The woman who inspired Martha Scott, the terrifying stalker in Netflix’s hit show Baby Reindeer, has identified herself as Fiona Harvey and challenged the show’s depiction of her.
Baby Reindeer follows the harrowing experiences of Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd), a barman who is kind to a woman named Martha Scott one fateful night, leading her to develop a “suffocating” obsession with him that violently escalates.
The show’s events are allegedly based on Richard Gadd’s real life experiences with who we now know to be Fiona Harvey — though she has sensationally denied his version of events and claimed she is the true “victim” of the story.
Fiona Harvey denies Baby Reindeer‘s allegations
Appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Harvey accused Gadd of being “a liar” and accused the depiction of her in Baby Reindeer of being a “work of fiction” and “completely untrue.”
She denied stalking Gadd, attacking his girlfriend, assaulting him or contacting his parents, and claimed she had only met him “five or six” times in her life. She also denied sending Gadd 41,000 emails, hundreds of voice messages, and 106 letters, and said the messages between them were just “banter” between friends.
“I mean, my point is, though, even if that were true, I didn’t lunge at him across the bar. I didn’t sexual[ly] assault him in a canal. I didn’t go to jail,” she said.
According to her own version of events, Harvey had sent Gadd only a few emails and tweets, and only one letter. She also denied ever being charged with or going to prison for stalking offences, and claims she only knew Gadd for a few months and that they were not friends — despite her earlier comments.
In fact, she says that at the time she was in a five-year relationship with a lawyer.
However, she did admit to owning four mobile phones and multiple email addresses, as well as having a toy reindeer that she once joked shared a resemblance to Gadd.
Harvey also disputed how she and Gadd met — in the show, Donny offers Martha a cup of tea at the pub he is working at. She claims she was actually sharing a meal with someone and drinking a lemonade.
“He interrupted a conversation… he said, ‘Oh, you’re Scottish’, and basically commandeered the conversation,” she said.
“You know, I was talking to somebody. It’s pretty rich. Interrupt. So he seemed to be obsessed with me from that moment onwards.”
Harvey said she had been hounded online and received death threats from internet sleuths because of the show. She claimed she had not been contacted by Netflix’s reps, and alleged Baby Reindeer depicted her in a “defamatory” way and went so far as to claim Gadd is “psychotic”.
“I think he’s psychotic. And I think that anyone going along, being in that play and doing this to somebody, I find that behaviour outrageous,” she said.
Harvey said she will be taking legal action against both Gadd and the streaming giant.
How have Netflix and Richard Gadd responded to Fiona Harvey’s interview?
Netflix has yet to respond to Harvey’s allegations, but Netflix policy chief Benjamin King said earlier this week that the streaming giant took “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story”.
“I personally wouldn’t be comfortable with a world in which we decided it was better that Richard was silenced and not allowed to tell the story,” he added.
While Gadd hasn’t released a statement since Harvey was identified, he did say after Baby Reindeer was released that Martha (AKA Harvey) was a “victim” of a system that does not support people with mental health issues, and urged the public to leave her alone.