The woman who claims Netflix hit show Baby Reindeer’s stalker “Martha” was based on her has scored a major legal victory over the streaming service.
Fiona Harvey is suing Netflix for $170 million in damages, claiming her life has been ruined by people connecting her to “Martha,” who stalks and sexually assaults failing comedian “Donny Dunn.” “Dunn” is played by the show’s creator Richard Gadd—who says that “Martha” was inspired by his real-life experience of being obsessively stalked by a woman 20 years his senior. The show opens by saying “This is a true story.”
In real life, Harvey says she is a Scottish lawyer 20 years older than Gadd who met him in a London pub where he worked while he was a failing comedian, asked him to “hang my curtains,” then pursued him obsessively with direct messages and emails littered with spelling errors which called him “Baby Reindeer”—an almost exact parallel to the show. But Harvey claims the show wrongly portrays her as a convicted stalker who served time in prison, stalked a police officer, both sexually and physically assaulted Gadd and sat outside his home 16 hours a day.
After the show launched she went public to say she believed she was “Martha.”
Despite living in the UK she turned to courts in America to pursue the case, opening up the possibility of a much larger compensation payment. The show was a major worldwide hit for Netflix and this month won its creator, Gadd, two Emmys.
On Friday Harvey scored her first victory, when a federal judge in California ruled against Netflix’s bid to have the case thrown out.
The opening of Baby Reindeer says “This is a true story,” then shows “Martha” meeting “Donnie Dunn” in a London pub, just like what happened in real life.
Ed Miller/Netflix
The streamer had claimed no “reasonable person” could conclude that “Martha” was Harvey but Judge Gary Klausner dismissed its claim. Critically, he ruled that portraying “Martha” as being twice convicted when Harvey was not, as well as a violent sexual assaulter, could open Netflix up to a reasonable chance of losing a defamation case. Netflix had used expert evidence from an English lawyer to claim that Harvey’s own conduct towards Gadd could have resulted in a five-year prison term. But in real life, Harvey had been warned by police in London against stalking Gadd, but never arrested, charged or convicted.
And Gadd himself had called the series “emotionally true” in a written court statement.
The judge also ruled that Netflix had portrayed Harvey as committing sexual assault on Gadd because of a scene in which “Martha” rubbed “Dunn’s” crotch, which Netflix has claimed was “inappropriate touching.”
Netflix had also claimed that the dramatic portrayal of the stalking meant it was obvious it was not factual, but the judge also dismissed that claim. And Harvey highlighted that when Gadd first performed a play based on his experience, he described it as “Based on a true story”— but when Netflix turned it into the hit show, it said “This is a true story.”
Harvey now faces the next round in the case, which will be to show that Netflix actually defamed her—which experts warn could be a tougher battle given that she admits in the legal documents to stalking Gadd.
Gadd plays the stalked failing comedian “Donny Dunn” in the show but the parallels with his own life are so close that Netflix lost the first round of the landmark case brought by the woman who stalked Gadd in real life.
Ed Miller/Netflix
The case is a landmark for television and movies which have long based shows on real-life experiences. But Baby Reindeer was unusually close to the real-life experience of Gadd, and Harvey’s U.S. lawyers had seized on comments he made in interviews publicizing the show that he “disguised” his stalker as “Martha” rather than using his own experience as the basis for fiction.
Netflix did succeed in having parts of Harvey’s claims dismissed by the judge, which would limit potential damages if she won to under the $170 million she has claimed.