What IS the truth about the comedian and his female stalker whose story has gripped the world in Netflix hit Baby Reindeer? Now she tells her side of the story….

Pity was the first emotion Richard Gadd felt when he clapped eyes on the woman who would become his stalker.

He was a struggling stand-up comic working behind the bar at a pub in London when she walked in one day, boasting that she was a high-flying lawyer and yet, strangely, was unable to afford to buy herself a drink.

Feeling sorry for her, Glasgow University graduate Gadd offered her a cup of tea on the house, a kind gesture he would, one might think, bitterly live to regret.

Instead, he took that moment, and the madness which followed, and turned it into Baby Reindeer, the extraordinary hit Netflix drama which has taken the television world by storm and brought the 34-year-old overnight fame and fortune.

Viewed more than 13 million times in the past fortnight and reaching number one in the Netflix charts in 30 countries, including the UK and the U.S., Gadd wrote and directed the seven-part mini-series in which he stars as Donny Dunn — a version of himself — and takes its incongruous title from the pet name of Baby Reindeer given to Donny by his deranged female stalker.

Over four and a half years, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages from the older woman, whom he calls Martha in the show. But while the twists and turns of their highly toxic relationship have proved to be ratings gold, Baby Reindeer’s runaway success seems to have come at a price.

For while Gadd has previously claimed to have disguised his stalker’s identity to such an extent that, he has said, ‘I don’t think she would recognise herself’, it didn’t take long for internet sleuths to work out who she is.

The woman, who spoke to the Mail this week but whom we have decided not to name, told us she thought Gadd’s script amounted to ‘bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune’ and that she had received online ‘death threats and abuse from Richard Gadd supporters’.

‘He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now,’ she claimed. ‘I’m the victim. He’s written a bloody show about me.’

More, in a moment, of the Mail’s extraordinary encounter with the woman who is said to have obsessively harassed Gadd for years.

For with internet speculation at fever pitch — not just about the female stalker but also about the identity of an older male TV comedy writer who grooms and rapes Gadd’s character in Baby Reindeer — West Midlands police stepped into the fray this week after a string of false accusations and threats were made on social media against a prestigious theatre director.

A sorry mess, indeed, though perhaps expected given the explosive nature of what he has called ‘lightly fictionalised’ material. How could he not have expected that viewers would try to identify the real people behind his outlandish characters?

For the woman said to be the real-life ‘Martha’, a 58-year-old who lives alone in a council flat in central London surviving on a food budget of £30 a week, shares several key similarities with her on-screen persona. 

Indeed, Gadd’s claim that he has protected her identity by changing key details is baffling given that both women are Scottish, both studied law at university, both are around 20 years older than Gadd and both use highly sexualised language in their speech and writing.

The woman also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Martha although after watching Baby Reindeer this week she told the Mail: ‘She sort of looks like me after I put on four stone during lockdown but I’m not actually unattractive.’

The parallels between the women’s lives do not stop there. In the first episode of Baby Reindeer, Gadd’s character Donny is seen googling ‘Martha’ and discovering, via a newspaper article, that she has a previous history of stalking — just like the real woman Gadd knew.

The made-up headline shown on screen reads: ‘Sick stalker torments barrister’s deaf child’ — not exactly a million miles away from a genuine article about the woman.

In this case it was a politician whose wife gave a job to the woman, a law graduate, as a trainee solicitor before letting her go within days after becoming alarmed by her conduct. She became so concerned that staff were issued with panic alarms.

The wife said the woman’s behaviour had been bizarre and she had to be escorted from the building.

The woman was said to have filed bogus and hugely distressing complaints accusing the politician and his wife of abusing their young disabled son which led to social workers turning up on their doorstep to investigate the claims.

The wife eventually secured an ‘interdict’ — a restraining order — against her via the Scottish courts. She had previously also targeted a Scottish MP, turning up at his ‘surgeries’ and launching tirades of abuse at him.

So how did Gadd come into her orbit?

The comedian, who was born and raised in a village near Fife, and the woman who became his stalker met around a decade ago in the Hawley Arms, a trendy Camden pub once frequented by the late Amy Winehouse and her entourage.

On screen, the often ambiguous nature of their early encounters makes gripping viewing, as do Donny’s often disastrous decisions about how to deal with Martha.

In the drama, Donny admits to being intrigued by her endless chatter and to enjoying the attention he gets from her at a time when his life is not going well.

Confused about his sexuality, he flatters Martha, played by actress Jessica Gunning in the show, and flirts with her in a bid to impress his laddish colleagues. In one exchange, Donny tells Martha how young she looks and says: ‘Peter Pan needs his moisturiser back.’

The woman, meanwhile, recalls the comedian remarking how young she looked for her age — 47 at the time. He said: ‘What moisturiser do you use?’ ‘I said, ‘Oil of Ulay’ slapped on,’ she told the Mail.

Another key clue to her identity is referenced early on in Baby Reindeer, when Donny cracks a crude joke across the bar about helping Martha to ‘hang her curtains’ at home, similar to a tweet once sent by the woman to Gadd.

Speaking to The Mail, the woman also referenced the ‘curtain’ innuendo when she recalled her early encounters with Gadd in the Hawley Arms. ‘He said, ‘Can I fix your curtains?’ That’s a euphemism for saying I want to sleep with you,’ she claimed.

But she disputed some elements of the drama. On the TV show, Martha gives Donny the nickname Baby Reindeer because, she says, he reminds her of a cuddly toy reindeer she had as a child with ‘big lips, huge eyes and the cutest wee bum’.

But the woman claimed: ‘I’ve never owned a toy baby reindeer and I wouldn’t have had any conversation with Richard Gadd about a childhood toy either.’ For viewers caught up in this moral muddle, it is gripping viewing.

The Netflix series is based on Gadd’s 2019 Edinburgh Fringe one-man theatre show of the same name which was a sell-out hit, with the comedian claiming that ‘it felt like it was actively mending me’.

Yet Gadd’s experiences with a stalker weren’t the first time he had mined the depths of his private life for stand-up material.

Baby Reindeer also incorporates a real-life experience from earlier in his career, which Gadd turned into his 2016 Edinburgh Fringe show, Monkey See Monkey Do. This saw him deliver a hugely personal and harrowing account, while running on a treadmill, of being raped by a manipulative older man. 

Described by The Telegraph as ‘a show that sucks you into a very troubled mind’ and ‘comedy-as-personal-catharsis taken to a whole new level’, it won Gadd that year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award and later transferred to the Soho Theatre in London for an eight-week run.

But while his career was finally on the ascent, behind the scenes Gadd’s life was being made a misery by his stalker.

‘It felt like I’d expunged the demons of one person who had caused me so much grief, only so that she could take centre stage in his place.

‘It felt so awfully ironic,’ he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2019 to publicise his Baby Reindeer stage show.

While he acknowledged that the show might provoke his stalker, he said it was a risk worth taking, ‘a last roll of the dice’ to shine a spotlight on stalking. He also insisted that it was about highlighting that harassers needed more care than punishment. ‘She needs help,’ he said at the time, ‘but she’s not getting any. So her instability would come down the phone at me every day.’

In an interview to publicise the new Netflix series, Gadd assured The Times last week that the stalking issue was ‘resolved’.

But the woman in question, who denied being a stalker when it was put to her by The Mail, said: ‘Richard Gadd has got ‘main character syndrome’.

‘He always thinks he’s at the centre of things. I’m not writing shows about him or promoting them in the media, am I? If he wanted me to be properly anonymous, he could have done so. Gadd should leave me alone.’

She said she is considering taking legal action against him.

She is certainly not the only one to have been caught up in the fall-out from the show. Several online sleuths have wrongly identified 59-year-old theatre director Sean Foley as Gadd’s rapist, who is named Darrien O’Connor in the show and played by actor Tom Goodman-Hill.

Comments have been made about the physical likeness between Foley and Goodman-Hill. Foley’s announcement last week that he was stepping down from his role as creative director at Birmingham Rep fanned the flames further.

The director, a double Olivier award winner, revealed on X that police officers were investigating ‘all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me’.

Gadd has now begged viewers to stop trying to figure out the truth about Baby Reindeer, writing on Instagram: ‘Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.’

Ultimately, the real-life storm of controversy unleashed by Baby Reindeer is part and parcel of its ongoing success.

Despite his plea to viewers to stop being so curious, Gadd must undoubtedly be aware of this.

So one wonders how such a deft storyteller could not have foreseen the Netflix effect which amplifies the fall-out that comes from blurring fact and fiction.