Pity was the first emotion Richard Gadd felt when he clapped eyes on the woman who would become his stalker.
Viewed more than 13 million times in the past fortnight and reaching number one in the Netflix charts in 30 countries, including the UK and the U.S., Gadd wrote and directed the seven-part mini-series in which he stars as Donny Dunn — a version of himself — and takes its incongruous title from the pet name of Baby Reindeer given to Donny by his deranged female stalker.
The woman, who spoke to the Mail this week but whom we have decided not to name, told us she thought Gadd's script amounted to 'bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune' and that she had received online 'death threats and abuse from Richard Gadd supporters'. A sorry mess, indeed, though perhaps expected given the explosive nature of what he has called 'lightly fictionalised' material. How could he not have expected that viewers would try to identify the real people behind his outlandish characters?
The parallels between the women's lives do not stop there. In the first episode of Baby Reindeer, Gadd's character Donny is seen googling 'Martha' and discovering, via a newspaper article, that she has a previous history of stalking — just like the real woman Gadd knew.
On screen, the often ambiguous nature of their early encounters makes gripping viewing, as do Donny's often disastrous decisions about how to deal with Martha. Another key clue to her identity is referenced early on in Baby Reindeer, when Donny cracks a crude joke across the bar about helping Martha to 'hang her curtains' at home, similar to a tweet once sent by the woman to Gadd.
But the woman claimed: 'I've never owned a toy baby reindeer and I wouldn't have had any conversation with Richard Gadd about a childhood toy either.' For viewers caught up in this moral muddle, it is gripping viewing. Described by The Telegraph as 'a show that sucks you into a very troubled mind' and 'comedy-as-personal-catharsis taken to a whole new level', it won Gadd that year's Edinburgh Comedy Award and later transferred to the Soho Theatre in London for an eight-week run.
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