Internet sleuths tracked her down after watching Baby Reindeer and now Fiona Harvey’s criminal record—or seemingly lack thereof—has been the topic of conversation. The “real Martha” said she was forced to defend herself after receiving death threats.
Comedian and actor Richard Gadd conceptualized Baby Reindeer after a woman sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours’ worth of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, and a variety of weird gifts, including a reindeer toy, sleeping pills, a woolly hat and boxer shorts over the course of four years. It began as a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe and it got picked up by Netflix began and Gadd as a fictionalized version of himself named Donny Dunn. The show explores his traumas and how the situation affected his career and personal life.
“Stalking on television tends to be very sexed-up. It has a mystique,” Gadd told Netflix’s Tudum. It’s somebody in a dark alleyway. It’s somebody who’s really sexy, who’s very normal, but then they go strange bit by bit,” Gadd explains. “But stalking is a mental illness. I really wanted to show the layers of stalking with a human quality I hadn’t seen on television before. It’s a stalker story turned on its head. It takes a trope and turns it on its head.”
While Gadd never named the people his characters are based on, it didn’t take long for the online community to identify Harvey as the “Real Martha”, despite Gadd telling GQ that “we’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.” In response to all the speculation, Gadd himself tweeted: “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
Fiona Harvey’s criminal record, whether she even has one, is now being debated by viewers online after she was interviewed on Uncensored With Piers Morgan. Here’s the latest on this drama.
Fiona Harvey’s criminal record
Fiona Harvey’s criminal record? She claims she doesn’t have one and that’s why she’s suing Netflix for its defamatory representation of her. In Baby Reindeer, Martha (supposedly based on Harvey) is shown to be arrested, pleading guilty, and spending nine months in prison. Donny (the fictionalized Gadd) is granted a five-year restraining order and he allegedly never sees her again.
But Harvey insists she doesn’t have a criminal record. Speaking with controversial TV host Piers Morgan, she refuted much of what was depicted in Baby Reindeer. “They have billed it as a true story, and so has he, and it’s not,” she said. “He is lying and they are lying.” When it came to her being arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime, she said, “That is completely untrue, very, very defamatory to me, very career damaging.”
This is more difficult to fact-check in the UK than it is in the US. In the UK, criminal records are publicly available and the criminal records office has records of every arrest, charge, caution, and conviction. However, the Human Rights Act states that criminal records are not publicly viewable unless released by the courts. The Freedom of Information Act allows individuals to request information about the criminal justice system from public authorities, including prisons and police forces, but the information may be exempt.
The interview with Piers Morgan has received a strong reaction from the public, with many in the comments section doubting the legitimacy of her story. Others were disturbed by “Piers Morgan conducting one of the most unethical interviews ever.”
“By promising viewers a true story, and by doing such a shoddy job of masking Harvey’s identity, Baby Reindeer might have invited us to speculate on what really happened,” argued The Guardian‘s Stewart Heritage. “But this has made us complicit. We’re following Fiona Harvey’s story just as closely as we followed the series itself. Baby Reindeer is shaping up to be a lesson in what happens if everyone—writers, producers, the media, viewers—follow their worst instincts at every turn.”
For more on Baby Reindeer, check out Richard Gadd’s book
and play that inspired the Netflix series. The script, which won an Olivier Award in 2020, “is described as a chilling story about obsession, delusion and the terrifying ramifications of a fleeting mistake.” Gadd writes in Baby Reindeer, “I looked at her, wanting her to laugh. Wanting her to share in the joke. But she didn’t. She just stared. I knew then, in that moment – that she had taken it literally…”
