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If you’ve watched the hit Netflix series and want to know the real identity of the real-life Martha, many fans are pointing toward this one person to be the inspiration. The weekend after Baby Reindeer premiered on the streaming service, people theorized that Fiona Harvey might have been Richard Gadd’s real stalker.
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.
Did fans really find Martha’s inspiration and is the Fiona Harvey and Richard Gadd theory real?
Is Fiona Harvey Richard Gadd’s stalker?
It’s not certain that Fiona Harvey is Richard Gadd’s stalker but this several 2014 has fans buzzing around. X User @MooreFoodPlz pointed out her profile and tweets from 2014 quoting one of them: “@MrRichardGadd your tweets cheer me up. ive not been able to get into hawley past three saturdays.your timeline is good!” The X user also pointed out that Hawley was a bar in Camden in London. Another big clue included a tweet from her saying “@MrRichardGadd my curtains need hung badly” which is referenced in the show.
In a TikTok video by GoldennHourrr that displayed alleged evidence, many fans took to the comments to react. “How tf did they find her??? Man this is scary,” one user commented However many fans also were aware of the privacy that Gadd wanted to provide for his former stalker. “There is no reason for anyone to go looking for her Richard Gadd had said to leave her alone. Why give her the attention she clearly doesn’t need?”
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.”
On June 7, 2024, news broke of her lawsuit against the world’s biggest streaming service—she’s seeking $170 million in damages. “The lies that Defendants told about Harvey to over 50 million people worldwide include that Harvey is a twice-convicted stalker who was sentenced to five years in prison and that Harvey sexually assaulted Gadd,” her complaint says. “Defendants told these lies, and never stopped, because it was a better story than the truth, and better stories made money.”
Who is Baby Reindeer’s Martha in real life?
Gadd has not disclosed the identity of the real-life Martha due to privacy as well as legal reasons. “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself,” he explained to GQ. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
The creator and comedian himself, doesn’t know where the whereabouts of the real-life Martha. He had a restraining order against her but did not want her to go to prison. According to an interview with The Times UK, he “didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.” He felt “mixed feelings about it” but that the situation was now “resolved.”
On why he felt a sense of empathy for the real life Martha, he told GQ UK, “Someone comes in who seems very normal, they seem perfect, but bit by bit they get weirder and weirder. Stalking is a mental dysfunction, it’s an illness and I wasn’t dealing with someone who felt calculated or insidious. I felt I was dealing with someone who was vulnerable, somebody who was mentally ill, someone who couldn’t stop because they believed what was in their head.”
“I can think of numerous examples where people have complained to the police about a stalker but because maybe they’ve had a previous relationship the police haven’t taken it seriously. They can look for a concrete reason to arrest… but sometimes situations are more nuanced than that. The first thing the police should do is try to preserve the safety of the person who is making the report rather than going through a long, arduous process to work out whether they should believe them or not.”
A woman who claimed to be the inspiration of Martha came forward to Daily Mail to talk about her thoughts on the show. “‘He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now,” the anonymous woman told the gossip site. “I’m the victim. He’s written a bloody show about me.” Daily Mail claimed that the woman had an uncanny resemblance to Martha in the show and shares several key similarities with her on-screen persona.
Baby Reindeer is now steraming on Netflix.
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 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…”
