Baby Reindeer's "real life stalker" breaks silence
The woman believed to be the inspiration for the stalker "Martha" in Richard Gadd's Netflix hit Baby Reindeer has denied the allegations that she stalked the show's creator.
The show depicts an aspiring comedian - Donny Dunn, played by Gadd himself - who meets a woman at a bar and she quickly develops an unhealthy obsession with him.
Fiona Harvey, 58, the person believed to be "real life Martha", spoke to Piers Morgan on his Uncensored YouTube show on Thursday and said that she was planning to take legal action against both Netflix and Gadd for the attention the semi-autobiographical show got her.
“You’re 100 per cent it’s not you?” Morgan asked.
"Yes,” she replied.
Harvey reportedly received death threats after internet sleuths tracked her down within hours of the show's premiere.
She also said that she only met a him a few times, and that the show's portrayal of events - including the one where they first met - were completely fictionalised.
“He didn’t offer me a cup of tea. No one gets anything free from the Hawley Arms,” she told Morgan, referencing the real-life pub Gadd worked at.
“He interrupted a conversation with another barman he said, ‘Oh, you’re Scottish,’ and basically commandeered the conversation.
“You know, I was talking to somebody. It’s pretty rich. So he seemed to be obsessed with me from that moment onwards.”
In the show, Gadd also claimed that he had received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, 106 pages of letters and 350 hours of voicemail from the woman who Martha is based off, and Harvey denied this, although she did send him a few emails.
“There may have been a couple of emails exchanged. Just some jokey banter,” she said.
“I have no idea (where the other emails and communications came from). I think it’s probably made up himself.
“I don’t see how anyone could do 41,000 emails.”
When asked to put a number on the emails she had sent, she replied: “A handful, 10? Not 41,000”.
“Even if the email thing was true, the rest is not,” she added and said that “I wouldn’t be suing if there were 41,000 emails out there."
She also said that she never sexually assaulted him, contacted his parents or attacked his girlfriend and was never charged – let alone convicted – of any offence, another claim that the show made.
When asked by Morgan if she thought Gadd was “mentally unwell,” she replied "yes".
”I think he always was. Whether that rape was real or conceived in his mind. He's completely off his head,” she said.
“He’s crazy and wants to make this up," she added.
“My mind is made up – he is a lair”.
Morgan then asked her if she had a message for Gadd, and she went straight to the point: “Leave me alone please. Get a life. Get a proper job. I am horrified at what you’ve done”.
Image: Piers Morgan / Netflix