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In the last weeks Baby Reindeer, the TV series created and starring Scottish comedian Richard Gadd and released on Netflix in April, has received a lot of attention around the world. It happened partly because the series was particularly appreciated by audiences and critics, and partly because it tells a true story: just like Donny, the character he plays in the series, Gadd was stalked by a stalker between 2015 and 2018, when he was at the beginning of his acting career.
On Thursday, British journalist and presenter Piers Morgan interviewed Fiona Harvey on his YouTube channel, the woman who claims to be the person who persecuted Gadd, who in the series is called Martha and is played by Jessica Gunning.
It was a highly anticipated interview, also because thousands of users on social media dedicated themselves with a certain morbidity to discovering the true identity of the person who persecuted Gadd, despite him having asked to avoid behavior of this type. So far the interview has obtained more than 7 million views, and has been covered by all the main international newspapers.
– Read also: “Baby Reindeer” is a rare series
During her interview with Morgan, Harvey said she was forced to be interviewed due to threats received from hundreds of users, and described Baby Reindeer as an attempt by Gadd to publicly humiliate her.
She also added that, although some details from the series are actually true (such as the nickname she called Gadd, i.e.baby reindeer”, meaning “little reindeer”), others have been invented or overly emphasized. Among other things, Harvey denied having persecuted Gadd with tens of thousands of emails (an aspect that is underlined a lot in the series), claiming that they were only a “handful”, and announced that he wanted to take legal action against of Netflix.
In an interview given to GQ in April, Gadd said that most of the events told in the series had actually happened, but that he had taken all the necessary precautions to prevent the identity of the person who persecuted him from being traced.
Harvey announced the interview on Wednesday, and has since received widespread criticism. Many people described the interview as inappropriate, especially from an ethical point of view. For example, the film critic of the British newspaper Guardian Stuart Heritage wrote that, regardless of the truthfulness of the facts told by the series, Morgan’s interview will necessarily have negative implications, because «by assuming that Harvey is really Martha, Richard Gadd and Netflix have wildly emphasized a story passing it off as true, which leaves them exposed to all types of legal action.” Or, Heritage continued, Harvey may have actually done all the things she is accused of, and in this case “a huge segment of the media is gleefully parading a mentally ill woman for clicks.”
According to Heritage, this situation is to the detriment of all the people involved, because on the one hand Gadd’s talent as a screenwriter has been overshadowed by the great media sensation that arose around the identity of his stalker, and on the other Harvey «will have to pass the rest of his life haunted by internet demons who failed to understand the fundamental lesson of Baby Reindeer». Heritage also criticized Netflix, which it said was careless in protecting the identity of the “true” Martha, encouraging user speculation.
Speculations about the real identity of the characters of Baby Reindeer they had also created misunderstandings in recent weeks. In April, immediately after the release of the series, British writer and director Sean Foley became the target of several threats on social media after some users speculated that he could be the person who inspired Darrien, a character who attacks and rapes in the series Donny, the character played by Gadd.
Foley had https://twitter.com/SeanFoleyJ/status/1782655837489492126 on social media that the police were investigating many “defamatory, offensive and threatening” comments he had received from some users. Gadd himself then defended Foley, writing that despite himself, many people he admires have been “unfairly involved in the speculation.”
