The Baby Reindeer backlash is far from over, as a letter appears to show that Netflix was aware that the ‘real-life Martha’ – who the show was based on – was not convicted of stalking.
In the show, Martha's character is portrayed as pleading guilty to stalking and being sentenced to prison. After the show aired, Fiona Harvey, a Scottish lawyer, was identified as the woman ‘Martha’ was based on. She then appeared on Piers Morgan's TV show to deny that she'd ever been convicted.
In May earlier this year, Benjamin King, Netflix’s senior UK director of public policy, told Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee that Baby Reindeer was a “true story of the horrific abuse” suffered by Gadd “at the hands of a convicted stalker.”
A subsequent letter to the committee from King clarifies that “the person on whom the show is based — who we have at no point sought to identify — was subject to a court order rather than a conviction.”
A Netflix spokesperson told Deadline, “The letter was sent to the DCMS Select Committee on 23 May, well before any legal case was filed, and has been publicly available since. It does not impact our legal position.”
Here, we revisit Beth McColl's essay about the ethics of watching (and obsessing over) the controversial show.
I watched Baby Reindeer with everyone else. And, like everyone else, I found it compelling, viscerally upsetting in parts, hard to watch, stunningly original, oddly uplifting and haunting. Naively I thought the final episode would be the end of it.
Such is the speed of new releases on competing streaming sites; I assumed that another hot new show would appear the following week and eclipse it.
The persistence of the Baby Reindeer news cycle has been unusual. Typically, we watch a show that stirs up some discourse which rages online for days or a week, and then it eases and exits the public consciousness almost entirely. Not so in this case.
First, the internet discussed it at length. Media outlets covered it. Then, viewers of the show began to speculate on what real-life figures the characters were based on. Then, they claimed to have tracked down Martha on X and Facebook. They named a man they fervently believed to be the abuser and rapist Darrien.
At this point, Baby Reindeer’s creator, Richard Gadd, put out a statement on his Instagram to clear the man’s name, just an innocent former colleague, he said. He also urged these viewers to stop their searching. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
Last night, an interview aired. Piers Morgan sat down to talk to Fiona Harvey, the woman who claims to be who the character of Martha was based on. When announced, Piers’ ‘world exclusive’ was met with anger, glee, concern, and horror – all of which are highly useful responses when your profits come from interaction and outrage.
The interview, aired on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel, was difficult to watch.
Though Piers never directly accuses her of being a mentally unwell stalker, he labours the point that this is how she’s portrayed in the show and now viewed by millions. He asks about her upbringing, her qualifications, the background of her current boyfriend – all information that, if revealed, could make her even more vulnerable to probing by internet sleuths.
During the show she accuses both Gadd and Netflix of egregious lying, something she says she plans to sue them over. She says she believes Richard Gadd to be a homosexual who is himself deeply mentally ill, also speculating that he may have recorded her voice at length in the pub where they met, his way of fabricating the voicemails he claims to have.
While watching the stream, I saw the viewership hovering at about half a million. Over on X and Instagram, clips from the interview were already becoming memes. The comments section was a free for all, with new ones appearing faster than I could read them.
There was the usual: the laughing emojis, the sexist insults, the jibes about her mental health. “Mad as a box of frogs” being one of the kinder remarks. There was analysis of her body language- she nods her head when she’s disagreeing, she drinks water when she’s being asked difficult questions. And all of it for a woman who has only just arrived in the public consciousness.
‘It’s a real, real shame.’
It’s this that I believe is what makes this interview so upsetting to watch. Fiona Harvey isn’t an existing public figure or celebrity with a team behind her or any media training or experience dealing with this kind of global attention.
Instead, this is a 58-year-old civilian who is, if we are to believe what we saw in the show, very unwell, potentially volatile and ultimately highly vulnerable. She’s been thrust against her will into the spotlight, harassed by viewers, and contacted by a world-famous TV figure – all within the space of a month. Piers Morgan and his team know this. But they also know that Baby Reindeer is in Netflix’s top 10 TV shows in 92 countries and hasn’t left Netflix UK’s number one spot since it arrived on the streamer in April. There are views to be collected and money to be made, and we live in an age where that appears to matter more than decency or safeguarding.
She related ‘deeply’ to her character.
Though I find this a detestable and potentially dangerous booking, I can’t deny that Piers has fulfilled an existing public demand and desire for this kind of exposé.
With the growing transparency shown on social media and endless true crime content, we’ve come to expect all-access passes to the people we see on our screens.
It would be easy for me to say that I only watched the interview so that I could write this piece, but I don’t know if that’s totally true. I suspect I would have seen others talking about it and allowed a dark curiosity to win out. Sometimes it’s just easier to be swept up in something that everyone else is doing without interrogating the ethics of it. We can, and so we do.
It seems that Fiona Harvey also been failed by the creators of the show, who have neglected to effectively obscure her identity.
In an interview with GQ last month, Gadd drew clear lines about the fictionalisation process. He said “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her [Martha] to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
Not only is she recognisable to herself, she’s recognisable to masses of viewers. She’s Scottish, white, brunette, has a legal background and her (easily searchable) tweets were even used verbatim in the script.
Fiona Harvey is clear in the interview that she does not believe herself to be mentally ill and maintains that she has never behaved in the anti-social and criminal ways depicted in the show.
"That's not the point of our show."
Having watched both Baby Reindeer and the interview, it’s hard not to speculate and pick sides. There are two warring narratives here, but as viewers without full context or hard evidence, we’re simply not equipped to separate fiction from fact.
What I will say is that the character of Martha is a violent fantasist who undoes the life of her victim, Donny, traumatising him in ways that may never fully leave him. She is also a deeply unwell and vulnerable woman. She is harmed and she is harmful. She is victim and she is perpetrator. Whoever the real Martha is and whatever she has done or not done, this appearance feels like a terrible failure of care.
You can watch the interview as a timely exclusive, sure, but you can also see it as exploitative. An older woman sits in an unfamiliar environment under hot studio lights tripping over her words. It’s sad. It’s horrible.
It’s hard to know where to go from here. Do we need a better cultural code for how we share our real stories and tell about our lives? How might we better protect people from the internet’s unstoppable prying? Maybe the best outcome available is that this news cycle will finally reach its close, and all those involved can leave it behind and begin to move forward. I won’t hold my breath, but I will hope.
