“I didn’t write him the emails…I think he probably made them up himself”

Lina PortmanJune 2, 2024

2 3 minutes read

The woman who allegedly inspired Richard Gadd's Netflix megahit “Baby Reindeer” has denied being a stalker.

Fiona Harvey, who is said to have inspired Gadd's stalker Martha character, appeared on Piers Morgan's YouTube show “Piers Morgan Uncensored” in a pre-recorded interview on Thursday evening UK time, where she told Morgan that she was taking legal action against Netflix and Gadd and the truth will come out during the legal process.

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“I didn’t write him the emails,” she told Morgan, denying she sent more than 41,000 emails and 100 letters to Gadd while allegedly stalking him.

When Morgan asked who sent the emails to Gadd, Harvey replied: “I think he probably made them up himself, I have no idea.”

She also described the situation as “obscene” and “horrible”, while claiming that she had not watched the program but that her friends and a number of journalists who had approached her had told her about scenes of this one.

“It's a work of fiction, it's a work of hyperbole,” Harvey said during the hour-long special, which attracted more than 500,000 viewers on the Morgan channel when it was broadcast for the first time.

Harvey admitted to knowing Gadd, having met him at the infamous Hawley Arms pub in Camden (best known as Amy Winehouse's favorite pub), where Harvey said he ordered a lemonade rather than the Diet Coke that Martha requested in the series.

She also admitted to nicknamed Gadd “baby reindeer”, which she said became a “joke” after he “shaved his head”, and that he once offered to “hang up her curtains ”, a scene that is depicted almost verbatim in the show.

While Harvey repeatedly denied sending Gadd tens of thousands of emails (“How long would that take to type?” she asked), at one point she admitted: “I think there may have been a few emails. »

“Baby Reindeer,” which launched on Netflix last month and quickly rose to the top of the streamer’s list of most popular shows, is a limited series from Clerkenwell Films. It's based on Gadd's live show in which he tells the true story of his attempts to transition from bartender to comedian – including how he ended up being stalked for six months by a customer and sexually assaulted by a man from the entertainment industry. he had hoped it would guide him.

Gadd claimed he changed enough details about his stalker, named Martha on the show and played by Jessica Gunning, to ensure she wouldn't be recognized, but fans quickly began scouring the internet and identified a woman named Fiona Harvey as a possible candidate.

In the series, Martha is portrayed as a Scottish fantasist who claims to be a high-powered lawyer with impressive political contacts, but in real life she was a pitiful character convicted of stalking. Over the course of six months, she sends Gadd's character Donny thousands of emails, targets his parents and attacks his girlfriend.

Harvey, who is Scottish and studied law, is believed to have received a police warning for stalking.

Harvey told Morgan in the interview, “Even if the email thing was true, the rest is not,” adding that she had never destroyed a bar or been convicted of stalking, like Martha is in the series.

She said she first realized she was at the center of Gadd's work when she saw an advertisement for his show at the Edinburgh Festival (on which “Baby Reindeer is based”) in which he held up a newspaper article about a previous harassment incident that Harvey allegedly moved on and she saw the name of the show.

Morgan pointed out that, given that Harvey was identified almost immediately after the series aired on Netflix, the streamer and Gadd's duty of care to Harvey had been “a spectacular failure.”

Netflix declined to comment. Representatives for Clerkenwell and Gadd did not respond Variety at press time.

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