Baby Reindeer: the true story behind Netflix's hit stalker drama

It’s the stuff of nightmares. One tiny act of kindness – letting someone share a taxi with you, or watching someone’s bag while they go to the loo – provides a stranger with an opportunity to enter your life. And, like a parasite, they refuse to ever leave – slowly destroying your relationships, career and mental health.

This is exactly what happened to Richard Gadd, a Scottish comedian and writer who gave a free cup of tea to a woman who came into the pub where he worked. And it is now the subject of major Netflix show Baby Reindeer.

Gadd’s simple action sparked an obsession which resulted in his receiving over 40,000 emails, 740 tweets, 350 hours of voicemail, 100 pages of letters and 45 Facebook messages over the following five years from the woman. And, incredibly, there was little the police could do.

As he found out, as long as stalking isn’t obviously threatening, it’s difficult for the police to act. “The laws surrounding harassment and abuse are so stupid,” Gadd said to one paper, “because they look for black and white, good and evil, and that’s not how it works.”

So Gadd responded in the only way he knew how: by creating a one-man show, Baby Reindeer, a reference to the nickname his stalker gave him. An Edinburgh Fringe award winner, critics described the show as “haunting”. It played in London’s Bush Theatre in 2019, winning an Olivier award and was due to transfer to the West End, but never opened due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Gadd has now written and starred in the seven-part Netflix adaptation. Drawing from his own horrendous experiences, the new series, which the Standard has described as “nail-bitingly tense” and “not for the faint-hearted”, explores the life of Donny, who is being stalked by mentally unwell Martha (Jessica Gunning). Martha becomes attached to the actor-writer when he gives her a free cuppa. But she’s miserable and sympathetic as much as she is terrifying.

“Stalking on television tends to be very sexed-up,” said Gadd to Netflix’s Tudum site. “It has a mystique. It’s somebody in a dark alley way. It’s somebody who’s really sexy, who’s very normal, but then they go strange bit by bit. But stalking is a mental illness. I really wanted to show the layers of stalking with a human quality I hadn’t seen on television before.”

Baby Reindeer is strange, unsettling and thought-provoking – as well as being darkly comic in parts. Gadd depicts Donny as a failing comedian who is partially complicit in his ordeal – he initially liked Martha’s attention, even flirting with her.

The show delves into the story as it spirals out of control with the avalanche of emails, comments on Facebook and voicemails. Later in the series, it flashes back to Donny’s past traumas of being sexually abused – based on Gadd own experiences – making for a show that the Standard described as a “swirling miasma of abuse, mental illness and people doing terrible things to each other.”

In real life, Gadd was a writer and comedian, who was earning a name for making uncomfortable, irreverent works. His Edinburgh Fringe show Cheese & Crack Whores (2013) which was described by reviewers as “utterly bat-shit” and “deranged, nihilistic, self-abasing”, was about Gadd being close to a mental breakdown.

His 2013 show Breaking Gadd transferred from Edinburgh to Soho Theatre, where one reviewer called it a “comedy of relentless degradation... wholly committed to its squalid vision.” And in his 2015 Edinburgh show Waiting For Gaddot “another intense, high-concept white-knuckle ride”, he made audiences suffer by only showing up towards the very end of the show.

Monkey See Monkey Do in 2016 won the Edinburgh Comedy Award and saw Gadd run on a treadmill for the entirety of the show, as he delved into his mental state after being sexually abused, allegedly by a comedy mentor.

And, all while making these works, Gadd was dealing with a stalker. One day, unknown to him, his life would change when the real-life Martha – whose actual identity Gadd never reveals – showed up in the London pub where he was working.

“At its height it was almost unbearable,” said the comedian to Channel 4. ‘Martha’, who is about two decades older than Gadd, would turn up at his house, attend all of his shows and often heckle him, or stand up in the audience disrupting the show.

She gave him small gifts such as a hat or boxer shorts and would send non-stop messages day and night – making Gadd question whether ‘Martha’ was even sleeping. She would harass his girlfriend, a trans woman (played in the show by Nava Mau), both online and in real life, which eventually destroyed the romantic relationship.

“I could almost cut a line, with a knife and fork, through my anxiety. I could feel it emanating from my body,” said Gadd in a recent interview. In another, he said he has had “every type of therapy going” now, lives alone and is single. “I am way more cautious around people now,” he said to The Times.

But he doesn’t wholly blame ‘Martha’ and does wonder whether he could have conducted himself differently. He took her out for a cup of tea once, he says, which perhaps egged her on: “I never wanted to upset someone who was vulnerable,” he said.

“There’s an issue of co-dependency, of attachment, where this person genuinely believes that the other person is an answer to all of their problems,” said Gadd to Channel 4. “I believe that the person who stalked me was a very vulnerable character. I believe she was someone to be sympathised with.”

He went to the police but there was very little they could do. After all, on their own, Martha’s communications weren’t particularly threatening – it was the sheer number of them that made them so suffocating and invasive. According to Netflix, every one of the emails shown in the series, including “I just had an egg”, were actually sent from the stalker to Gadd.

“Abundance should be enough,” he said in one interview. “If I prodded you 2,000 times a day in the shoulder, that would be harassment.” One of the problems, Gadd has said, is that dealing with the police is a “bureaucratic nightmare” – and that their approach to these kinds of crimes need a major overhaul. He found himself trying to gather evidence that proved he was in danger, recording ‘Martha’s’ voicemails and trawling through them for signs of aggression.

He coped by starting to write Baby Reindeer, a process that took more than two-and-a-half years. “In a weird way, I first started feeling like this could be a good story during the whole ordeal itself,” said Gadd.

“It was one of the most intense periods, when I was listening to these voicemails. I’d go to sleep at night and these voicemails – her words would bounce around my eyelids. I remember thinking, ‘God, if I was ever to speak about this onstage, I’d fire the words around.’ That’s how the play was born.”

Now, Martha’s real-life counterpart has been legally prevented from approaching Gadd or anybody who knows of him, while the Netflix series, which was released two weeks ago, has gone stratospheric.

According to ABC news, it’s currently totted up 52,800,000 hours watched. It hit number one on the platform in the US just five days after its release, and continues to rank in Netflix’s top 10 TV shows in multiple countries. “It’s clearly struck a chord,” said Gadd to The Guardian. “I really did believe in it, but it’s taken off so quickly that I do feel a bit windswept.”

There’s been some backlash, too: “Is this show about exploitation starting to seem uncomfortably careless – even exploitative?” asked one article, after internet sleuths started trying to work out who Gadd’s abusers could be. “There’s nothing entertaining or fun about the worst percentage of the internet doxing women with mental health problems, or scattergunning accusations of abuse at celebrities for fun,” it continued.

“It’s baffling that neither Gadd nor Netflix saw this coming,” said another critic.

On Monday Gadd had to turn to Instagram to try and calm fans down: “People I love, have worked with, and admire (including [director-writer-comedian] Sean Foley) are unfairly caught up in speculation. Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.” Foley contacted police this week after being falsely accused of being Gadd’s abuser.

Baby Reindeer continues to chart around the world, provoking important conversations about responsibility, mental health and abuse, but the experience has forever left its mark on Gadd.

“I think about that rule that you need four things in your life to be happy. Family, love, health, career,” he told the Telegraph in 2019. “She managed to drive a freight train through every single one of those in quite an unbelievable way.”

Baby Reindeer is available to watch on Netflix now