Lawsuit rains on Baby Reindeer's popularity parade | Canberra CityNews

Lawsuit rains on Baby Reindeer's popularity parade | Canberra CityNews
Jessica Gunning as Baby Reindeer’s Martha… “an absolutely terrifying performance worthy of the best actress gong.”

“It seems almost the whole world has got on board with Baby Reindeer, but one person in particular is not happy,” writes streaming columnist NICK OVERALL

Netflix’s Baby Reindeer has become one of the most talked about shows of not only this year, but arguably the decade.

Nick Overall.

The meteoric rise of this seven-part “true story” about a man and the obsessive woman who stalks him has been watched by more than 22 million people and is already in talks for an Emmy sweep.

The show has turned its creator, little-known comedian Richard Gadd, into a household name in the space of just a few weeks.

Gadd has told stories of airplane pilots coming out of the cockpit to introduce themselves to him to say just how much the show moved them.

All that’s on top of a near-perfect critical reception that’s praised his story as raw and brave.

The 35-year-old created Baby Reindeer, wrote it and played himself, confronting some intense topics head on including drug abuse, sexual assault and self-destruction that he had to partially relive to tell his story.

It seems almost the whole world has got on board with Baby Reindeer, but one person in particular is not happy.

That would be Fiona Harvey, the woman who identified herself as the real person who stalked Gadd for years.

In the show, she’s played by Jessica Gunning in an absolutely terrifying performance worthy of the best actress gong.

The script renamed her as “Martha”, with Gadd previously saying in an interview with 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.”

But after Baby Reindeer released it wasn’t long before internet sleuths tracked down the real Martha through a trail of manic tweets and newspaper articles. This was despite Gadd repeatedly telling people to stop the search.

Fiona Harvey soon had the whole world’s attention on her doorstep.

Now she’s come out saying the show is not true and is suing Netflix for around $US170 million ($A250 million) on the grounds of defamation, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and more.

That follows a bombshell interview she gave on Piers Morgan’s controversial television program that racked up 14 million views on YouTube in just four weeks.

It was an attempt to clear her name, telling Morgan she thought he would give her “a fair go”.

But it seems the interview has only made things worse, with hate piling on to the point she says it has “destroyed her life”.

Viewers can make up their own minds about the interview, but most who have watched the series will notice striking similarities to the way she’s depicted in the series.

In the time since, a British lawyer named Laura Wray has also appeared on Morgan’s program, also accusing Harvey of stalking and being obsessed with her.

Minor spoilers for those who haven’t seen it yet, but in Baby Reindeer Martha is eventually convicted of stalking and sent to prison, whereas in real life Harvey maintains that conviction never happened, the basis of her lawsuit.

Gadd has previously been open to the fact that his story included “tweaked events to create dramatic climaxes”.

Netflix has responded to all this by saying it plans to defend Gadd vigorously and his right to tell his story. Boy, does it make for a hell of a lot of publicity for the show in the meantime.

In a strange way, it feels kind of like a new twist in the Baby Reindeer saga, almost like the series has spilled out from the screen to real life for a sequel that people are still obsessively watching.

Could “Martha” cause even more trouble for Richard Gadd yet?

The court documents have now been filed.

I wonder if they were sent from her iPhone?

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor