«I have to report something. A stalker. She is an older woman than me. She follows me, she emails me all the time, she calls me. This has been going on for about six months.” The Netflix series begins with a complaint «Baby Reindeer»based on the true story of its author, the Scottish comedian Richard Gadd, victim of stalking for over two years. The series is a work «extremely and emotionally truthful». A sort of animated diary that Gadd created six years after those events to face his past and “overcome these negative emotions by facing them head on”, as he told the British edition of GQ.
The success of the series, in first place among the most viewed on Netflix, is due to several factors: first of all the ability to tell her life by showing both the dark sides of Martha (the name of the stalker), the moments of madness and the crescendo of her obsession, and her feelings towards her, exposed through the use of voice-over. Despite it all, Gadd feels empathy, he tries to understand her disorder, he almost feels ashamed for her. All this without ever justifying her actions. «I felt I was dealing with someone who was vulnerable, someone who was mentally illsomeone who couldn’t stop because he believed in what he had in mind” says Gadd again.
Secondly, the construction of history works, the use of the texts of over 40 thousand emails that the real stalker sent him all those months. The first of these says: «I need a good boy to take care of me, one that looks like a small reindeer (in English baby reindeer, hence the title, ed)”.
If we then add a hunt for the real protagonists undertaken by fans of the series, and an interview given to Daily Mail Saturday 27 April of the real Martha, in which accuses the series of making her a victim of bullyingand that she is the “victim”, then the title acquires even more interest.
What happened between Gadd and Martha?
But first we need to take a step back and return to that scene at the police station. What prompted Gadd to report Martha (in the series played by Jessica Gunning)? It all begins with a hot tea offered in the London bar where Gadd – who in the series is also the protagonist Donny – works, now in his thirties, while trying to make a career as a comedian.
Those that are meant to be kind gestures, jokes and niceties become the object of her attentions, soon turn into obsession. «I felt sorry for her. It’s the first sensation I felt. A patronizing, arrogant feeling to feel sorry for someone you just looked at, but I did,” Donny says. Martha immediately begins to show confidence. He tells him that he is an important lawyer, of owning luxury homes, and her loud and contagious laugh captures him for a few moments.
Then the first email arrives. Intrigued by her life, he follows her home, where she discovers that the luxury she boasts of does not exist. To find out more, look for her on the internet, and here is her first revelation: Martha is one stalker sentenced to four years in prison because, after being fired for inappropriate behavior with her boss, she followed him home, attacked her mother, and unjustly reported him for abusing her disabled daughter. The thought that closes the first episode, and the first of many months in Gadd’s life, is this: “There is a convicted stalker stalking me.”
Eighty emails a day, 350 hours of vocals
From that moment on, every day, she waits for him two hours before opening outside the bar, then sits down, takes the usual Coke – offered – which «he never drinks, and talks about people as if I already knew them, as if I was already part of his life. And when she doesn’t, she talks about me.” The emails rise to eighty a day, and “continue until late at night”. In an interview Gadd said he received in total 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters and 350 hours of voice messages.
Martha creeps more and more slowly into his life: she tries to become a member of the cooking club held by the mother of Donny’s ex (with whom she lives), only to be kicked out by him by threatening to call the police. Thus she begins to wait for him every day for more than 10 hours at the bus stop near his home, despite the cold.
One evening he comes to terms with Teresa, the girl Donny has been dating for months, tearing her hair: that’s when he decides to report. It’s been six months since Martha started stalking him. And even then, instead of mentioning her name, showing her old articles, accusing her of having groped him against her will, claims to be concerned about his mental health.
From the bar to the viral video
After the attack Martha is banned from the bar, but her presence becomes even more obsessive and aggressive. She attacks her ex-girlfriend, calls Donny’s parents telling them that she was in an accident. She breaks a glass on him and, to make matters worse, and at that point Teresa also decides to leave him. “I thought about leaving the pub or moving, but I didn’t want him to take more from me than he had already taken from me,” he says.
Only then, during a stand-up comedy, Gadd goes out of his usual script and he tells everything he went through until that moment. The video of his confession goes viral and his fame begins to grow, to the point of pushing him, in 2019, to set up a one-man show called Baby Reindeer. “It’s as if my life began three decades later,” she says, “and all I had to do to make it happen was be honest.” The Guardian in 2019 he defined the show as «disturbing stuff, a call for a new legal approach to stalking, a dark account of two damaged souls unable to escape each other’s grasp».
Unlike what was told in the series – where Martha is accused of three counts of stalking and harassment and sentenced to nine months in prison and a five-year restraining order -, Gadd has never explained the fate of his stalker in various interviews. She only reported that the situation was resolved, that even during the 2019 show she never came back to make herself heard, adding to the Times that “I had mixed feelings about it: I didn’t want to throw someone in prison who was at that level of mental distress.”
Episode 4 and the abuse by the producer
That from Martha is not the only abuse that Gadd brings to the scene. During the fourth episode, the one that he himself defines as the truest, he says that, five years before meeting Martha, he had sexual assault by a man in his 50s (Darrien in the series) who, posing as a mentor capable of making him famous, introduces him to drugs and alcohol and, in moments of blackout, rapes him.
This episode was written by Gadd «obsessively over a couple of days. I felt like I need to get it all out at once, because if I had stopped I could have broken the flow. But many of the people who worked with me found the writing difficult to read and create” due to its ferocity. What we see in the series will be much smaller than what Gadd initially told. However, it will also be fundamental to understand his relationship with Martha, why he is unable to report her and what are the thoughts a person who is a victim of violence has to deal with: shame, fear, confusion, guilt.
The accusations of the real Martha
After his story, the internet is now obsessed. Sean Foley, creator of the series together with Gadd, he had to report comments and messages accusing him of being the harassing producer to the police that is talked about in the series. “I wanted to show that what Darrien did was perniciously evil, whereas Martha’s behavior came from a place of deep vulnerability,” he told British GQwhile on Instagram he wrote: «Please, don’t speculate on who the people might be in real life. This is not the purpose of our show.”
A message that didn’t help. Tracing comments still present on Gadd’s social networks, some people have managed to trace the real Martha, to offend and threaten her. Gadd’s attempt to disguise it, borrowing the “emotional reality” rather than the physical one, was of little use.
“I’m the victim” However, the alleged stalker said in an interview with Daily Mail, released anonymously. «He is bullying an older woman for fame and wealth. He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now.” And then he advances his version: «I have been in Richard Gadd’s company on a few occasions, but I didn’t persecute him as he claims. Her story is a serious intrusion into my privacy. I haven’t seen him for 12 years.” The real Martha is also reportedly considering taking legal action against the series.
«I did a lot of wrong things – he admitted again in 2019 to Guardian Gadd – and I made the situation worse. I wasn’t a perfect person. The show was only slightly fictionalized, but the skeleton of the story is absolutely true. Of course, it wasn’t that thrilling. The feelings you experience when being harassed are relentless boredom and frustration. But I didn’t want the public to hear it.”
