How the reality behind the Netflix hit Baby Reindeer is unravelling

In Baby Reindeer, the character of Martha pursues her prey with spine-chilling ruthlessness. She haunts her victim’s workplace, sits outside his home for hours and bombards him with endless emails and text messages.

And so it is not without irony that the ‘real life’ inspiration for the television drama has now launched a no-holds-barred legal assault on Netflix – demanding an eye-watering $170 million (£133 million).

For according to Fiona Harvey’s court claim, the mini-series that stormed the TV world – watched by an estimated 65 million and counting – is ‘the biggest lie in television history’.

The law graduate, who lives in a high-rise London council flat, wants every cent of the streaming giant’s profits from its surprise hit, along with many millions more to compensate her for ‘viciously’ destroying her life with ‘brutal lies’, a Californian court has been informed.

The seven-part drama was written by comedian Richard Gadd and was based, he said, on his own real-life experiences.

While Gadd has never named his stalker, in the show he plays the main character, a barman and aspiring comedian called Donny Dunn, who is tormented by an older woman – called Martha – who plagues him with thousands of emails and phone calls before violently assaulting him.

Now Ms Harvey, 58, who says she is easily identified as the real Martha, has set loose a firm of self-styled ‘aggressive’ Manhattan attorneys who boast they ‘take the gloves off’ fighting for their clients.

And The Roth Law Firm’s lawyers are certainly not pulling their punches. Their 34-page legal claim begins with the fact that Baby Reindeer is billed by Netflix as ‘a true story’, not ‘based on’ a true story, yet the show depicts Martha as pleading guilty and being jailed for stalking, which Ms Harvey insists is a devastating fabrication.

Her claim states: ‘It is a lie told by Netflix and the show’s creator, Richard Gadd, out of greed and lust for fame; a lie designed to attract more viewers, get more attention, to make more money, and to viciously destroy the life of… Fiona Harvey – an innocent woman defamed by Netflix and Richard Gadd at a magnitude and scale without precedent.’

It goes on: ‘The lies that [Netflix] 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. [Netflix] told these lies, and never stopped, because it was a better story than the truth – and better stories made money.’ 

Baby Reindeer has certainly become a worldwide phenomenon and is tipped as a frontrunner in next month’s prestigious Emmys, for which it has been nominated for over a dozen awards.

Predicted to become one of Netflix’s ten biggest shows ever, it is based on 34-year-old former barman Mr Gadd’s experiences of being stalked by a woman he met in a north London pub where he was pulling pints.

Over four and a half years, Mr Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages from his stalker.

Despite Gadd and Netflix’s insistence that the storyline does not reveal the stalker’s true identity – Gadd previously said he had disguised her identity so that ‘I don’t think she would recognise herself’ – Ms Harvey was quickly exposed by online sleuths before going public herself and says she has suffered death threats and abuse from internet trolls.

Her legal claim states: ‘Harvey is physically weak. She has and continues to experience anxiety, nightmares, panic attacks, shame, depression, nervousness, stomach pains, loss of appetite and fear, extreme stress and sickness all directly caused by the lies told about her in Baby Reindeer.

‘Harvey is fearful of leaving her home. At the same time, Netflix and Gadd have travelled the country promoting the show and accepting awards.’

It claims: ‘Netflix defamed a middle-aged woman, Fiona Harvey, so completely, that Harvey is even afraid to go outside.’

The truth behind the global hit has been unravelling ever since the Daily Mail was the first publication to speak to Ms Harvey after trolls unmasked her in April. The Mail did not name her until she had given an interview to Piers Morgan on his YouTube channel.

At her one-bedroom council flat in central London, she told us that the ‘suggestion I’m a serial stalker is a load of rubbish’ and raged about her TV depiction, unkindly declaring that the actress Jessica Gunning who plays Martha ‘sort of looks like me after I put on four stone in lockdown’. 

The Baby Reindeer creators, had they been more wary, could have cast Martha as a thin doctor from Wales who met her victim in a restaurant in Bristol.

Instead, as her legal claim states, she shares many similarities with Ms Harvey: a Scottish lawyer living in London, 20 years older than Mr Gadd, and bearing such an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to Martha that her ‘accent, manner of speaking and cadence’ are all ‘indistinguishable’.

And the lawsuit says further clues litter the series.

On the show, Martha creates social media posts identical to genuine, searchable posts by Ms Harvey, including one in which she says, ‘My curtains need hung badly’, which is used as a sexual euphemism in the drama.

The Mail can also reveal how Gadd, whose drama began life as a stand-up stage act, projected her actual messages to him on the walls of the venue when he performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019.

And in the live show he also played her real voicemail messages, which were blasted over loudspeakers to the audience.

Further, despite Gadd insisting she would not recognise herself in the Netflix drama, he told an interviewer in 2019 that ‘I don’t know how she’s reacting to it [the stage show] really – but I’m sure with a sense of embarrassment’.

When the Mail met Ms Harvey, she told our reporter she did know about the live show based on her. Indeed, for the first 15 minutes of our conversation, she seemed unaware of the TV series and thought he was talking about the stage show. 

Perhaps it is no wonder that in television circles there is jaw-dropping astonishment at how Netflix finds itself accused of a ‘mega failure’ of ‘compliance’, under which executives are supposed to maintain a duty of care to people depicted on screen.

Returning to her legal claim, Ms Harvey’s lawyers say her identification ‘took a matter of days’ and yet the drama about her is full of ‘brutal lies’.

The attorneys submitted ‘Exhibit 1’, a copy of her official British report known as a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) certificate, which states under ‘police records of convictions, cautions, reprimands and warnings’: ‘None recorded.’

In Baby Reindeer, Martha smashes a bottle over her victim’s head and gouges his eyes, sexually assaults him and is eventually arrested and told she faces a prison sentence, none of which actually happened, according to the lawsuit. 

It states Netflix has portrayed her as ‘a twice-convicted criminal’ who ‘spent a total of five years in prison for stalking Gadd and another woman’, and that ‘in addition, Martha stalked a policeman, sexually assaulted Gadd in an alley; violently attacked him in a pub and waited outside his home every day for up to 16 hours a day’.

It says: ‘The real Martha is reasonably understood by all viewers to have done all of these monstrous things because Netflix and Gadd stated this was true.’

How much effort went into checking the truth of the ‘true story’?

According to the legal claim: ‘Netflix, a multi-national billion dollar entertainment streaming company, did literally nothing to confirm the ‘true story’ that Gadd told.

‘As a result of [Netflix’s] lies, malfeasance and utterly reckless misconduct, Harvey’s life had been ruined. Simply, Netflix and Gadd destroyed her reputation, her character and her life.’

Ms Harvey is now seeking at least $50million for actual damages, at least $50million in compensatory damages for ‘mental anguish, loss of enjoyment and loss of business’, at least $50million for ‘all profits from Baby Reindeer’, and $20million for punitive damages.

In a tawdry sideswipe to her perceived tormentor, her lawsuit brands Mr Gadd as ‘a self-admitted crack, meth, and heroin user…following her home and spying on her through her window, and lying to the police about his contacts with her’.

These relate, presumably, to scenes in the drama which depict Donny spying on Martha, and his involvement with a man who sexually assaults him after they take drugs together.

In real life, Gadd says he was assaulted by an older, more powerful man in the TV industry, an experience which he has also previously turned into a stage show.

Back in April, in a Netflix press release to promote the launch of the show, Mr Gadd was quoted as declaring: ‘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 the Mail has previously revealed how Mr Gadd is said to have told production company Clerkenwell Films that his stalker was never actually convicted.

Sources indicated that Mr Gadd had told Clerkenwell the stalker was the subject of an ‘exclusion order’ – a civil order which is not the same thing as a criminal conviction for stalking.

Her original stalking controversy in Scotland more than 20 years ago, involved several Scottish politicians and their families. But even by the account of one of her ‘victims’ – a Scottish Labour MP’s widow, Laura Wray, 62, who says she was stalked after sacking Miss Harvey from her law firm for erratic behaviour – the height of legal action taken was the seeking of an ‘interim interdict’, a form of civil injunction.

According to Ms Harvey, she successfully argued against it in Glasgow Sheriff Court in 2002, representing herself, and it was never granted. Even if it was, it did not amount to a criminal conviction. 

In the case of Gadd, according to sources close to him, the action taken against his accuser was a ‘First Instance Harassment Warning’ from the Metropolitan Police in 2017, which does not amount to a crime having been committed.

Netflix, which has held back from commenting on the Baby Reindeer controversy’s twists and turns, broke its silence after lawsuit No. 24-04744 was filed in the US District Court in the Central District of California last Thursday.

‘We intend to defend this matter vigorously and to stand by Richard Gadd’s right to tell his story,’ said a Netflix spokeswoman.

The court process is at a preliminary stage, but legal experts suggested one possible line of defence would be to test whether Ms Harvey, who does not deny interacting with people who have claimed they are her ‘victims’, has a character of sufficiently high standing to be defamed.

And she faces legal hurdles that are higher in the US than had she chosen to sue in Britain.

In America, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, therefore the law will consider the Netflix portrayal to be true or substantially true and it is up to Ms Harvey to prove otherwise. The burden of proof is the other way around in the UK.

And what of Mr Gadd, who is not named as a defendant in the case, and his co-star Ms Gunning?

If they are fazed by the furore, they were not showing it when they attended an event in New York on Thursday. The co-stars were all smiles, Ms Gunning wearing a green satin jumpsuit, as they posed for photographers.

Gadd and Clerkenwell Films were approached for comment. Whether their high spirits will remain as the lawsuit against Netflix progresses remains to be seen.