The woman named as a real-life stalker who inspired the series Baby Reindeer has said she will sue Netflix, and has accused the show’s writer of being “obsessed” with her.
Fiona Harvey, 58, has broken her silence after fans of the hit drama claimed to have identified her as the person who inspired the character of Martha just hours after its release last month.
In an interview with Piers Morgan Uncensored on TalkTV, she claimed no one from Netflix had contacted her, and said she had been depicted in a “defamatory” way.
Written by and starring Richard Gadd, a 34-year-old comedian, the drama charts the “suffocating obsession” of Martha towards him “which threatens to wreck both their lives”, as well as his experience of being raped by a man.
In her first time on camera, Ms Harvey claimed the series was “completely untrue” and “a work of fiction”, despite each of the seven episodes carrying the claim: “This is a true story.”
Asked if she would be taking legal action, she said she “absolutely” would “against both him and Netflix”, adding that she had instructed lawyers “in part”.
Netflix and Gadd have been contacted for comment. Gadd recently asked fans on Instagram: “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of the show.”
During the interview, Ms Harvey denied ever being at Gadd’s home, contacting his parents or sending thousands of texts and emails. But she admitted owning four mobile phones and four to six different email addresses, as well as having a toy reindeer when she was younger, as depicted in the series.
She told Morgan she was in a five-year relationship with a lawyer and had never been charged with a criminal offence. In Baby Reindeer, Martha is given a prison sentence for stalking.
Asked if it was true Gadd had offered her a free cup of tea after she first walked into the pub where he was working, Ms Harvey said she was actually having a meal with lemonade as she is diabetic, and had met him only “five or six times” in her life.
Asked if she spoke with him after first meeting him, she told Talk TV: “He interrupted a conversation… he said, ‘Oh, you’re Scottish’, and basically commandeered the conversation.
“You know, I was talking to somebody. It’s pretty rich. Interrupt. So he seemed to be obsessed with me from that moment onwards.”
Pressed on the 41,000 emails, 350 hours of voice messages, 744 tweets, 48 Facebook messages, and 106 letters she is alleged to have sent Gadd, Ms Harvey said: “That’s simply not true.”
She accepted sending him “a handful” of emails, which she numbered as “less than ten”, and sent “about 18 tweets” to him “years and years ago” as well as a letter. She said she also went to one of his comedy shows.
She was questioned about the possibility of Gadd having voice messages from her in real life, but claimed these “would be [from] taping me in the Hawley Arms”.
“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.
“On the internet, sleuths tracked me down and hounded me and gave me death threats. So it wasn’t really a choice. I was forced into this situation,” she said.
Ms Harvey told Morgan she had a “standard Scottish” upbringing, and had not told her mother about the drama.
Speaking in Parliament this week, Netflix policy chief Benjamin King said that the streamer and Clerkenwell Films, which made the show, took “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story”.
He added: “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.”
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