in 2023 following his not-guilty verdict. He is 62 years old. He has returned to the equestrian community and, by available reports, to coaching. He gave an on-camera interview for the Netflix documentary. He is, to all appearances, rebuilding his life in the sport where he built his reputation in the first place.
Robert Goodwin, Kanarek's fiancé who was present at Hawthorne Hill throughout the conflict, remains with her in Florida. He was not charged with any crime related to the events at the farm.
The Internet's Verdict,
And Why It Landed Where It Did
The Reddit thread is called "Lauren Kanarek is unhinged." It is, at time of writing, the first organic result on Google for her name — above her Instagram, above news articles about the shooting, above the Netflix documentary page. This is what SEO people call "position 1," and in this particular case position 1 is a Reddit thread calling someone unhinged. This is not a fate anyone would wish on themselves.
But it is also worth understanding why the thread landed there, because it is not purely a product of internet cruelty. Internet cruelty does not need evidence. Internet cruelty will pick someone apart based on a bad photo or an unfortunate phrasing. The "Lauren Kanarek is unhinged" consensus is not content-free — it is built on the Facebook post, on the trial record, on the jury verdict, on the specific facts of what was documented at Hawthorne Hill over the course of more than a year. People who read the full record and reach that conclusion are not doing so in a vacuum. They are doing what the jury did, with less legal structure and more meme energy.
This is, frankly, one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the story to grapple with. Lauren Kanarek was shot. She nearly died. She called 911 herself while bleeding out in a driveway. Whatever the circumstances leading up to it, whatever her behaviour in the months before, she did not deserve to be shot. Nobody deserves to be shot. And yet the documented record of her behaviour before the shooting is what it is, and people who encounter that record reach the conclusions they reach. The internet does not do nuance particularly well, but in this specific case it has arrived at a position that is not entirely without foundation.
"Being shot does not retroactively make the months before the shooting not have happened. The record is the record."
— Brewtiful Living · CultureWhat would it look like if the story had gone differently — if the documentation had been more sympathetic to Kanarek? If the documentaries had presented her primarily as a victim of a violent man who shot her in his driveway? Probably she'd have a sympathetic Reddit thread instead of a hostile one. But the documentaries couldn't do that without omitting the Facebook post, the eviction timeline, the jury verdict, and the very public trial record. Omitting those things would have required the documentarians to make an editorial choice to protect one party's narrative at the expense of accuracy. Netflix did not make that choice. The family's lawsuit argues they should have.
This is, at its core, a case about who gets to control the story of a public court proceeding. The answer that defamation law has traditionally given is: nobody. Court proceedings are public. Evidence entered at trial is public. Verdicts are public. The media has broad latitude to report on public court proceedings accurately. The Kanarek family's lawsuit is testing that principle in the streaming documentary context. Wherever it lands legally, the court of public opinion has already rendered its position with considerable specificity.
Lauren Kanarek moved onto Michael Barisone's property, allegedly took his horse, resisted eviction for months, allegedly filed a CPS complaint timed to a boiling point, posted about her "other personalities" on Facebook during an active eviction dispute, got shot, survived, watched a jury find her shooter legally insane based substantially on her own documented behaviour, and then sued Netflix for documenting it. The internet called her unhinged. The internet has seen the Facebook post. The internet has read the trial record. The jury verdict was unanimous. We are not here to argue with the internet on this one.
She was still shot. That matters. But being shot does not erase the months before the shooting — and the lawsuit that argues it should has a very steep hill to climb in a legal system built on the premise that court records are, by definition, public.
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