Although she has done several media interviews since the launch of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer premiere, the inspiration for Martha, Fiona Harvey, appeared for the first time on video for a Piers Morgan interview.
Almost immediately after the Netflix premiere of < em>Baby Reindeer , Fiona was exposed on social media as the inspiration for Martha, as viewers swiftly cross-referenced social media posts with show details.
For example, she once tweeted to show creator Richard Gadd that she needed him to “hang her curtains,” a significant show element. Soon after she was outed, Fiona took to Facebook to deny that she knew Richard Gadd but also said that he stalked her. She posted many long, rambling rants and even insulted Jessica Gunning, the actress who portrayed Martha.
Fiona starts the Piers Morgan interview by claiming she hasn’t watched the show. She says the experience has been “horrendous” for her, and people are calling her and giving her death threats.
Martha claims she has only met Richard Gadd “2 or 3 times” and doesn’t know him. She learned about Baby Reindeer five years ago when it was a play.
After excessively posting about the show on Facebook for two weeks, Fiona says she left Facebook yesterday.
Did Richard Gadd purposefully set Fiona up to garner the world’s ire? Fiona certainly thinks so. When shown a clip of someone offering up that opinion, Fiona agreed. She went on to speculate that Richard Gadd wanted someone to take the attention off of him to cover up “rape allegations.”
To our knowledge, Richard Gadd has never been accused of rape, but Fiona may have been speaking about the rape arc of the show. Since this was a vital part of the show, it’s unclear what point she’s trying to make with this. Both the stalker and the abuse story were intertwined.
Did Richard Gadd purposefully set Fiona up to garner the world’s ire?
Fiona certainly thinks so. When shown a clip of someone offering up that opinion, Fiona agreed. She went on to speculate that Richard Gadd wanted someone to take the attention off of him to cover up “rape allegations.” To our knowledge, Richard Gadd has never been accused of rape.
Although Fiona has referred to Jessica Gunning, who played Martha, as “fat and ugly” in online posts and in previous interviews, she tells Piers Morgan that the only difference between the two of them is that Jessica is 18 years younger than her.
Fiona does admit that she had a baby reindeer that inspired the title of the show, but insisted that it “was a joke.”
In the show, Donnie Dunn follows Martha home and looks through her window; Fiona says that “categorically didn’t happen.”
In a special called “Baby Reindeer | The (True) Backstory” published on AfricaonNetflix’s YouTube account, Richard Gadd sits down and says “41,000 emails, 350 voice messages, 744 tweets, 48 Facebook messages, 4 fake Facebook account, 106 pages of letters, and one cup of tea.” It should be noted that in the special, he does not directly accuse the real Martha of sending this precise amount of messages to him, it’s only implied.
In today’s interview, Piers Morgan confronts Fiona with some of these exact numbers. Fiona not only denies these exact numbers, but claims that she didn’t “send him anything.” She immediately contracts her statement that she didn’t send him “anything,” by admitting that she might have sent him a few “jokey banter emails, but that was it.”
Piers then confronts her with the public tweets she sent Richard, which anyone could see. Backed into a corner, Fiona says she only tweeted him 18 times. Piers tells her that it’s still a lot, and she again contradicts an earlier statement. Fiona began the interview claiming that she didn’t really know him but now claims that the reason she tweeted him was that they were friends and would banter.
She also admitted to writing Richard Gadd one letter after she read an interview in The Guardian about his rape. She still maintains that she never sent Richard a Facebook message.
As for the “sent from iPoenh” that often appeared at the end of Martha’s emails in the show, which implied that she was pretending to have an iPhone, and also not spell-checking, Fiona claimed that she was not a tech wiz and wouldn’t know how to pretend. Instead of further explaining to Fiona that people believe she typed in the “sent from my iPhone” messages and usually mistyped them in order to make it look like an iPhone when she did not, Piers moved on. Fiona said that she only has a flip phone but her “other phone” was packed away because she recently moved. Again, this is an odd explanation as most people never pack away their main phone while they move. We usually keep our phones on us 24/7, regardless of the scenario.
Fiona Harvey says she is ready for all of her electronic messages to be exposed in discovery if she sues Richard Gadd and/or Netflix for defamation.
At this point, Richard Gadd and Netflix claimed to have tried to obscure Martha’s true identity. Obviously, it didn’t work, but part of the obscurification involved mixing in fictional details along with the truth.
Works that are based on true stories are not documentaries.
However, the show had enough true things to lead people to quickly find Fiona Harvey.
Although she isn’t articulating her points well, Fiona seems to be saying that because people were able to connect her to the Martha character and because she did not do everything that is depicted in the show, she has been defamed.
This wasn’t meant to suggest that she WAS defamed, but an attempt to untangle what she’s trying to argue as she is constantly contradicting herself and stumbling over her own logic.
Things Fiona says she never did that Martha did on the show:
– Never heckled Richard Gadd
– Never attacked Richard’s girlfriend
– Never went to his house
– Never sat outside his house
– Didn’t know where he lived
– Never contacted Richard Gadd’s parents
– Never Smashed up a bar
– Never sexually assaulted him in a canal
On the show, Martha pled guilty to stalking Donny Dunn and to harassing his parents. Fiona says she’s never been to jail or prison.
Earlier, she claimed that she never got a free cup of tea and never sent him an excessive amount of communication. At one point, she even claimed to have never sent him any communication at all, but she backtracked on that position.
What does Fiona Harvey think of Richard Gadd? Well, she doesn’t mince words. Fiona thinks Richard Gadd is “psychotic.” She thought he was “all out for himself, wanted to control the bar, was very inarticulate, and full of himself.”
Fiona Harvey questions whether the rape that Richard Gadd depicted in #BabyReindeer was “real, or conceived in his mind.”
Is the “Real Martha” from Baby Reindeer dating anyone?
Fiona says she’s been in a five-year relationship with a lawyer, who thinks this situation with the Netflix show is “horrendous.” She says all of her lawyer friends agree with this sentiment.
Fiona explains the “350 voice messages” Richard mentioned by saying Richard could have taped her talking in the Hawley Arms bar.
