The creator of the hit show Baby Reindeer has insisted that it is “emotionally true” in a court filing backing Netflix against the woman who allegedly stalked him for years.
Richard Gadd, a Scottish comedian and writer, first performed the show as as a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. It tells the story of Donny, a pub barman in London, who is stalked, harassed, and abused by a character named Martha.
Rights to the show were bought by Netflix and it was a huge hit for the streamer on its release in April this year, with Gadd playing Donny. Fans quickly identified the real-life Martha, Fiona Harvey—who then sued Netflix for her depiction in the show, seeking $170 million in damages.
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Harvey disputes various elements of Martha’s portrayal, including claims that she had two criminal convictions for stalking, that she spent five years in prison for stalking Gadd, and that she sexually abused him.
Legal experts say her case centers around Netflix’s potentially costly decision to preface the series with five words on screen after the opening scene: “This is a true story.”
In his filing, backing Netflix’s motion to have the suit thrown out, Gadd acknowledges that Baby Reindeer is a fictionalized account. The filing, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, was first reported by Variety.
“The Series is a dramatic work. It is not a documentary or an attempt at realism. While the Series is based on my life and real-life events and is, at its core, emotionally true, it is not a beat-by-beat recounting of the events and emotions I experienced as they transpired. It is fictionalized, and is not intended to portray actual facts,” Gadd writes.
In its motion to have the suit thrown out, Netflix is arguing that Baby Reindeer is substantially true in its depiction of events, and Gadd details years of “extremely upsetting” harassment to back that allegation.
He says he first met Harvey in 2014 when she came into the pub where he was working in North London, the Hawley Arms—which had become famous as Amy Winehouse’s favorite watering hole before her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011.
Gadd recounts how Harvey, who is also Scottish, had looked “distressed,” so he offered her a “cup of tea on the house” and they chatted about their common heritage.
After that first meeting, he alleges, Harvey stalked and harassed him for the next three years, memorizing his work schedule at the pub and coming to sit at the bar for his entire shift, interrupting his interactions with customers and trying make smutty jokes or banter.
“When Harvey was around, I had my guard up. There was a particularly intense period of time when Harvey often attempted to touch me in inappropriate (and sometimes sexual) ways. Harvey pinched and touched various parts of my body, including my bum, and was generally very ‘handsy’ towards me,” he writes.
At the time, Gadd was trying to make his mark as a stand-up comedian. On one occasion, he says, she told another customer about a bad review he’d received. He replied by mentioning news coverage he’d seen of her harassing a Scottish politician.
She left the pub, he says, but soon returned and accosted him behind the bar, poking him in the neck and warning him that his mouth was going to get him into trouble, Gadd says.
“She was furious and I found her demeanour intimidating. I remember quickly apologising out of fear she was going to hit me, as well as embarrassment at the fact a number of customers nearby were looking over.”
“I was scared of Harvey and what she might be capable of,” he writes. “Nothing deterred her, and I remember long shifts where I would sit out on the balcony or in the basement for hours waiting for her to leave.”
Gadd alleges that Harvey sent him thousands of emails, left him hundreds of voicemails, and wrote him dozens of letters, many containing sexually derogatory or hateful remarks and threats.
He attaches some of the emails to back up his account, including a series from 2016 when she is said to have repeatedly propositioned him.
“Harvey emailed me ‘I want to suck your cock all day have u shag me and have a stab at this’ and threatened me with an ‘ultimatum,’ demanding ‘sex three times at night and twice in the morning’ and stated ‘I just want to give u loads and loads of blow jobs to make you sleep,’” he writes.
Gadd says he first went to the police in early 2016, and the alleged harassment eased slightly, only to intensify later in the year. Eventually, in 2017, he says he got the police to send Harvey a formal warning, after which she stopped stalking him—but still sent him a letter with a pair of her underwear.
“Overall, it was an incredibly stressful and worrying time, with a sustained period of relentless behaviour taking place over several years,” he concludes.
