The Baby Reindeer Obsession

B aby Reindeer, the new Netflix black-comedy drama, opens with the statement: “This is a true story.” Note: not based on a true story, not inspired by real events, but a true story — mostly, anyway. The writer, protagonist, and lead actor Richard Gadd told Variety: “It’s all emotionally 100 percent true,” “borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met.”

The series, set in London and Scotland, tells the story of an aspiring comedian bartender whose experience with a female stalker forces him to confront his wounds from past sexual abuse. Gadd plays “Donny Dunn,” a pseudonym for himself. Baby Reindeer first ran as a play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Gadd adapted it for a Netflix miniseries. It was released in April and has been wildly successful.

It is relentlessly grim, occasionally funny in a bleak sort of way, but undeniably gripping.

The stalker is an obese, middle-aged woman named “Martha Scott” (Jessica Gunning). When Martha walks into the bar where Donny works, he feels sorry for her and gives her a free cup of tea. That’s when her obsession starts. She nicknames him “baby reindeer,” after a toy from her childhood that she says he looks like. Gadd claims that during the yearslong stalking, the real Martha sent him 41,000 emails and left 350 hours of voicemails.

Martha is not what we expect from a stalker. She is wildly contradictory. She’s well educated, with a first-class law degree, but her emails are riddled with typos. In some scenes, she is aggressive and mean-spirited; in others, she is vulnerable and kind.

Donny is not what we expect from a victim. He appears deeply conflicted about Martha. He does not choose a healthy response — ignoring her, then reporting her — but instead indulges her behavior. At one point, he even expresses (to the audience, not Martha) a twisted sexual interest in her. Donny makes explicit that, on some level, he craves her attention and validation. He gets the police involved only after she begins harassing his family.

Ultimately, the series is about two very damaged individuals who wind up being co-dependents.

Given the sensitive nature of this “true story,” what was done to protect the identities of those involved? Gadd told Variety: “You can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it into television. We were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult.”

Yet, almost immediately after the series was released, internet sleuths managed to identify the real-life Martha as 51-year-old Fiona Harvey. She even looks like Martha (or rather the actress who played her). Harvey went on Piers Morgan’s show and claimed that Gadd was a “psychopath” who had made the whole thing up. She has since hired the Roth Law Firm, a U.S.-based legal firm, which has demanded that Netflix, Gadd, and the production company Clerkenwell Films “take all necessary steps to preserve evidence.”

You can watch Harvey’s interview yourself and see who you think is telling the truth.

It shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Either Harvey is a convicted stalker, or she isn’t. Either she harassed Gadd and his family, or she didn’t. These are ascertainable facts. The sorts of details that will easily be hashed out in court, if it comes to it.

In Baby Reindeer, Donny has a breakdown on stage during a comedy set in which he overshares with his audience that he had an abusive sexual relationship with an older writer who promised to help him with his career. Donny would take drugs with the writer; then, after he’d passed out, the writer would take advantage of him sexually. This happened multiple times and caused Donny — who up until then had been heterosexual — to question his sexuality. Working out his confusion, he dates a male transsexual (Nava Mau).

The audience wonders why, after the abuse happened the first time, Donny keeps going back. And why (spoiler alert), at the end of the series, he goes back to his abuser again.

Perhaps it’s meant to be a comment on the irrational and self-destructive behavior of very damaged people. But whatever it is, the problem with Baby Reindeer is that Gadd’s character is insufferably passive. Watching the show is a maddening experience. At multiple points, I found myself literally shouting at the screen, “No! What are you doing!”

I don’t know how many times Gadd performed Baby Reindeer as a play. But from a mental-health standpoint, it doesn’t seem like a great idea to take the worst things that have ever happened to you and then reenact them again and again in front of thousands of people. Or, in the case of the Netflix series, 22 million people.

Gadd appears to see things differently. He told the Guardian, “The way people received that show, and received me, and accepted what happened to me: it saved my life. It’s mad that it happened that way.”

Mad is one word for it. Of course, purely from a career perspective, it was brilliant. The show’s success has launched Gadd as a writer and actor and probably made him a millionaire. Hopefully now he will be able to move on to something more constructive.