Baby Reindeer’ s Richard Gadd is throwing his support to Netflix as the streamer defends itself against a lawsuit filed by Fiona Harvey , a Scottish lawyer who claims to be the inspiration for the series’ Martha Scott character.
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In the lawsuit, which was filed on June 6, Harvey accuses Netflix of defamation, negligence and violating her right to privacy because the show depicts “Martha” as a deranged stalker who commits sexual assault and has spent time in prison for harassment.
Seven weeks later, Gadd has submitted a declaration of support for Netflix as part of the streamer’s effort to have the suit tossed. In the 21-page letter, the series’ Emmy-nominated creator and star details his alleged history with Harvey, but reiterates that Baby Reindeer is only “emotionally true.”
He also states, point blank, that “Martha Scott is not Fiona Harvey.”
“The series is a dramatic work,” Gadd claims on Page 3. “It is not a documentary or an attempt at realism. While the series is based on my life and real-life events and is, at its core, emotionally true, it is not a beat-by-beat recounting of the events and emotions I experienced as they transpired. It is fictionalized, and is not intended to portray actual facts.
“Throughout the process of writing the Baby Reindeer play and the series, I intentionally did not refer to Harvey by name in any way. When viewers began speculating about the real-life inspirations for various characters, I urged them to stop ,” Gadd points out on Page 20. “I never intended the series to identify any real person as Martha Scott, including Harvey. Martha Scott is not Fiona Harvey. Like all characters in the series, Martha is a fictional character with fictional personality traits that are very different than Harvey’s.”
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Gadd stars in Baby Reindeer as Donny Dunn, a stand-up comic who gets entangled with a woman named Martha (played by Emmy nominee Jessica Gunning) and ends up suffering through years of stalking, harassment and threats from her, including tens of thousands of emails and hundreds of hours of voicemails.
Following the series’ Netflix release, Harvey surfaced and took issue with the depiction, most notably in a May 10 interview with Piers Morgan — an interview that Gadd acknowledges in the final page of his letter.
“I was surprised that Harvey appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored ,” he writes. “Though I have only watched certain segments, I understand she claimed that she was the inspiration for the Martha character, and that she never sent me thousands of emails nor left me any voicemails. She harassed and stalked me over several years, and since her interview,” he alleges that “other individuals have contacted me through my agents and publicists and said they were also harassed by Harvey, but all were too scared of her to come forward.”
After Harvey filed suit, Netflix released the following statement to TVLine: “We intend to defend this matter vigorously and to stand by Richard Gadd’s right to tell his story.”
Previously, the streamer’s Senior Director of Public Policy for UK and Ireland said, “We did take every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story… whilst also striking a balance with veracity and authenticity of Richard’s story, because we didn’t want to anonymize that and make it generic to the point where it no longer was his story.”
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