Mike Blake/Reuters
The woman who claims Netflix hit show Baby Reindeer’s stalker “Martha” was based on her has scored a major legal victory over the streaming service.
Fiona Harvey is suing Netflix for $170 million in damages, claiming her life has been ruined by people connecting her to “Martha,” who stalks and sexually assaults failing comedian “Donny Dunn.” “Dunn” is played by the show’s creator Richard Gadd—who says that “Martha” was inspired by his real-life experience of being obsessively stalked by a woman 20 years his senior. The show opens by saying “This is a true story.”
In real life, Harvey says she is a Scottish lawyer 20 years older than Gadd who met him in a London pub where he worked while he was a failing comedian, asked him to “hang my curtains,” then pursued him obsessively with direct messages and emails littered with spelling errors which called him “Baby Reindeer”—an almost exact parallel to the show. But Harvey claims the show wrongly portrays her as a convicted stalker who served time in prison, stalked a police officer, both sexually and physically assaulted Gadd and sat outside his home 16 hours a day.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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