Baby Reindeer On Netflix

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Have any of you watched “Baby Reindeer” on Netflix?

I was checking Netflix for something to watch when I came across this limited series. Having no idea what it was about, I began to watch it.

Baby Reindeer may be fictionalized, but it is based on actual events from the life of the creator, Richard Gadd. The comedian plays a version of himself, Donny Dunn, in the show, and recounts being stalked by a middle-aged woman he calls Martha.

How The Story Begins On Screen:

Aspiring comedian Donny Dunn works as a bartender in a London pub. The woman they call Martha comes in and sits down on a stool. He asks what she wants to drink, and she says she can’t afford anything.

So he offers Martha (portrayed by actress Jessica Gunning) a cup of tea to cheer her up. This small act of kindness encourages Martha to believe they’re in a relationship.

The whole thing gets bizarre, so one day Donny follows her home. She has told him that she’s a successful attorney, but he finds her living in somewhat squalid conditions.

Martha becomes more unhinged and violent. She turns her anger on Donny’s girlfriend, then on his parents.

She obtains his email and stalks him for four years, calling him “Baby Reindeer.”

The situation spirals out of control. Over multiple years, he said that she sent him more than 41,000 emails, 744 tweets, 100 pages of letters, and 350 hours of voicemails.

She says he’s lying.

He will wonder down the line if he somehow encouraged her actions with that first free drink.

The plot thickens.

Baby Reindeer is both unsettling and terrifying. It involves events you won’t want to dwell on. Yet for some reason I just can’t explain, it is nearly impossible to look away.

Sexual Assault:

Years earlier, Donny was being mentored by TV writer Darrien O’Connor, who said he’d help advance his career. O’Connor supplied Donny with drugs and then sexually assaulted him.

Donny doesn’t run from this. Instead, he keeps going back. He’s still clinging to the idea that Darrien said he had talent. And perhaps this really was his best shot at a career as a comedian.

His stand-up show, Monkey See, Monkey Do, won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016. The show was based on Gadd’s experiences of being groomed, raped, and assaulted.

Thus, you will not see him as a choir boy.

Donny does not paint himself as a victim. He is brutally honest about himself. Sometimes disturbingly so.

Martha saw him as he wanted to be seen. He liked to make her laugh. And he gave her free drinks.

Baby Reindeer shows how difficult it can be to confront stalking. Especially if the victim already has a history of trauma.

When Donny finally went to the police, they asked him why it took him 6 months to report the stalking.

Donny says that he couldn’t understand the irony of reporting her and not Darrien.

Therein lies the emotional roller coaster he found himself on.

Fiona Harvey On Piers Morgan Uncensored:

On May 9, 2024, 59-year-old Scottish law graduate Fiona Muir-Harvey claimed to be the real-life inspiration for Martha in an interview with Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Fiona Harvey told Piers Morgan that she had not watched the series. “It isn’t my kind of drama,” she said.

Fiona Harvey says that Richard Gadd came on to her, but she rebuffed him. She said she sent fewer than 10 emails to him. “Just jokey banter emails,” she told Morgan.

Almost everything he says about her, she in turn says about him. Contrary to what’s depicted on the show, Harvey claims she has no criminal record.

On June 6, 2024, Fiona Harvey sued Netflix for $170 million, alleging that Netflix defamed her. She claims that the show has “viciously” destroyed her.

What Richard Gadd Said:

Gadd, a struggling Scottish comedian, maintains that he went to great lengths to protect her identity. But internet sleuths tracked her down after watching Baby Reindeer.

Richard Gadd told Variety that the events of the series are “all emotionally 100 percent true.”

It’s about hating yourself more than you hate your abuser…

In response to all the speculation, Gadd tweeted: “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”

“I wanted to show the nuances of the human condition, really,” Richard Gadd told This Morning right after the series hit Netflix.

“I wanted to show that people are a mixture of good and bad, and I think stalker stories usually tend to be one person is good, one person is bad. And I wanted to kind of get away from that.”

How Stalking Is Depicted On TV:

“Stalking on television tends to be very sexed-up. It has a mystique. It’s somebody in a dark alleyway. It’s somebody who’s really sexy, who’s very normal, but then they go strange bit by bit,” Gadd says.

“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. It’s a stalker story turned on its head. It takes a trope and turns it on its head.”

***

Laura Wray, a lawyer and widow of the Scottish politician Jimmy Wray, said that she had briefly employed Harvey at her law firm in 1997. She claimed Harvey made abusive social media posts after losing her job.

So what truly is Fiona Harvey’s past? We have yet to find out.

Baby Reindeer Viewership:

Baby Reindeer debuted at number 5 on Netflix’s top 10 English titles for the tracking week of April 8 to 14, 2024, with 10.5 million hours viewed.

The following week, it climbed to number one and garnered 52.8 million viewing hours. On Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of 58 critics gave the series a positive review with an average of 8.7/10.

I won’t tell you that the subject matter isn’t grim and raw. It is.

I find myself wondering what ending could possibly sum up what has transpired in the first four episodes. I realize that it probably won’t be pretty.

But Baby Reindeer sums up assault and shame in 7 episodes, and it takes most of us a lifetime to explain it.

Therefore, I think it is important to watch it without flinching or turning away.

Quotes From Survivors Of Assault:

(Referring to rape) “It already is bigger than everything else. It lives in front of me, behind me, next to me, inside me every single day. My schedule is dictated by it, my habits by it, my music by it.”

– Daisy Whitney

“The silence was killing me.

“And that’s all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.”

– J. Lynn

“In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I’d built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city — a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that’s where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn’t longing, and it wasn’t insanity. It was relief. It got me through.”

– Amanda Lindhout,

“The solution I settled on was minimization and denial. I didn’t understand that when you bury a secret it seeps deeper into your bones. And once embedded it becomes so much harder to untangle from your sense of self.”

– Natalie Norris

(Image Sources: The Telegraph, Netflix, Piers Morgan Uncensored, YouTube)