The Horse Girl, the Olympian, and the Farm That Ended in a Shooting
The Horse Girl,
the Olympian,
and the Farm That
Ended in a Shooting
Netflix's Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill dropped April 21 and the internet has not recovered. An Olympic dressage trainer. A student who paid $5,000 a month and wanted more. Three hundred pages of printed Facebook posts. A gun retrieved from a safe. A jury that said not guilty by reason of insanity. Here's the full breakdown.
Before we get into the shooting, the trial, and the verdict that sent the equestrian world into a collective spiral, let's talk about dressage for a second. Because if you don't know what dressage is, this story will make slightly less sense — and it's already a lot to process.
Dressage is the sport of training a horse to execute precise, choreographed movements in response to near-invisible cues from the rider. At the elite level it looks like the horse is dancing. At the elite level, it costs an absolutely unhinged amount of money. The trainers who operate at that level are effectively gods within their niche — they can elevate a rider's career with a single endorsement and end it just as quickly with a single phone call. That power structure matters enormously for understanding everything that follows.
Who Is Michael Barisone
Michael Barisone is not an obscure figure in equestrian circles. He was an alternate on the 2008 US Olympic dressage team, won over 100 CDI Grand Prix events, and took a World Cup gold medal in 1997. In 2012, he tutored Stephen Colbert in dressage ahead of the London Olympics for a Comedy Central segment — the kind of crossover that puts you in front of a much larger audience than horse sport typically reaches. After his competitive career wound down, he transitioned into training, splitting his time between his Hawthorne Hill Farm in Long Valley, New Jersey, and a Florida property.
He was, in short, exactly the kind of trainer that an ambitious dressage rider would give a great deal to work with. Which is what makes the next part of the story so comprehensible, even as it becomes increasingly incomprehensible.
The Setup: How Two People End Up Sharing a Farm and Then a Courtroom
Lauren Kanarek knew she wanted to ride horses professionally from the age of five. By the time she met Barisone at a dressage clinic in Wellington, Florida in 2018, she had a clear goal: develop her horses to the top levels of the sport. Barisone offered to train her. She agreed. The terms: $5,000 per month for training, boarding her horses, and living on the farm with her boyfriend, Robert Goodwin. She and Goodwin relocated to Hawthorne Hill. The professional relationship, initially, appeared to work.
Then it didn't.
Kanarek's core complaint was that Barisone was delegating her coaching to assistants — specifically Mary Haskins Gray — rather than giving her the personal attention she was paying $5,000 a month to receive. From Barisone's perspective, this was normal practice at his level. From Kanarek's perspective, she was not paying $5,000 a month for normal practice.
A flood then displaced Barisone and his fiancée from the farm's main house into a barn. He asked Kanarek and Goodwin to move out so his fiancée could move in. They stayed. What had been a professional dispute became a landlord-tenant dispute. What had been a landlord-tenant dispute became something considerably more hostile.
The 300 Pages of Facebook Posts
Kanarek took her grievances public. In July 2019 she posted on Facebook: "It's about time to possibly go to war. Anyone who repeatedly kicks a resting beast will eventually wake her up." She then posted additional messages accusing Barisone of being racist, homophobic, and antisemitic — allegations he has vehemently denied. She also made posts describing feeling bullied by a much larger man and expressing fear.
Barisone called 911 four times to report harassment and trespassing. Both sides were generating paper trails faster than either could manage them. By the time the case reached court, the printed versions of Kanarek's Facebook posts alone crossed 300 pages. A Child Protective Services agent also showed up at the farm in August 2019 to investigate a report about possible abuse of Barisone's girlfriend's children, who were living on the property. It's unclear who filed that report.
"Getting bullied into buying a horse is the biggest piece of bulls--- I've ever heard in my entire life, period."
— Lauren Kanarek, in the Netflix documentary, responding to Barisone's accountBoth sides have a version of events in which they are the person being targeted. Barisone says Kanarek and Goodwin commandeered one of his horses for a dressage show without permission, then bullied and threatened him into selling them the horse at a below-market price. Kanarek denies this characterization entirely. What is not disputed is that by August 2019, police had visited the farm multiple times without resolving anything, and the situation had reached the kind of pitch where one party or the other was going to do something that couldn't be walked back.
August 7, 2019
A Child Protective Services agent arrives at Hawthorne Hill to investigate the report about Barisone's girlfriend's children. Barisone, who has been barely sleeping or eating for weeks, later says this pushed him past a breaking point — he believed Kanarek had orchestrated the CPS visit as part of a campaign to destroy his career and his life.
Barisone retrieves a handgun that a friend had been storing at his office for safekeeping. He loads it. The prosecution would later argue that the act of retrieving and loading the weapon was evidence of premeditation. The defense would argue it was evidence of a man in the grip of a delusional disorder who believed he was protecting himself from a real threat.
Barisone shoots Kanarek twice in the chest at close range. He then fires at her boyfriend Robert Goodwin, missing. Kanarek, shot twice in the chest with damage to her left lung, calls 911 herself and tells them she has been shot. Emergency services arrive quickly. Both Kanarek and Barisone — who sustained injuries in the confrontation that followed — are taken to hospital. Both survive. Barisone is arrested at the scene.
Two counts of attempted murder. Weapons offences. The equestrian world, which had been watching the Hawthorne Hill feud unfold at a distance, now had its full, undivided attention on what came next.
The Trial: A Case That Goes Places
Barisone's defense team argued for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Their argument: that months of sustained harassment, the social media campaign, the CPS investigation, and the accumulated pressure of the dispute had induced a delusional disorder in Barisone — leaving him genuinely unable to distinguish between a real threat and a perceived one when he pulled the trigger. Two doctors testified to support this position.
The prosecution countered that the act of retrieving the gun from a safe, loading it, and firing it twice — and then firing again at Goodwin — was not the behaviour of a man in the grip of delusion. It was the behaviour of a man who had made a choice. "We're here on this trial because of the defendant's choice on August 7, 2019," the prosecutor told the jury. "His choice to get a gun, to point that gun at Lauren and pull the trigger twice, and then to turn it on Rob and pull the trigger again."
In 2022, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Barisone was confined to New Jersey's Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. He was released in 2023. He is currently living on a horse farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, where he has returned to training horses.
Why the Internet Is Obsessed
The horse girl world is its own universe — and this case cracks it open
The world of competitive dressage is small, intensely hierarchical, and extremely expensive. The trainers at the top of the pyramid have enormous power over the careers of riders below them — a single negative word from the right person can close doors across the entire sport. That power structure, and the desperation it creates in ambitious riders trying to reach the top, is the context without which this story doesn't fully make sense.
Kanarek paying $5,000 a month and living on her trainer's farm is not unusual in this world. The level of proximity and dependency that creates is genuinely extraordinary by normal standards, and it's a dependency that runs in both directions — the trainer needs serious students to maintain his standing, the student needs the trainer's access and endorsement to progress. When that relationship breaks down, there's no clean way out. You're in each other's houses.
The insanity verdict — what it does and doesn't mean
Not guilty by reason of insanity is one of the most misunderstood verdicts in criminal law. It doesn't mean the jury decided Barisone didn't shoot Kanarek — he did, and that is not in dispute. It means the jury decided that at the moment he did it, he lacked the mental capacity to understand that what he was doing was wrong.
The specific claim was delusional disorder — that Barisone had, by August 7, become genuinely convinced that Kanarek was an existential threat to his life and livelihood, and that what he did was self-defence against a danger only he could perceive. Whether you find that convincing likely depends on how much weight you give to the months of documented harassment, the CPS visit, and the pattern of escalation that preceded the shooting. The prosecution's argument that retrieving and loading a gun constitutes premeditation is a strong one. The jury disagreed.
Both people gave interviews to the documentary — and both are still standing
What makes Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill different from a standard true crime reconstruction is that both Barisone and Kanarek participated in new interviews for the film. Both of them have a version of events in which they are the person who was persecuted. Both of them are entirely certain they are correct. The documentary, to its credit, does not try to decide between them — it presents the evidence and the testimonies and lets the viewer sit with the discomfort of two irreconcilable accounts.
Kanarek is now living in Florida with Goodwin and has returned to dressage. Barisone is back training horses twenty minutes away, also in Florida. They have not communicated since the trial.
The Facebook posts — 300 pages is not a typo
The printed versions of Lauren Kanarek's Facebook posts, submitted as evidence in court, ran to over 300 pages. That's the part of this story that tends to stop people in their tracks, and it should. Three hundred pages of Facebook activity directed at one person's situation is not a posting habit. It's a campaign. Whether it was a campaign in the sinister sense — deliberately designed to isolate and destroy Barisone — or simply the documented output of a person who felt genuinely wronged and had no other platform through which to be heard, is one of the central questions the documentary wrestles with.
The post that tends to get quoted most — "It's about time to possibly go to war. Anyone who repeatedly kicks a resting beast will eventually wake her up" — reads differently depending on which version of Kanarek you've decided to believe.
$5,000 per month for training, boarding, and accommodation. Kanarek felt she wasn't getting the personal attention that price implied. Barisone felt this was standard industry practice.
At least six documented calls to police from both sides before the shooting. Police visited multiple times. Nobody intervened. The situation continued to escalate.
Not guilty by reason of insanity, 2022. Confined to psychiatric hospital until 2023. Now living in Florida, training horses.
Survived two gunshot wounds to the chest with damage to her left lung. Required emergency surgery and a medically induced coma. Has returned to dressage competition.
What This Story Is Really About
On the surface this is a true crime story about a shooting on a horse farm in New Jersey. Underneath, it's a story about what happens when two people with enormous egos, an intense power imbalance, and no functional exit strategy end up trapped on sixty acres together with no neutral party willing to intervene.
The dressage world provided the specific conditions — the money, the hierarchy, the dependency, the stakes of reputation — but the dynamic it produced is not unique to equestrian sport. We have covered before the specific way that privileged worlds produce their own catastrophes — the sense that the rules that govern ordinary disputes don't apply because the stakes are too specific, the community too small, and the intermediaries too invested in not causing offence to anyone useful. The Hawthorne Hill farm had six 911 calls and multiple police visits before anyone was shot. At no point did anyone make the problem stop.
Both Barisone and Kanarek were, by most accounts, difficult. Both of them escalated. Both of them had grievances with some basis. The specific tragedy — and it is a tragedy, even with a verdict attached — is that a professional dispute about training delegation and a tenancy dispute about who gets which building on a New Jersey farm ended with one person shot twice and another person in a psychiatric hospital, and nothing resolved, and both of them now living in the same state, and the only thing that will keep them apart is the distance between two Florida properties they chose independently.
The pattern of escalation is the story. The shooting is just the point at which the pattern became impossible to look away from.
Watch it. Then sit with how uncomfortable both of them make you.
Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill is on Netflix now. It's one of those documentaries where you keep thinking you've landed on who the villain is, and then something shifts. By the end you're not entirely sure the verdict was wrong, you're not entirely sure it was right, and you're extremely sure that nobody involved in this situation made good decisions at any stage of it.
The horse girl to true crime pipeline is real and it is thriving. This is the peak of it. A subculture that most people have never thought about for five consecutive seconds turns out to contain exactly the same dynamics — obsession, entitlement, power, money, wounded pride — that every other closed world contains. Just with better jodhpurs.
Is it a comfort that Kanarek is riding again and Barisone is training again and both of them seem to be, by all outward appearances, fine? Netflix has a way of serving you endings that aren't really endings. This is one of those. The documentary finishes. The situation just continues, somewhere in Florida, in the specific silence of two people who have agreed by circumstance never to discuss it again.
