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One evening in July 2021, 22-year-old Jennifer Burns—“Jenna” to her friends and family—was sitting in a Walmart parking lot in Clemson, South Carolina, when a flurry of email notifications appeared on her phone. Jenna, a mechanical engineering undergraduate at the city’s university who’d been shopping for a simple dinner with her roommate, remembers thinking the timing was “weird”—it was after work hours after all. Then she noticed the source: a DNA site she’d subscribed to several years earlier. “A new DNA relative has sent you a message,” one notification read. “At that point I’m kind of freaking out,” she remembers. It could only mean one thing.
Jenna was born Maria Mashinka in the grim Russian industrial city of Nizhniy Novgorod and given up for adoption as an infant. When Jenna’s American adoptive mother Marybeth was young, she had always prayed for the children behind the Iron Curtain, and the impact of those prayers resonated. In 2000, she and her husband, Chris, were approved to adopt two Russian babies, and though they planned on bringing only one home, a boy they called Ethan, at the last moment they added Jenna. Jenna and Ethan were raised practically as twins in rural North Carolina, a childhood that, by Jenna’s account, was a typical all-American small-town idyll.
“I was the only girl in my neighborhood,” Jenna remembers, “so I grew up playing a lot of sports with boys, because that’s what I had to do if I wanted any friends at all. And we were a very outdoorsy family—a lot of camping and hiking and fishing and canoeing and kayaking. We were outside every weekend. It was very happy.”
All the while Jenna was idly curious about her Russian birth parents—enough so that as a teenager she registered with an online DNA service—but she was never especially interested in Russian culture and history. “I never thought it would be a possibility to meet my biological family, so I kind of thought, Why bother? In a way that was me protecting myself. There were some insecurities, which is quite common with adopted kids.”
Russian adoption law, meanwhile, made it more or less impossible for any Russian relatives to track Jenna down. And yet, in 2019, Jenna was notified of a match via the DNA service she’d subscribed to, and after some internet sleuthing she discovered that she had a half sister with a very public profile. She sent a message through the site, mentioning her birthplace and name. “Basically I just said, ‘I’m doing well. I hope you’re doing well too.’ ” Jenna recalls. “You don’t even have to reply to this message. I just wanted to let you know that I’m fine, if you’ve been wondering, and I hope you are too.”
When there was no reply, Jenna assumed that that was the end of it.
Natalia Vodianova—“Supernova” as she was dubbed at the height of her runway and print celebrity—began her modeling career in Nizhniy at 16, soon after a boyfriend introduced her to a local modeling academy. Scouts told her she could go to Paris but would need to learn English in three months. Revealing the steely drive that would steer her through life, Natalia did exactly that. Anything would be better than toiling away at her mother’s fruit and vegetable stand. “I had nothing to lose,” she told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2003. “Only something better could happen to me.”
In Paris, she was borne by her Cinderella story and the celestial beauty that would see her cast as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Annie Leibovitz’s legendary December 2003 Vogue portfolio. Her preternatural elegance and composure veiled any thought of a complicated history.
Motherhood and a first marriage to the artist Justin Portman, scion of the aristocratic British dynasty, which owns swaths of prime central London real estate, was to follow. At 19, Natalia was pregnant with Lucas (now 20 and studying modern culture and media at Brown), and the following year, 2002, Portman and Vodianova wed “in a three-day extravaganza,” wrote Vogue, in St. Petersburg. Natalia was dressed by Tom Ford, whose stellar Yves Saint Laurent fall 2002 show she had opened and closed. Soon after—her modeling star in ascendancy—Natalia (whose family with Portman would come to include daughter Neva, now 16, and second son Viktor, 15) signed a contract with Calvin Klein, providing a new level of financial security that allowed her to arrange nursing care and housing for her severely autistic younger sister Oksana and her mother, Larisa. “She’s my baby,” said Natalia of her mother, then only 39. “I want to spoil her now, make sure she’s happy. She’s had such a hard-core life.”
“Natalia Vodianova’s story is so romantic,” wrote Vogue in 2003, “she’s already a girl on the brink of legend…the heroine of a magical Russian rags-to-riches fairy tale.” Natalia had revealed just enough of her hardscrabble life to fuel the myth: At the age of 11, she recalled, “I used to carry tens and tens of [fruit] boxes, each of which weighed 30 kilos, without even thinking it was heavy!” She was known for her hard-bargaining techniques: To avoid being cheated by suppliers she would bring her own scales to establish the correct weights.
In 2004, Natalia applied her influence and determination toward the launch of a charity, the Naked Heart Foundation, a response to her country’s entrenched attitudes toward people like her sister Oksana with disabilities. “The Soviet Union wanted to present itself as a nation of healthy individuals,” the charity’s website notes, “and those with disabilities were hidden away behind closed doors and high fences. The Naked Heart Foundation aims to reverse this horrible legacy.” The organization supports families that choose to look after their disabled children at home, and builds playgrounds across Russia and former Soviet countries, in areas that need them, beginning in Nizhniy itself.
Portman and Vodianova divorced in 2011, and in 2020 Natalia married businessman Antoine Arnault, the elegantly willowy son of Bernard Arnault with whom she has sons Maxim, eight, and Roman, six. On a balmy day in the parkland of the pretty village outside Paris where Natalia and her family decamp for weekends, and with a bodyguard shadowing us from a discreet distance, Natalia shared the complicated history that led to the adoption of her half sister Jenna, whom she remembers only as baby Masha.
“My mom had quite a series of very unhappy relationships, starting with my father,” she explained. They married when Natalia’s mother Larisa was 19. Army service was mandatory at the time, with few exceptions, and so Natalia’s father was called up when she was a baby—and the marriage didn’t last. Nor did a second romantic entanglement—with a man who would be the love of Larisa’s life, according to Natalia—that produced a second daughter, Oksana, born with severe developmental issues. Soon Larisa and daughters found themselves, as Natalia recalls, “in a little 20-meter room with nothing.” Her mother acquired furniture on credit and “worked really, really hard,” even as Natalia assumed many responsibilities at home and later on, at that market stall.
As Natalia grew up there were further tumultuous relationships for Larisa—a summer fling on holiday in Ukraine with a mentally abusive younger man, and, briefly, a return of Oksana’s father, still Larisa’s true love, which produced Natalia’s sister Kristina. Natalia was 14. “Love is a crazy, crazy thing,” she says of this period. And so it proved when, a few years later, “Prince Charming comes along—this perfect guy,” the brother of one of Larisa’s friends, “and he sweeps her off her feet,” Natalia says. “He’s a gentleman. He seems so serious. He’s so kind to us, and after six months they’re together.” He asked Natalia to call him Dad. “My mom is shining,” she remembers. Larisa, then 36, was soon expecting her fourth child. “I guess the lack of sexual education in [the] Soviet Union as well played its part,” notes Natalia wryly.
It would, however, prove to be another unhappy love affair, and a financially ruinous one for Larisa, even as she became pregnant with her fourth child. The relationship left her with a debt that forced her to turn to the local mafia to borrow money at extortionate terms. “By the time she’s eight months pregnant, we have to have this tough conversation,” says Natalia, then a 16-year-old having to grow up fast. “I told her, ‘You absolutely cannot bring another child into this situation.’ ” And so the decision was made to put the baby—who would be called Masha—up for adoption, through state channels. “I have always taken responsibility for that decision, maybe even more than I have admitted to myself,” Natalia explains quietly. However, “by the time Masha was born, there was no question that it was the right decision,” she adds, recalling that the mafia’s tactics were becoming ever more intimidating. There was an excruciating grace period in which Larisa could have reversed her decision and decided to keep her newborn. “They called us and they were like, ‘She’s such a good baby, she never cries, she’s so beautiful, are you sure you want to go ahead with this?’ And I remember saying to my mom, ‘There is a queue of parents who want this child. She’s going to be loved, she’s going to have a much better life than with us.’ ” Natalia went to see her infant sister for the first, and as she thought, the last time. She put her hand through the bars of the cot, “and she caught my finger and she just wouldn’t let go. She already was such a fighter. And in that moment, that very irrational, emotional moment, I said to her, ‘I promise we’ll see each other again.’ ”
Natalia arrived in Paris in November of 1999 as Jenna’s adoption was under way. “As soon as I was even a little successful and felt safe,” Natalia recalls, “I came back to look for her, but she was gone. I even hired a private detective to try to crack the system. Nobody was giving us information.”
For Natalia the years that followed were haunted by a “nightmare of thinking, What if Masha is with the wrong family? As things got better for me, and loving my own children, I just thought, What if she’s unloved? When you have your children, you understand how precious it is.”
It was in 2016 that Natalia first took a DNA test. The website she used sent her monthly updates about potential relatives. “Everybody was doing it and it seemed fun,” she recalls. “I had very little hope of finding anything. For a while I looked at the monthly emails thinking, Who knows? But then it just became too painful.” And so she stopped looking altogether—and fatefully missed the emails, in 2019, from Jenna.
It was half sister Kristina who made the connection. Kristina too had registered with the DNA site, and in 2021 had been notified of a half sister match. Was this Natalia under an assumed name and age? Kristina contacted her to ask, but no, this was another sibling altogether—and so the discovery was made. Natalia and Kristina immediately sent a flurry of emails to Jenna. “I’ve been looking for you forever,” read Natalia’s.
Jenna thinks back to that day in the Walmart parking lot. “I was happy, obviously, and I was also in shock,” she recalls. “My mind was racing. I tried to go grocery shopping and I forgot half of the things I was supposed to buy, I was so distracted.”
A correspondence began, tentatively, at first, on Jenna’s side. But with time, her confidence grew and eventually Jenna felt ready for a video call with Natalia. “I blew off class,” Jenna remembers. “And I was quite nervous…I don’t know what I had expected her to be. I think maybe the stereotypical ‘supermodel,’ but she was quite natural, and easy to talk to.” They spoke for almost three hours, Natalia asking lots of questions about Jenna’s childhood, and sharing some details of the complicated circumstances leading up to Jenna’s adoption. Natalia was electrified by Jenna’s physical resemblance to their mother—stronger than any of the other sisters.
Jenna told her American parents, Marybeth and Chris—who, she says, were shocked, amazed, but wholly supportive—and the half sisters continued to correspond back and forth. Eventually, Natalia suggested that Jenna visit her in Paris, with her brother Ethan. It would be Jenna’s first trip to Europe and her first in-person meeting with Natalia. “We hugged for a long time in the airport,” Jenna remembers.
“It was a lot,” she goes on, recalling her immersion into Natalia’s family life, including meeting Kristina, who was there for the visit. Ethan “was brilliant. He knew exactly when to kind of step back and maybe let me have a moment with my sisters. And then he knew exactly when to step in and be with all of us.” They all visited museums and tourist attractions and the creme of the city’s restaurants, and Jenna found she had a special connection with Kristina, only two years older. “She’s a doctor of paintings,” says Natalia proudly of Kristina, whom she brought to London to be educated at the age of 11 and who has just received her master’s in restoration at the University of Amsterdam. “They’re the two nerds, and I’ve never been to university.”
The second week of the Paris trip, as Jenna recalls, “was a little more serious. That’s when I met my mom for the first time.”
Larisa speaks no English, and Jenna didn’t speak any Russian (she is learning the language now and has just mastered reading the Russian alphabet). “I was quite an anxious mess,” says Jenna, “but it went about as well as it could go. It was a very intimate moment, the first time we met. Natalia and Kristina were translating between the two of us. Everyone was kind of in shock. She just was looking at me and holding me.”
“I had never seen Mom more peaceful,” says Natalia. Larisa had ended up marrying the father of Oksana and Kristina, even though it would prove “a very turbulent relationship,” Natalia says. He died in 2021, and Larisa lost her Ukrainian-born mother that same year. “But finding Jenna brought her so much peace,” Natalia says. “I couldn’t recognize her. She has been like a dark cloud for the majority of her life, and now she was sunshine.”
Exactly a year after Jenna received those first emails from Natalia and Kristina, she is joining them in the rambling turn-of-the-century house in a seaside enclave in Connecticut, where Antoine and Natalia and their extended families spend the summer, and Annie Leibovitz has come to capture the moment.
“Natalia’s just in such a different phase of life than I am,” Jenna tells me. With her mechanical engineering degree, she has recently joined a construction company in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I just graduated university. I’m starting my first job. And she’s been working, and a mother of five children. But I think our personalities go very well together. She says things and I’m like, Oh my gosh—that is so something I would say. It’s nice that we finally have made our connection and we’ve closed that chapter of uncertainty, and we know we’re both okay. It’s going to be exciting to move forward with it.”
“For me,” says Natalia when she comes to join us on the porch. “I felt she has always been part of my life, even if I didn’t know her. But it was in a quite painful way, always wondering if she was okay. I just feel that we are catching up very quickly. Feels like family. There’s something beautiful about genetics and our genes. Love comes very naturally. And thank God for technology because we would never have found each other. What are the odds?”
I admire Jenna’s remarkable grape-colored eyes. “I grew them myself,” she says with a laugh, and then, suddenly curious, turns to Natalia. “Were his eyes green?” she asks, meaning her father. “They were,” Natalia tells her. “Isn’t it an incredible color?”
Soon after the shoot, Natalia planned to head to North Carolina to meet Jenna’s parents. Jenna promises to show her lots of family videos documenting her childhood.
“You’re going to cry,” she tells her sister.
“I’m ready,” says Natalia. “Happy tears.”