Something about the woman on her television screen made Laura Wray feel uneasy. The lawyer, and widow of a Labour MP, was relaxing at home, captivated by the opening minutes of the Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer, particularly by the character Martha who stalks a struggling comedian.
What was it about Martha that seemed so familiar? Maybe the raucous laugh that seemed to last just a bit too long, or the way she clutched her handbag to her side when timidly entering a pub. Whatever it was about this curly-haired Scot, she reminded Laura of someone from her past. The realisation came like an electric jolt, and Laura slumped back on her sofa, open-mouthed.
For she knew Martha only too well, or rather the real Martha, who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, upended Laura’s happy life with a relentless five-year harassment campaign. It was so fierce at one stage that Laura was forced to issue staff at her Glasgow law firm with panic alarms.
After watching Netflix’s Baby Reindeer lawyer Laura Wray said: ‘I know Martha by her real name, but my jaw dropped watching the series’
In one scene from the drama Martha flips from exuberance to screaming rage in an instant. ‘That put it beyond doubt – I’ve seen her do that,’ says Laura.
Baby Reindeer, which has been watched by 13 million viewers in just two weeks, topping the Netflix charts in 30 countries, is based on the real-life experience of its creator, Richard Gadd, who plays a version of himself, an aspiring comic.
One day, Martha walks into the pub where he works and boasts of being a hotshot lawyer though, inexplicably, a broke one. Taking pity, he makes her a cup of tea. So begins the start of a terrifying obsession.
Soon she is emailing Gadd hundreds of times a day, turning up outside his house and harassing his family and friends.
Over a period of four-and-a-half years, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages.
The series also hints at Martha’s previous history of stalking. Gadd’s character Donny is seen googling her and finding a newspaper article – fictionalised for the show – with the headline: ‘Sick stalker targets barrister’s deaf child.’
Gadd has insisted the character of Martha was so well disguised in his script that the real-life person she was based on ‘would not recognise herself’. But for Laura – the ‘barrister’ referred to in those fake headlines – the shocking recognition of the woman who had terrorised her family, including her severely disabled son Frankie, was almost instant.
Nor did it take long for internet sleuths to uncover the real Martha and target her with abuse online.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday yesterday, the woman – whose identity we have chosen not to disclose – claimed the Netflix show amounted to ‘bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune’ and that she had received ‘death threats’ from Gadd’s supporters. The comedian, she said, was ‘using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now’.
But while ‘Martha’ may be keen to paint herself as a victim, for Laura that is a tad ironic.
If anything, Laura’s nightmare eclipsed that of Gadd. At one stage ‘Martha’ made a death threat against her husband, Jimmy Wray, then MP for Glasgow Baillieston.
But the final straw came in 2002 when the woman falsely accused the couple of assaulting Frankie, then nearly four years old, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. ‘I know Martha by her real name, but my jaw dropped watching the series,’ said Laura, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday for the first time about her ordeal
‘It brought so many things back to me that I’d forgotten. She did the same to me, made my life a nightmare. He [Gadd] has got her spot-on. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. I felt sorry for her. Everybody she’s come across and pestered the life out of has felt the same, it seems.’
The real ‘Martha’, now 58, is from a middle-class family who lived in a village near Stirling.
She was a law graduate and first came into Laura’s orbit in October 1997, when Laura was persuaded to give her a two-week trial at her company. ‘She told me a real hard-luck story about how she had no family support and how she got her law degree and was looking for a traineeship, but nobody would give her one,’ says Laura.
‘I had my reservations. She was terribly upfront, telling me all this very personal stuff. Before we even met, she sent me a postcard congratulating me on my engagement to Jimmy. But basically, I felt sorry for her.
‘Once she started with us she was rude to everyone. Once she threw a book across the room and hit a member of staff on the head. One day, she manned a phone line and we discovered she was recommending rival solicitors.
Jessica Gunning who plays Martha on Baby Reindeer, which follows the character as she stalks a struggling comedian
‘She also shouted at Karen, one of my secretaries, and demanded she drop everything else she was doing for me and instead do something for her immediately.
‘Then she began threatening people and screaming, like in Baby Reindeer when she goes from being quite pleasant to shouting, ‘Don’t speak to me like that!’
‘She did the same [in my office] and I told her, ‘We’re a business I can’t have that kind of behaviour.’ I fired her after a week. She was furious and threatened that she’d do this, that and the other to me.
‘She then ran from my room screaming that she was not going to leave and that she was calling the Law Society. She was saying that everyone in the legal world disliked me and that my staff were useless. Then she started shouting, ‘Jimmy Wray will rue the day’.
‘Some of the girls in the office were shaking and upset and thought she was going to attack me or some of the other staff. Eventually she was escorted out, still calling me vile names, and was later spotted circling the office in her car.’
Soon she was bombarding Laura with threatening phone calls saying ‘I’ll get you’, and disparaging her to other solicitors, her family, friends and political associates of her husband, among them Donald Dewar, Scotland’s inaugural First Minister.
In September 2001, the woman even left a message on her MP’s answering machine, threatening to kill Jimmy. Feeling ‘genuinely sorry’ for her, Laura tried to ignore it. She says: ‘Back then there wasn’t legislation about stalking or harassing.
‘There was no obvious right of recourse for me. The only thing I could have done was sued for defamation but there was no point, she had no money and the only other option was using civil procedure which wasn’t really designed for that kind of thing.’
Yet her reserves of compassion would soon run dry.
Things escalated when Laura started a course at the University of Strathclyde the following month to get some additional qualifications. On the first day, she bumped into her stalker – staring at her across a room, her gaze like a harpoon. ‘She kept turning up now and again at lectures I went to. She was just suddenly there.
‘Quite a few times she came and stood beside me as students waited for the lecture room doors to open. I have recollections of her right next to me – almost breathing over me. It was very unnerving, and I was frightened. I had to get some of the other students to walk me to my car.
‘I went to see a professor and explained everything and he looked up the list and said she’s not actually registered as a student. But the university ignored me and did nothing.’
The university later apologised, admitting that the woman had, in fact, been a student but had been permanently excluded for her behaviour towards other students and staff.
But it was in April 2002 that her behaviour finally crossed a line for Laura. She arrived home with Frankie, then nearly four, to find two social workers at her door.
‘[The woman] had claimed we hit our son and I was forced to explain all the background,’ Laura says. ‘The social workers thankfully believed me but it was just dreadful, and I was absolutely furious.
‘This is a child who couldn’t walk or speak, couldn’t do anything for himself. To think that someone could suggest we would do this [harm him] is vicious and cruel.
‘It was all well and good to write someone off as mentally ill and just ignore the harassment. But the final thing was Frankie, and I wasn’t having that.’
Laura applied to the courts for a restraining order, which was granted the following day.
Gadd has insisted the character of Martha was so well disguised in his script that the real-life person she was based on ‘would not recognise herself’
For Laura and her family, it gave them long-awaited peace. But over the years she would occasionally find herself wondering what happened to her stalker. Did she target others? Did she get the help she needed?
And then came Baby Reindeer. ‘I feel sad that she managed to slip through the cracks for so long when she’s clearly unwell,’ Laura says.
She’s dismayed, too, that the woman has now been identified on social media as a result of the Netflix show – despite Gadd’s insistence that he had obscured her identity.
‘He’s had an Edinburgh Fringe show that featured this story and now he’s got this hit series on Netflix and absolutely good luck to him, but it must have occurred to him that people were bound to speculate on who Martha is – and whether she’s done this to anyone else,’ says Laura.
‘They could have changed things without diluting the content, but they’ve made it so realistic.
‘They have portrayed her absolutely spot on, it is so obviously the woman who stalked me. It is so uncanny.’
Additional reporting: Daisy Graham-Brown
James Parker is a UK-based entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to the West End, he offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
