With its 60 million views and worldwide acclaim, it would be easy to imagine Baby Reindeer’s creator Richard Gadd must be celebrating his good fortune. But the comedian wore a decidedly pensive expression when he was spotted walking along a North London street earlier this week.
Perhaps a month’s worth of raging controversy is taking its toll.
The seven-part mini-series based on his experiences of being stalked, in which he plays the lead role of Donny Dunn, has brought 35-year-old Gadd overnight fame, fortune… and, now, a lot of potential trouble.
For the next instalment in this all-too-real saga threatens to eclipse even the original story.
In past interviews, Gadd has said that the episode with his stalker — whom he has never named — was ‘resolved’ and that ‘the situation… with the person who stalked me is certainly over’.
So maybe he hoped Fiona Harvey, who has outed herself as the true-life inspiration for stalker ‘Martha’, would melt away.
Fiona Harvey, who has outed herself as the true-life inspiration for Baby Reindeer’s stalker ‘Martha’, has hired a top lawyer who claims she has never been charged with a crime
The 58-year-old appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored to contest the way she has been portrayed in the global hit show
If so, then he has not been paying attention to his own script because the situation now appears the opposite of resolved.
Not only is Ms Harvey, 58, going nowhere, she is fired up with rage and indignation and poised for revenge — having secured the help of a top-flight lawyer.
Despite Gadd and Netflix’s insistence that the storyline does not reveal the stalker’s true identity — Gadd previously claimed to have disguised his stalker’s identity to such an extent that he said, ‘I don’t think she would recognise herself’ — Ms Harvey was quickly exposed by online sleuths and says she has suffered death threats and abuse from internet trolls.
The fallout has raised serious questions about whether Netflix’s compliance procedures were adequate, especially in the light of what she claims are serious factual inaccuracies.
Over four and a half years, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages from his stalker.
In an interview, the comedian has said: ‘I felt a great deal of empathy for the real-life Martha. I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.’
Comedian and Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd, 35, pictured with a friend in London this week, is gearing himself up for a legal battle with Fiona Harvey – despite saying that ‘the situation… with the person who stalked me is certainly over’
But a powerful scene in Baby Reindeer portrays Martha tearfully pleading guilty in the dock, and being jailed for nine months. Ms Harvey insists this is a defamatory and devastating fabrication.
Yesterday Ms Harvey’s lawyer Chris Daw KC, a leading barrister, told the Mail: ‘Fiona states that she has never been charged with any crime, let alone pleaded guilty and served a prison sentence, as suggested in Baby Reindeer.
‘She maintains that this is complete fiction. I have not seen anything from Gadd or Netflix to support this part of the plot of Baby Reindeer. The serious harm done to Fiona, if this key part of the plot turns out to be fiction, should be obvious to anyone.’
A key issue is that Baby Reindeer, which has held the number one spot in the streaming giant’s charts since its launch in April, begins with the words: ‘This is a true story’ — not ‘based on a true story’ or ‘inspired by real events’.
In the Netflix press release, Gadd himself declared: ‘It’s a true story.’
He subsequently appeared to row back on this claim in an interview with GQ magazine in which he said the story was ‘pretty truthful’ and ’emotionally truthful’ and that it ‘never moved too far from the truth’.
And — while the show garnered rave reviews and praise over how he portrayed the trauma of being stalked — he has repeatedly urged viewers not to identify the woman who made his life hell, saying: ‘If I wanted the real life people to be found, I would’ve made it a documentary.’
But, either through oversight or lack of imagination, the drama is replete with clues.
Written by Gadd, Baby Reindeer depicts Martha as a chubby, middle-aged, curly-haired, Scottish, self-proclaimed successful lawyer obsessively stalking barman-cum-struggling stand-up comedian Donny.
Online sleuths pointed to Ms Harvey’s physical resemblance to ‘Martha’, the fact she also says she is a lawyer, tweets sent under her name a decade ago — written with the same fruity language as used on TV — and to newspaper headlines about a previous stalking victim that the Netflix show barely changed.
Not to mention that Gadd himself spent time as a barman, at The Hawley Arms in North London, where Ms Harvey admits they did cross paths.
Mr Gadd stands behind the bar during the Netflix drama as he meets ‘Martha’ – the character based off of Ms Harvey and played by Jessica Gunning
Mr Daw, from Lincoln House Chambers, said: ‘If you’re telling the whole world something’s a true story, it’s no good to then say in media interviews, ‘Oh, don’t treat it as a true story, it’s all kind of made up’.
‘Both [Gadd] and Netflix, in my view, have made the mistake of trying to ride two horses at once — both getting the benefit of a true story, which we all know increases viewing figures, but at the same time trying to avoid the consequences potentially of portraying someone in a completely inaccurate and defamatory way.
‘There is absolutely no defence to say, ‘we didn’t mean it to be a literal truth, we meant it to be an emotional truth’. From a legal point of view, that’s absolute nonsense.’ He said Ms Harvey had yet to formally instruct solicitors, adding: ‘I am building a team to consider what claims Fiona may have against Gadd, Clerkenwell Films and Netflix, arising from the use of her image, defamation and any other potential claims.’
Last week Netflix — previously under fire over made-up sequences in Royal Family drama The Crown — was dragged over the coals in Parliament regarding the show’s duty of care to those portrayed in Baby Reindeer.
Its policy chief Benjamin King doubled down during a hearing of the media select committee, telling MPs: ‘Baby Reindeer is an extraordinary story and it is obviously a true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist Richard Gadd suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker.’ He insisted Netflix and Clerkenwell Films — the production company behind the show — had taken ‘every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story’.
In the TV industry, there is much smugness that Netflix has found itself accused of messing up its ‘compliance’, under which executives are supposed to maintain a duty of care to people depicted on screen. Ms Harvey says she was never contacted by the filmmakers.
One TV insider said ‘jaws were dropping’ at the ‘mega compliance failure’, adding that the BBC and its belt-and-braces compliance department would never have let the show air if it was so easy for Ms Harvey to be found and targeted.
In fact, Clerkenwell Films, the production company, is owned by BBC Studios, which makes many top programmes for the corporation. BBC Studios is part of the BBC’s commercial wing and does not spend public money. Neither Clerkenwell nor Gadd have commented directly about claims they made it too easy to identify Ms Harvey. As the possibility appears to grow of a legal claim being brought by her, that may be a wise move.
Ms Harvey’s ‘role’ in Baby Reindeer has been such a ‘mega compliance failure’ that is has ‘dropped jaws’ in the TV business
One thing is clear, many of those who have become involved with the Baby Reindeer story have found themselves rapidly out of favour with Ms Harvey.
‘The Daily Mail was one of the first publications to speak to her when we met her at her London flat. The newspaper did not name her. As well as insisting it was she who was the stalking victim, she told us: ‘The suggestion I’m a serial stalker is a load of rubbish, a figment of Richard Gadd’s imagination.’ She added: ‘And do you think he’s bonny, with his big nose? I never fancied him. He was 23, I was about 47.’
She raged about her depiction in Baby Reindeer, shockingly declaring that the actress Jessica Gunning who plays Martha ‘sort of looks like me after I put on four stone in lockdown, but I’m not actually unattractive. Not like that fat cow who’s apparently 60 stone. She’s a fat, ugly twerp.’
After her Mail interview, Ms Harvey took to social media to complain about how it was written.
Then last week she gave an interview to Piers Morgan on his YouTube channel — in the process identifying herself — to complain Baby Reindeer had been ‘quite horrifying’, saying: ‘Some of the death threats have been really terrible online. People phoning me up. It’s been absolutely horrendous.’ She said she was ‘being bullied for fame’.
She said she went on Morgan’s show because she trusted him to give her a fair hearing. But afterwards, Ms Harvey, from Stirlingshire, turned sour on Morgan too, telling Scottish newspaper the Daily Record that the broadcaster ‘feels sorry for no one’. She said: ‘His staff were being so nice and saying everything was OK but when I went in to meet him he could barely look at me. It was all a big act.
‘He didn’t even say goodbye and only got the photograph taken with me because he needed it for the publicity.’
She claimed she had been offered only £250 for the interview and added: ‘I have not signed a contract for the interview and I will be seeking far more than a piddling £250. I’d settle for a million.’
In response, when Morgan was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Media Show, he did not deny the £250 offer but said his show had also funded a nice haircut and a car from her home. He said: ‘She is not going to get a million pounds from me. She was perfectly happy with the agreed sum.’
Morgan has endured plenty of brickbats from critics who claimed his interview was unethical because Ms Harvey could be mentally ill. He said: ‘I didn’t believe a lot of what she was saying, but that doesn’t make her mentally vulnerable or mentally ill… she doesn’t see herself as vulnerable.’ He said she was entitled to have her say about the truth or otherwise of the Netflix drama.
He added: ‘If you accuse someone of being a convicted stalker and they are not, that is a pretty serious claim to make.
‘I think they’ve got problems here because she clearly is determined to have her day in court with Netflix. She is emphatic there was no court case, no conviction and no pleading guilty, nothing that led to any apparent conviction.
Ms Harvey battles to clear her name on YouTube after Netflix watchers uncovered her identity soon after the show was released
‘There’s a big difference between being obsessive, or even harassing him, but if you do not cross the bar of a crime, then to call them — in a series in which they have been immediately identified — a convicted criminal is a serious failure by Netflix.
‘In nearly a month, nobody has found any evidence that she has a criminal record.’
Meanwhile SNP MP John Nicolson has asked Netflix to provide evidence that the woman who inspired Martha is a ‘convicted stalker’.
Gadd, Clerkenwell Films and Netflix were approached for comment but did not respond.
And what next for Gadd — who lays bare his own mental health problems in the drama? Few doubt that the comedian’s account of his experiences at the hands of his real-life stalker would be anything other than terrifying.
In an interview just before Baby Reindeer aired on Netflix, he said of such a personal drama: ‘It’s just a big exposing time — but I’m well up for the ride.’
But after the dark twists and turns of the past few weeks, and the threat of a legal drama to come, one wonders if he’s enjoying the journey now.