The story of Baby Reindeer is getting more unwieldy by the day. The wildly popular Netflix show has been watched by almost 60 million people since it premiered last month. The series, starring Richard Gadd and adapted from his one-man show of the same name, tells the story of what Gadd purports to be his real-life experience with a stalker. On the show, Gadd’s character becomes the object of obsession for a woman named Martha, who proceeds to send him 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, 350 hours of voice-mails, 106 letters, and 46 Facebook messages. Now, Fiona Harvey is coming forward and claiming to be the real Martha. She’s also threatening to sue both Gadd and Netflix.
Harvey’s identity became public after internet sleuths found old tweets of hers that corresponded to ones that appeared onscreen in the episodes and pieced together that she was the real Martha. Gadd had tried to prevent this from happening, telling British GQ, “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
When fans started trying to identify Martha, Gadd asked them to stop. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show,” he wrote in an Instagram Story. Alas, it was too little too late.
In her first public appearance, Harvey appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show and claimed that she was the real victim of Baby Reindeer. She asserted that she never stalked Gadd, and that she certainly never sent him such a high volume of correspondence.
“That’s simply not true. If somebody was sending somebody 41,000 emails or something, they’d be doing how many a day? Lots,” she told Morgan. She conceded that she sent “a couple of emails” but never any texts or Facebook messages. When pressed by Morgan, she did admit that she had tweeted at Gadd around 18 times.
At the end of the show (spoiler, if you’re one of the five people who haven’t watched), Martha is sentenced to nine months in jail for stalking. Harvey denied that this ever happened, saying that she has never even been charged with a crime.
“That is completely untrue; very, very defamatory to me; very career damaging,” she said. Elsewhere in the interview, Harvey claimed that both Gadd and Netflix are “lying” by calling Baby Reindeer a true story.
According to the Daily Record, Harvey was paid £250 for her interview. She told the Scottish tabloid that she did not feel great after the interview. “I have my own thoughts on it that I’d like to keep to myself, but I wouldn’t say I was happy,” she said. “It seemed to me that I was set up. I feel a bit used.”
