'The Shooting At Hawthorne Hill' Recap: What Happens In The Michael Barisone-Lauren Kanarek Case?

The last presentation in the sixth season of Netflix’s sports documentary series, Untold, brings us a story from the equestrian world that is perhaps more about human nature and our very brash tendencies. In August of 2019, the world of equestrian sports was left shaken by the news that former US Olympian, Michael Barisone, had supposedly shot his student, Lauren Kanarek. The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill gets into the details of the background, the incident, and then the court trial that followed, the result of which was simply shocking to some, while others felt that justice had finally been served.

How did Michael Barisone first meet Lauren Kanarek?

The world of equestrian sports, and especially dressage, is not extremely popular or well-known to the average sports fan, and so I must first begin by describing it. While the term ‘equestrian’ refers to the sport or the discipline of horse riding, dressage is a particular horse-riding sport that requires training the horse to follow the exact orders of its riders. If you’ve ever seen the Olympic sport where riders do tricks and precise moves on their horses, sometimes even resembling some sort of horse-ballet, well that is exactly what dressage is. It is considered to be one of the most difficult sports to get into, not only because of the tremendous amount of skill required to tame, train and guide horses, especially of superior breeds that often have haughty temperaments, but also because of the huge sum of money required to participate. 

Firstly, you would need a horse, preferably one of good breeding, which would set you back a few thousand dollars. Next, the shelter and maintenance costs of the animals are also naturally very high, with the horseshoes, which need changing every four weeks, costing 500 to 700 dollars every time. In order to take part in competitions, which is the only way to show your skills and mettle to the world, you’d have to arrange for a trailer to transport the horse, and for flight tickets to carry the animal in an airplane when necessary. The participation fees at these competitions and shows are also naturally higher than in any other sport, because of the expensive maintenance involved. It is obvious then, that very few people can make it to the top of the sport, with the pinnacle of dressage being representing one’s country in the Olympics. An Olympic dressage team only has four riders, and with the grand event occurring only once in four years, the calculation comes down to just 100 riders getting the chance to be considered successful in the sport.

Therefore, a rider like Michael Barisone is naturally held in high regard in the sport, for having been a part of the US Dressage team in the 2008 Olympics. Although Michael was a reserve rider in the team, which was incidentally also disqualified from the competition because of doping charges, he built a reputation as an extremely skilled rider in later years. His specialization also lies in training horses, and so Michael made it his profession to train other people’s horses for dressage. Being a dressage trainer also meant that he had to often work closely with the riders themselves, who would generally send in their horses earlier, and this was exactly how he first met Lauren Kanarek. A young woman from New Jersey who had realized at the mere age of 5 that she wanted to ride horses professionally, Lauren Kanarek jumped at the chance of training under the revered Michael Barisone when such an opportunity presented itself in 2018.

To the determined Lauren, anything other than moving into Michael’s sprawling estate of Hawthorne Hill in Long Valley, New Jersey, would have been a half-hearted effort, which she earnestly wanted to avoid. Therefore, she moved into an apartment on the property with her partner, Rob Goodwin, also a horse groomer by profession. Lauren’s father, Jonathan, was also closely involved, as he wanted to support his daughter’s ambitions in every possible way, and he was the one paying Michael for his services. Soon, training of all kinds began for Lauren, and she thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Almost 8 years later, Lauren does not really have much to say against Michael’s skills and coaching style at present, although the situation is very different on the other side. Michael almost testifies to how bad and untalented Lauren actually was, describing her as a 9-year-old in Little League in baseball terms, compared to himself being like someone with experience playing in the MLB World Series. But it is obvious that his assessment of the woman is very much based on the terrible incidents that followed between the two of them.

Why did Michael and Lauren’s relationship turn sour?

The only problem that Lauren can remember facing at Michael Barisone’s training camp was the almost maddening obsession that he and his trainers had with regards to representing the USA in the Olympics. Michael was very clear about his goal—he wanted to create skilled riders who would make it into the US Olympics team in the sport. But Michael started having problems with Lauren, particularly with her conduct, after one of his trainers let her ride one of his most-prized horses, JT. It is a fairly common practice in the sport to let trainee riders sometimes experience the best of horses, in order to inspire them to train better and reach the top level. Lauren was naturally overjoyed by the experience, and she found herself to be in sync with JT, immediately falling in love with the horse. In the weeks that followed, Lauren kept training with JT, and then started entering competitions with the horse as well. Being a mostly novice rider, she could not win any of these competitions with JT, and Michael was irked by this entire development.

Firstly, Michael felt that JT was one of his best horses, and Lauren did not deserve to even train with him, let alone enter competitions riding him. His assessment that Lauren was still not ready to control such a fierce and temperamental horse was evident from her performances in the competitions, and he was further frustrated at how she was basically devaluing the horse’s record, which would affect the price he would get while selling him. Therefore, Michael quickly stepped in and stopped Lauren from entering competitions with JT, following which he claimed that he needed to sell off the horse, as he was going through a divorce from his wife. Lauren and her father were ready to make the move to buy JT, and a sale did go through, with Michael receiving 20,000 dollars for the animal. 8 years later, Michael now claims to have been threatened, bullied and cornered into making the sale by Lauren and Jonathan, who seemed eager to pick a fight with him from this very time.

Soon afterwards, Lauren started having clashes with Michael’s girlfriend at the time, Mary Haskins, who was also a rider and trainer at the facility, and whom Lauren felt to be absolutely undeserving of the position. Things only got worse from here on, as Michael started threatening to not just evict Lauren from his training camp, but also to have her banned from professional dressage as well. On the other side, Lauren started writing rants on her Facebook account, indirectly addressed to Michael and Mary, threatening to take them down and burn down their farm. Eventually, Lauren sought help from SafeSport, an NGO set up to curb malpractice, especially sexual exploitation of minors in Olympic sports. Although she apparently filed her complaint against Michael only mentioning how she was being threatened, the CPS got involved because SafeSport usually handles situations surrounding children in danger. 

On the 7th of August, 2019, a CPS agent showed up at Hawthorne Hill to investigate whether Michael Barisone was sexually abusing the two children of his girlfriend, Mary Haskins, who were living at the property at the time, and this was enough to drive him into a fit of rage. Using a handgun that a friend had kept at his office for safekeeping, Michael shot Lauren Kanarek twice, before firing at her partner, Rob Goodwin, but missing. Although both Lauren and Michael sustained serious injuries, the latter from the tussle that followed, and had to be rushed to the hospital, both survived, and a criminal case began.

Is Lauren Kanarek the helpless victim?

Lauren Kanarek presented herself as a helpless victim during the investigation and trial, and she hasn’t changed her story to this day. But in all honesty, she did a number of things to push Michael beyond all limits. It all began with Lauren’s cryptic Facebook posts, which were so long that the printed versions of all of them presented in court crossed 300 pages. She often used analogies and metaphors to speak ill of Michael and Mary indirectly, without ever taking their names, and would also threaten to destroy their lives in every way possible. When Michael was seemingly unbothered by these antics, Lauren apparently started climbing on trees and going out on his property in the middle of the night just to spook them. Since she kept mentioning ‘burning the farm down’ in her Facebook posts, Michael feared that she might literally do so and kill his entire family in the process. 

Eventually, Lauren supposedly felt that Michael was so dangerous that he might do anything to her, and this is why she bugged his house to listen in on his conversations and stay one step ahead of him. She and her father also wanted to gather evidence they could produce for the authorities once Michael ended up doing something dangerous to them. We are not given any concrete idea about how the bugging had actually been done. According to Lauren, she did try to alert the authorities about the situation a number of times, but to no avail. On the other side, Michael started suffering from anxiety and extreme fear that Lauren would physically hurt him. The fact that she specifically sought help from SafeSport, an organization that mostly works against sexual predators, also seems fishy. 

In the Netflix documentary, Lauren says that the operator whom she had been speaking to while filing her complaint kept asking her whether any minors were being abused by Michael. She nonchalantly states that she did not understand why such a question was being asked, and she had simply brushed past the topic to talk about her own woes. But given her desperate and entitled nature, Lauren Kanarek could have very well made SafeSport send a CPS worker to Michael’s home with some false allegations, in an ultimate threat to ruin his reputation forever. Although it was just a routine CPS check without any concrete allegations filed against Michael, it was, after all, enough to make the man believe that Lauren could destroy his life. Don’t get me wrong, Lauren definitely did not deserve to get shot at by a man almost thrice her age, but it is not like she had not done anything suspicious either.

Can Michael Barisone’s actions really be justified?

But no matter whatever Lauren had done to instigate Michael and make him feel threatened in his home, his decision to go ahead and shoot her can never really be justified. Firstly, Lauren had not yet done anything to actually put him or his family in danger, other than the CPS officer’s visit, which could have been unintentional on her part. Moreover, it was not like Michael had not threatened to have her barred from all equestrian sports either, and he did try to take advantage of all his supposedly powerful friends and contacts in positions of influence to hamper Lauren’s career. I must also add that the whole fiasco seems to have begun with Michael being unwilling to let Lauren ride his fancy horse, which comes off as a very petty and childish thing to fight over. Yet, this very immature fight took such a nasty shape that it led to Michael shooting at his student. His previous attempts to jeopardize Lauren’s career had failed, as he did alert the police as well as multiple dressage organizations about what he believed was a scenario in which he was being held hostage inside his own home. Either he simply did not have any substantial proof to get Lauren banned from the sport, or Michael was not really that well-connected, after all. Throughout the Netflix interview, Michael seems like a thorough man who is confident about his next moves, and then conveniently switches to being timid and submissive whenever the shooting is mentioned, which makes him look all the more cunning and manipulative.

Was justice finally served in the Michael Barisone-Lauren Kanarek case?

At the end of the day, the Michael Barisone-Lauren Kanarek case was simply a clash between two egoistic individuals who wanted to dominate the other and ended up getting into a horrific situation. In the court trial that followed, Michael’s lawyers prepared for an insanity defense, which means they wanted to prove to the jury that the man was mentally unstable when he made the decision to shoot the gun. Their argument was that the months of online and offline abuse and harassment that Michael was subjected to at the hands of Lauren and her father had driven him to insanity, and made him delusional about her coming to destroy his career and kill him. He had apparently stopped eating and sleeping normally in the weeks before the incident, and then when a CPS officer came to investigate him, his mania got the better of him, and Michael Barisone shot his student. 

Throughout the trial, Michael kept claiming that he had absolutely no recollection of the shooting, and he maintains the same to this day. The prosecution, on the other hand, fought back with counter-arguments that none of Lauren’s actions had been so severe or damning that they would make an adult man take up arms and shoot her in retaliation. They also pointed at how Michael was being projected as a helpless old man while in reality he was mentally fit enough to provide crucial details about the months of fighting that had preceded the horrific incident. It was also extremely convenient that he could remember everything before and after the shooting, but was unable to recollect anything from the exact time of his crime. To top it all off, Michael was clearly made to appear more sick, more insane, and out of his mind during the trial, simply in order to garner sympathy. Ultimately, the cheap trick worked, and the jury found Michael Barisone not guilty of attempted murder, by reason of insanity. He was sent to spend a year in a mental health institution, where doctors concluded that he was completely fit, and thus he was released as a free man.

Yes, Lauren Kanarek had made numerous egoistic decisions and mistakes which would be irritating to anyone standing against her. Even during the trial, she did admit to having indirectly posted her thoughts about wanting to destroy and kill Michael and his family on Facebook, which could have played a crucial role in the jury’s decision. As I see it, the optics mattered a lot during the trial, with Michael’s narrative of him having once been an Olympian who had represented the country to his reputation being dragged into the mud overtrumping Lauren’s straight and ‘honest’ approach. Since there was nothing too incriminating against the individuals on either side, the jury ruled in favor of Michael Barisone. However, I cannot help but wonder whether the jury’s decision actually set a horrible precedent for law and order in the country, as someone who had literally shot someone (arguably) with the intent to kill had been set free. The only true justice in the case, it seems, came a few years later, when Michael Barisone was handed a lifetime ban from dressage by SafeSport, while Lauren Kanarek continues to pursue her dream of becoming a successful dressage rider even now.

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