Spoilers for Baby Reindeer ahead
Baby Reindeer might just be one of the most brilliant yet devastating things you’ll see on TV all year.
Initially billed – without much fanfare – by Netflix as a dramedy about a comedian with a stalker, things take an incredibly dark turn halfway through the seven-part series. Instead, it becomes a harrowing tale immersed in the complexities of abuse, trauma, mental health and shame and the impact they have on a person (with a few choice jokes, too).
What makes it even more affecting is that it’s a true story, based on the life of the comedian Richard Gadd. Much like Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You, Gadd plays himself, reenacting and reliving his own real-life sexual assault, and the depths of PTSD that follow. While Gadd plays a fictional version of himself, a mid-Fringe comedian called Donny Dunn, and he renames his real-life stalker, most of what viewers see on screen happened to Gadd in real life.
The show provides a somewhat ambiguous ending. But what happened in reality to his stalker, represented in the show by the character Martha Scott (played by Jessica Gunning) and his industry abuser, the so-called Darrien (played by Tom Goodman-Hill)?
The backstory
In the series, Gadd details how a chance encounter with a crying woman at the pub he worked in led to a years-long obsession and campaign of stalking and harassment.
Over a three-year period from 2015, she sent him more than 40,000 emails and 350 hours worth of voicemails. She also turned up repeatedly to his work, when he was on stage in comedy clubs and also harassed his parents, falsely telling police that Gadd’s dad was a paedophile.
The police dismissed Gadd’s ordeal with his stalker – as happened in real life, as he told The Guardian in 2019 during the original theatre show of Baby Reindeer: “I was getting told off for harassing the police about being harassed… I’ve been through two police investigations in my life and they’ve both been hilarious, fly-on-the-wall terrible. Honestly my advice to someone who ever thought of pressing charges would be: it’s a fucking nightmare process, and it takes years.”
In the show, Martha eventually gets arrested and ends up in court for leaving a threatening voicemail on Donny’s phone. She is charged with three counts of stalking and harassment, of which she pleads guilty, and receives nine months in prison and a five-year restraining order.
Gadd, however, is at pains to point out that his stalker isn’t an evil monster, but a vulnerable person with extreme mental health issues. Speaking with The Independent in 2019, he said: “I can’t emphasise enough how much of a victim she is in all this. When we think of stalkers, we always think of films like Misery and Fatal Attraction, where the stalker is a monstrous figure in the night down an alleyway. But usually, it’s a prior relationship or someone you know or a work colleague. Stalking and harassment is a form of mental illness. It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster, because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her.”
In reality, he hasn’t revealed the fate of his own stalker – other than he managed to get a restraining order out against her – and, according to an interview with The Times, “It is resolved. I had mixed feelings about it — I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.”
Perhaps the most shocking incident in the series doesn’t feature Martha the stalker though, and instead happens in episode four, where Donny is groomed, loaded with mind-altering drugs and then raped by an older male TV industry mentor.
This also happened to Gadd in real life, and he previously attempted to process the sexual violation through another theatre show, improbably a comedy, Monkey See Monkey Do, which won the Edinburgh Comedy award in 2016.
In 2012, as he described in the theatre show, he met a man at a party who drugged and then sexually attacked him. In the series, Darrien – a writer on the fictional show Cotton Mouth – draws him in by offering him industry contacts, and says he’ll help him get his own TV show commissioned. The pair meet frequently at Darrien’s flat, where he plies Donny with harder and harder drugs, including GHB and acid, and in a graphic scene, rapes him.
In the series, Donny eventually goes back, seemingly to confront Darrien, but when Darrien acts like nothing’s wrong – he makes him a cup of tea and offers him a writing position on his TV show – Donny leaves, without saying anything.
It’s unknown what happened to Gadd’s real abuser. But in an interview with The Guardian he said that he worked to channel his experiences into his creative theatre and TV show: “Keeping this in was really hard. And I knew the only way I’d be free of it is if I start to tell people. I don’t think anyone knows how bad it is until it happens. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I think.”
Commenting on Instagram on the release of Baby Reindeer – which charted at number one on Netflix’s most watched in the UK and US – Gadd added: “‘I am okay, for those asking. I promise.”
Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse; you can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk.
