Baby Reindeer was the overnight Netflix success that few saw coming. Back in April, and within weeks of its release, Richard Gadd’s series had become one of the most popular shows on the streaming platform and millions of people across the globe were moved by his story. The comedian and actor had initially created the show – which deals with issues like mental health, sexual assault and harassment – for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019 before it was given the green light for its own Netflix series. However, the unprecedented interest in Baby Reindeer led not only to overwhelming critical praise, but also to a number of subsequent controversies.
In the series – which opens with a statement that the show is a ‘true story’ – protagonist Donny Dunn is relentlessly stalked by a woman named Martha. When Baby Reindeer began gaining traction, viewers started to look for the real people involved in the story and eventually a woman named Fiona Harvey publicly claimed she was the ‘real-life Martha’. She then proceeded to appear on YouTube series Piers Morgan Uncensored and threatened to take legal action against Netflix.
While Jessica Gunning, who plays fictional character Martha, spoke about the intense interest in the real people behind the show, Gadd remained quiet on the threat of legal proceedings. Fiona Harvey filed a $170 million lawsuit against Netflix in June, citing defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and gross negligence. At the time, a spokesperson for Netflix told the Guardian: “We intend to defend this matter vigorously and to stand by Richard Gadd’s right to tell his story.”
This week, it has been reported that Gadd filed documents in California, US to support Netflix in their legal battle, stating that he suffered years of ‘stalking, harassment, abuse and threats’ between 2014 and 2017. In his court filing, he writes that Baby Reindeer is a ‘fictionalised retelling of my emotional journey through several extremely traumatic real experiences’, continuing: “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.”
In the documents, Gadd also writes that he reported Harvey to the police in 2016 after receiving ‘thousands of emails, hundreds of voicemails, and a number of handwritten letters’ of a ‘sexually explicit, violent’ nature over a two year period.
In her interview with Piers Morgan, Harvey denied the claims, saying: “I don’t think I sent him anything. There may have been a couple of emails, jokey banter, but that is it.”
Fiona Harvey is seeking $50m for actual damages, $50m in compensatory damages for “mental anguish, loss of enjoyment and loss of business”, $50m for “all profits from ‘Baby Reindeer’” and $20m for punitive damages, as per the Guardian.
