The woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character Martha in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer has come forward to reveal her identity.
Fiona Harvey spoke with Piers Morgan Uncensored for an interview airing May 9 to discuss her alleged involvement with series creator Richard Gadd, who has said he met the Martha character while bartending in London in 2013.
Ahead of the show, Piers Morgan tweeted that Fiona will “set the record straight” about the saga.
Fiona’s reveal comes almost two weeks after an anonymous woman came forward as the real Martha, saying she felt victimized by Baby Reindeer.
“He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now,” she told the Daily Mail, accusing Richard of “bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune.”
“I’m the victim,” she added. “He’s written a bloody show about me.”
The TV show—which claims to be a “true story”—follows hopeful comedian Donny Dunn (Richard) as he meets and becomes close with an older woman named Martha (played by actress Jessica Gunning) while working as a bartender. Martha begins stalking Donny and sending him hundreds of emails, calling him names like “Nipple” and “Baby Reindeer” after a stuffed toy she had as a kid. It becomes overwhelming for Donny, who viewers learn is still healing from a past abusive relationship.
“It’s all emotionally 100% true, if that makes sense. It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met,” the actor told Variety April 19. “But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television.”
*WORLD EXCLUSIVE*
The real-life Martha from Baby Reindeer breaks cover and gives me her first TV interview about the smash hit Netflix show.
Fiona Harvey wants to have her say & ‘set the record straight.’
Is she a psycho stalker?
Find out tomorrow on ?@PiersUncensored? pic.twitter.com/MxaE5SEiTa— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 8, 2024
But while Richard may have drawn from real-life experiences when crafting the emotional show, he has asked viewers to not read more into the characters.
“Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” Richard wrote on Instagram. “That’s not the point of our show.”
To get a deep dive on the true story behind Baby Reindeer, read on.
The Real Martha?
Ahead of the series’ premiere, Gadd said he wasn’t worried about the real Martha trying to reach out, telling Vanity Fair, “The situation did result in a situation, shall we say, where she cannot contact me again.” (He’s said in multiple interviews since 2019 that he has to choose his words carefully for legal reasons.)
But, he added, “When it comes to stalking, you can never really escape. There’s always the nugget of worry in the back of your head.”
On April 26, the Daily Mail published an interview with an unidentified woman who said she is the inspiration for Martha and that she is now the victim of Gadd’s unwanted attention.
“He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now,” she told the publication. “I’m the victim. He’s written a bloody show about me.” The woman said of the actress playing Martha, “She sort of looks like me after I put on four stone during lockdown but I’m not actually unattractive.”
She denied stalking Gadd, saying, “Richard Gadd has got ‘main character syndrome.'”
Ed Miller/Netflix
Gadd did not respond to E! News’ request for comment about the Mail article.
But he previously said that the production took pains to mask identities.
“It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met,” he told Variety. “But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television. And obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult.”
Richard Gadd, Jessica Gunning on “Lorraine” (Ken McKay/ITV)
And he emphasized that real-life events didn’t unfold exactly as they do in Baby Reindeer.
Reiterating that “a lot of stalking is quite boring,” Gadd explained that “you need to move certain timelines around, you need to move certain points to the end of episodes to make them pay off a little better. As well as a true story, you have to make it visually interesting.”
But while there’s a psychological thriller aspect to the narrative, he really wanted it to be “an examination of the ramifications of trauma,” he said. “And I think that’s quite subtle in the show, but a lot of people are really getting that aspect of it. They see Donny and they’re appreciating someone’s self-destructive tendencies in the wake of trauma. And I think people are finding a great comfort in that, honestly.”
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