Is 'Baby Reindeer' Based on a True Story? What Happened to the Real-Life Martha and Who Is Fiona Harvey?

Baby Reindeer is Netflix’s latest surprise sensation. The British limited series has climbed to the top of the streaming service’s daily top 10 chart on the strength of word-of-mouth, as people recommend the riveting, based-on-a-true-story psychological thriller to their friends. And as it achieves meme status, viewers have been wondering about the real story behind the show. Let's dig in. 

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What is Baby Reindeer about? 

Baby Reindeer may sound like a cute Christmas movie, but it’s actually a very dark, thematically and tonally complex drama. It’s created by and stars Scottish comedian Richard Gadd, who based the show on disturbing events that really happened to him when he was younger.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a bartender and aspiring comedian living in London. He’s lonely and depressed and has very low self-esteem. He meets Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), an obviously mentally unwell woman, when she comes into his bar. He feels empathy for her, and she takes a liking to him. But it very quickly escalates to obsession, as she starts spending hours in the bar every day and emailing him incessantly when she’s not in the bar, often with sexually suggestive messages. 

But even though he’s uncomfortable with her behavior, Donny indulges in the attention. As her obsession intensifies, Donny finds out that she served prison time for stalking, and his attempts to get her to leave him alone fail—until they don’t. And when Martha is gone, he becomes obsessed with her. As the story continues, we find out more about Donny’s traumatic past that led to his own mental health issues. And it culminates in closure on his toxic relationship with Martha.

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Is Baby Reindeer based on a true story?

Baby Reindeer is adapted from two semi-autobiographical one-man shows Gadd wrote and performed: 2016’s Monkey See Monkey Do, which dramatized his experience being sexually abused by an older man he thought was helping him with his career, and 2019’s Baby Reindeer, which told the stalking story.

Gadd says that everything in the show is “emotionally 100% true” and based on something that actually happened—“I was severely stalked and severely abused”—even if it happened quite differently in real life than how it plays out on the show. The chronology has been adjusted, and events have been “tweaked slightly to create dramatic climaxes,” Gadd explained to The Guardian.

“It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met,” Gadd told Variety. “But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television. And obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult. So you have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”

How did things end between Richard Gadd and his real-life stalker?

Like he does in the show, Gadd eventually went to the police about his stalker. He talked about it a little bit in an interview with British GQ, saying, “The first thing the police should do is try to preserve the safety of the person who is making the report rather than going through a long, arduous process to work out whether they should believe them or not.” This is sort of what happens to Donny, as the police alternate between taking him seriously and not. 

In an interview with The Times, Gadd said the issue with his stalker is “resolved,” adding that he had mixed feelings about how it happened. “I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison,” he said.

Who is the real-life Martha from Baby Reindeer and where is she now?

Earlier in his press run, Gadd told Variety that he couldn't talk about the real person on whom Martha is based for legal reasons. Nor could he give viewers any insight into what happened to the real Martha. But he did say that he's not worried about her trying to contact him after the success of the show. “Due to where things ended in real life, it’s not a concern for me,” he said. 

Gadd also said he has no idea how she would react to Baby Reindeer on Netflix. “Her reactions to things varied so much that I almost couldn't predict how she’d react to anything,” he told GQ. "She was quite an idiosyncratic person. We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself.”

Since then, a woman named Fiona Harvey, a lawyer from Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, has stepped forward to identify herself as the inspiration for the character after internet sleuths had targeted her as the alleged stalker. 

How has Fiona Harvey responded to Baby Reindeer?

The Daily Mail published an interview with Harvey (without naming her at that point), and she told the outlet that Gadd is "using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now. I'm the victim. He's written a bloody show about me."

Then, on May 9, she sat for an interview with Piers Morgan on his YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored.

“The real-life Martha from Baby Reindeer breaks cover and gives me her first TV interview about the smash hit Netflix show,” Morgan teased the interview on X. “Fiona Harvey wants to have her say & ‘set the record straight.’ Is she a psycho stalker?”

The following day, he posted a trailer to the conversation. 

Prior to the segment airing, Harvey spoke to Scottish website Daily Record about the interview saying she wasn't "happy" with it. "It was very rapid to try to trip me up. He did it fast paced to catch me off guard," she said (via Business Insider). 

"It seemed to me that I was set up. I feel a bit used," she added. "He asked me if I loved Richard Gadd and I said 'you've got to be joking.'"

The segment has since aired, and in the nearly hourlong interview, Harvey revealed, among other things, that she hasn't watched the show. “It’s taken over enough of my life," she said. "I found it horrifying, misogynistic…it’s been absolutely horrendous. I wouldn’t give credence to something like that.” 

She's heard plenty about the series from reporters, however, including that Gadd's alleged stalker sent him 41,000 emails, hundreds of voice messages and handwritten letters—all of which Harvey denied ever doing. According to her interview with Morgan, she only sent Gadd a "handful" of emails, never texted him, tweeted at him maybe 18 times, never sent him a single Facebook message and wrote him one letter. 

She also revealed that she has a lawyer boyfriend of five years and that she's planning to take legal action against both Netflix and Gadd. When Morgan pointed out that it would be easy for a legal team to prove whether she was lying about how much she contacted Gadd, Harvey agreed, suggesting she wasn't concerned about the possibility because she wasn't lying.

"I think he's psychotic," she said of the show creator. Given a chance to send him a direct message, she said, “Leave me alone, please. Get a life. Get a proper job.”

Netflix commented on the controversy on Wednesday, May 8, prior to the airing of Harvey's interview with Morgan. Benjamin King, the streamer’s Senior Director of Public Policy for UK and Ireland, said (via TVLine), “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.”

Online sleuths had found social media profiles belonging to Gadd’s former stalker almost out of the gate. But Gadd himself has asked fans to stop digging, saying in an Instagram Story on April 22, "Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.” 

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