After Netflix was sued by a woman who claimed that she inspired the stalker character on the series Baby Reindeer, the show’s creator, Richard Gadd, said in court papers filed on Monday that he had been stalked by the woman in real life but that the series was a “fictionalised retelling”.
In a declaration filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Gadd said the woman, Fiona Harvey, harassed him in many of the same ways the character Martha stalks Gadd’s character, Donny, on Baby Reindeer, which claims to be “a true story”.
Gadd said that in real life, Harvey visited him constantly at the bar where he worked and sent him “thousands of emails, hundreds of voicemails, and a number of handwritten letters”, some that were sexually explicit or threatening. But he also argued that Baby Reindeer is “a dramatic work”.
“It is not a documentary or an attempt at realism,” Gadd wrote in the filing. “While the series is based on my life and real-life events and is, at its core, emotionally true, it is not a beat-by-beat recounting of the events and emotions I experienced as they transpired. It is fictionalised, and is not intended to portray actual facts.”
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Gadd gave his declaration in support of a motion filed by Netflix seeking to dismiss the defamation lawsuit Harvey filed last month.
Harvey claimed in the suit that the character Martha was based on her, and that the series defamed her by portraying the character as a convicted stalker who at one point sexually assaults the character played by Gadd. In her lawsuit, Harvey said she had never been convicted of a crime and had never sexually assaulted Gadd.
Harvey’s lawsuit calls particular attention to a statement that appears on-screen at the beginning of Baby Reindeer: “This is a true story.” That statement, her lawsuit claims, is “the biggest lie in television history”. (The show’s credits state: “This programme is based on real events: However, certain characters, names, incidents, locations and dialogue have been fictionalised for dramatic purposes.”)
A lawyer for Harvey, Richard A Roth, said, “Netflix’s motion ties itself in knots”.
“Netflix and Richard Gadd indisputably admit Baby Reindeer is not a true story – the very essence of Ms Harvey’s claims,” he said in a statement to the New York Times. “After asserting – under oath – that ‘Martha’ is not Fiona Harvey, it then engages in more attacks of Ms Harvey, allegations that are irrelevant and have nothing to do with the litigation or the ‘true story’ of Baby Reindeer.”
In his court documents, Gadd describes growing fearful of Harvey and losing sleep over the “exhausting and extremely upsetting” ordeal. He describes confrontations in which he said Harvey threatened him and includes numerous quotations from emails he said Harvey sent him, some of which included racist and homophobic language.
The 21-page declaration does not suggest Harvey was a convicted stalker, but Gadd says that he was fearful enough that he went to the police. Nor does the filing suggest that Harvey sexually assaulted him in the way the Martha character assaults Donny on the show. But Gadd describes one “particularly intense period of time when Harvey often attempted to touch me in inappropriate (and sometimes sexual) ways” including pinching and touching “various parts of my body, including my bum”.
“The series is not a documentary representing literally true details and imagery,” Gadd wrote in his declaration. “It is a fictionalised retelling of my emotional journey through several extremely traumatic real experiences.
“I did not write the series as a representation of actual facts about any real person, including Fiona Harvey,” he added. “Harvey is never mentioned in the series.”
Before filing her lawsuit, Harvey went public with her complaints about Baby Reindeer, airing them in an hourlong interview on YouTube with television personality Piers Morgan.
In its own court filings, Netflix argues that Baby Reindeer is “a skilful exploration of sexual identity, sexual abuse, harassment and stalking”. It notes that “it was Harvey who thrust herself into the spotlight and identified herself as the supposed inspiration for Martha” and argues that Harvey’s claims “are a baseless attack on Netflix’s exercise of free speech.”
The company’s court papers call on the court to “strike Harvey’s complaint in its entirety”.
In an interview with the New York Times this month, Jessica Gunning, who played the Martha character in the show, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
But she said that while she was aware that much of Gadd’s work “touched on real life experience” she said: “I’m playing the character of Martha, so I’m not doing an interpretation of anybody.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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