Less than a month after the debut of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, which centers on creator and star Richard Gadd’s alleged experiences with an actual stalker, the woman who allegedly inspired the character of Martha has revealed herself—and denied that Gadd’s portrayal of her is accurate. Fiona Harvey, a 58-year-old Scottish woman who has previously been accused of stalking, has now claimed that Gadd is “obsessed” with her.
Speaking with Piers Morgan on Thursday’s episode of his YouTube show, Harvey said she was forced to go public after the show premiered on April 11. “The internet sleuths tracked me down and hounded me and gave me death threats,” she said. “So it wasn’t really a choice.” VF has reached out to reps for Netflix and Gadd for comment.
Harvey, who said she had not watched any of the seven-episode series, referred to it as “obscene,” “horrifying,” and “misogynistic” in its depiction of Martha, a character played by actor Jessica Gunning. After first revealing her identity in an interview with the Daily Record, Harvey offered further details of her alleged relationship with Gadd in the Morgan interview, claiming to only have met him “two or three times”—a number that shifted to “five, six times” by the interview’s end.
Harvey said that, unlike what’s depicted in Baby Reindeer, the real Gadd did not offer her a cup of tea during their first encounter. “Nobody gets anything free from the Hawley Arms,” she said, referencing the pub where they allegedly met, before claiming that Gadd “commandeered the conversation” she was having with another person at the bar. “He seemed to be obsessed with me from that moment onwards,” Harvey said. She later added, “I should never have gone in that bar.”
Morgan pressed Harvey about the fact that both Netflix and Gadd say the comedian is in possession of around 41,000 emails, 350 voice messages, 106 letters, and a number of tweets she sent to him. Harvey admitted to sending “a handful” of “jokey banter emails,” one letter, and some tweets, which can still be publicly viewed. One, dated September 1, 2014, reads, “Did you get my emails or am I emailing the wrong address?” Harvey denied having left Gadd any voicemails. “I know that he doesn’t [have 350 voice messages from me]. Unless he was taping me in the Hawley Arms. I didn’t phone him,” she said. Morgan then asked, “Are you challenging him to reveal his evidence?” “No, I would challenge him to leave me alone,” Harvey replied.
Harvey maintained that she was able to identify herself in Martha not because of the stalking, but because of the Netflix series’ title. She, like Martha, had a reindeer toy when she was a child: “That bit is true…. It was a joke. So I have inadvertently penned the name of the show.”
Morgan asked Harvey to fact-check a number of other details from the series. She claimed to have only gone to one of Gadd’s comedy shows and said that she had never heckled him. Harvey also denied contacting Gadd’s parents, loitering outside his home, or attacking his girlfriend: “I don’t think he had a girlfriend; I think he’s homosexual. But no, I have never been to his house or attacked any girlfriend or anything like that.” Unlike the character of Martha in Baby Reindeer, Harvey never sexually assaulted Gadd or went to prison after pleading guilty to stalking and harassment, she said.
Gadd has previously acknowledged taking creative liberties in Baby Reindeer. Some details have been “tweaked slightly to create dramatic climaxes,” he told The Guardian. “It’s very emotionally true, obviously: I was severely stalked and severely abused. But we wanted it to exist in the sphere of art, as well as protect the people it’s based on.”
Harvey asserted that Netflix and Gadd “are lying” in their presentation of the series. “They have billed it as a true story; so has he. And it’s not,” she said, before sharing a message for the show’s creator: “Leave me alone, please. Get a life. Get a proper job. I am horrified at what you’ve done.” Harvey also shared that she would be taking legal action, saying, “I wouldn’t be suing if I thought there were 41,000 emails out there.”
At another point, Morgan asked Harvey, who copped to having had “four to six” different email accounts and four phones in her past, if she was ever in love with Gadd. “Piers, is that a serious question?” Harvey replied. “No.” In fact, she claimed that Gadd once propositioned her: “He asked me to sleep with him…. I gave him the brush-off big-time, I think…. I don’t fancy little boys without jobs.”
Although Harvey told Morgan that she tells “white lies if I absolutely have to,” she said she would “possibly” be amenable to taking a lie detector test. In the interview’s final moments, Morgan asked Harvey to address the camera, leading her to conclude, “You need to make up your own mind, but my mind is made up. He’s a liar.”
In the aftermath of his hit show, Gadd has implored viewers to stop searching for the real-life people behind his characters, also telling Vanity Fair that the trauma of his experience lingers. “When it comes to stalking, you can never really escape,” he said. “There’s always the nugget of worry in the back of your head.”
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