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They say that life is stranger than fiction. I suppose in the case of Baby Reindeer, it’s a bit hard to tell the two apart.
The Netflix show has taken the world by storm, thrusting its creator Richard Gadd into the spotlight and dominating Netflix’s Top 10 chart for weeks. It’s sparked a lot of conversation—some of it healthy, some of it not so much.
On the one hand, as I noted in my review of Baby Reindeer, the limited series is a heartbreakingly raw examination of trauma and abuse. It’s also just an incredibly well-written—if stress-inducing—series, with some extraordinary performances from Gadd (playing a version of himself named Donny), Nava Mau as his girlfriend Teri, Tom Goodman-Hill as Darrien, a writer who Donny meets and is abused by, and especially Jessica Gunning as Martha, the middle-aged woman who ends up stalking Donny, though the show is smart enough to show us how it’s never quite so simple as a one-way street.
On the other hand, a lot of the online conversation has been speculation and amateur sleuthing around the real-life identities of Martha and Darrien. The latter remains a mystery, but it didn’t take long to trace Martha to her real-life counterpart, Fiona Harvey, a Scottish lawyer who has threatened to sue Netflix and Gadd over her depiction in Baby Reindeer.
I’ve avoided discussing this because up until now, it seemed more important to keep private individuals private. But perhaps it should come as no shock to anyone that the woman Martha is based off of has found her place in the spotlight.
Today, she will appear on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel, Piers Morgan Uncensored. In a tweet Wednesday, Morgan wrote:
*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
Not very subtle there, Morgan, though this will surely be quite the interview, drawing in countless fans curious to see what Harvey will be like in person. Whether Morgan’s choice of interviewee is ethical, on the other hand, given what may be serious mental health issues at play, remains to be seen.
The interview will air on Morgan’s channel at 8pm GMT / 4pm EST / 1pm PST on Thursday, May 9th.
As for Harvey, she told The Daily Record that Gadd’s accounting in Baby Reindeer is “a load of rubbish.”
“This is all made up and hyperbole,” she said. “There are no restraining orders, injunctions or interdicts anywhere. There’s just no way. I’ve not had the police at my door about any of these things.
“It’s a load of rubbish. I don’t have any money but I’m a perfectly capable lawyer so I will represent myself.”
As for the interview, which was recorded earlier this week, Harvey told The Daily Record that she wasn’t happy with Morgan and his line of questioning. “It seemed to me that I was set up,” she said. “I feel a bit used.”
The whole thing is a bit tawdry, but I suppose that’s how these things are. As I said above, life is often stranger than fiction, but here we have real life bleeding into a fictionalized story and then bleeding right back into real life again in a way that seems almost fitting. After all, in Baby Reindeer Donny never really can let go of Martha. The cycle continues. The end is the beginning. It’s just that now it’s all playing out on a much grander—and more public—stage. I suppose I wonder if we will learn any more of the truth at all from this, or if the point of Baby Reindeer is more important than what actually happened.
