Fionna Harvey, the real-life Martha of “Baby Reindeer,” has slammed Netflix and for portraying her as a stalker in a new interview with Piers Morgan, aired on Thursday May 9. She called Richard Gadd, creator and star of the series, a “misogynistic” and “psychotic.”
The series, which has accumulated 54 million views so far, tells the story of Donny, a bartender and comedian who gets stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha. The story has been deemed as based on Gadd’s real life experience with a stalker, which he refused to identify.
However, since the release of the series, fans have been interested in knowing more about the real-life Martha, and finally discover that her real-life counterpart was Fionna Harvey, a Scottish lawyer. After speaking with The Daily Report for the first time (and slamming her portrayal on the show), she also sat down with Morgan to give more insight into her side of the story.
The real-life Martha denies sending 41,000 emails, says only met Gadd ‘five or six’ times
During the interview, Morgan, in his characteristically style, confronted the lawyer with some of the alleged facts that have been circulating about the story. For example, Gadd told Netflix that he received “41,071 emails, 350 hours’ worth of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters and several gifts” from his alleged stalker.
Harvey told Morgan that she didn’t send 41,000 thousand emails, admitting that she sent “some” and saying that if someone does send that quantity of emails, “it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a stalker.”
When asked if she was in love with him, she first responded “yes,” then asking if it was a “serious question” and then saying no. “I don’t fancy him,” she repeated. Nonetheless, she did confess to dubbing Gadd “baby reindeer,” a nickname she claimed became an ongoing jest after he’d shaved his head.
She also mentioned an incident where Gadd purportedly made a suggestive proposition to “hang her curtains,” a moment almost identical to one portrayed in the show. Harvey also denied having ever smashed up a bar or been convicted for stalking, as Martha is in the show, saying it is “completey nonsense” and “defamatory.”
Morgan highlighted that since Harvey was identified almost immediately after the show premiered on Netflix, both the streaming platform and Gadd’s responsibility of care towards Harvey had experienced “a remarkable failure.”
