Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Netflix series Baby Reindeer.
On his hit Netflix series turned solo play Baby reindeerScottish comedian Richard Gadd tells the harrowing true story of how his experience of being stalked forced him to confront buried trauma.
Playing a fictionalized version of himself named Donny Dunn, Gadd uncovers the years-long campaign of stalking and harassment he suffered at the hands of a middle-aged woman he refers to by the pseudonym Martha (played with chilling intensity by Jessica Gunning ) while struggling to become a stand-up and writer in London. As depicted on the show, the stalking began after Gadd was groomed, repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped by an older TV industry mentor (called Darrien on the show and played by Tom Goodman-Hill) – an ordeal that left him reeling emotionally. , questioning her sexuality and struggling with extreme self-loathing. Still, Gadd doesn’t shy away from his own complicity in what happened to Martha, frequently painting himself in a negative light as the story unfolds over the course of seven episodes.
“It would be unfair to say she was a horrible person and I was a victim. That didn’t seem true,” he said. The Guardian in 2019, following the sold-out inaugural season of Baby reindeer to play. “I did a lot of things wrong and made the situation worse. I wasn’t a perfect person [back then]So it doesn’t make sense to say yes.”
When Gadd debuted his one-man show at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it had been two years since he had seen or heard from Martha. Three years earlier, while the persecution was still in full swing, he won the festival’s top prize for his comedy show. Monkey see monkey do, which explored her experience as a survivor of sexual violence. O Baby reindeer The Netflix series, which is currently in second place on the streamer’s most-watched charts following its release last week, is an amalgamation of the shows across two stages.
“It seemed like a risky thing to do — to do a ‘warts and all’ version of the story where I held my hands up for the mistakes I made with Martha,” Gadd wrote in a statement. piece that accompanied the premiere of the show. “The foolish flirting. The cowardly excuses about why we couldn’t be together. Not to mention the themes of internalized prejudice and sexual shame that underpinned it all. The graphic details of the drug use, grooming, and sexual violence I experienced just a few years before… But I also couldn’t escape the truth about what had happened to me. This was a confusing and complicated situation, but one that needed to be told, anyway.
Here’s what you should know about the real story behind Baby reindeer.
What happened to Marta?
Similar to how the show starts, Gadd said that the stalking began after he gave Martha a free cup of tea when she walked into the London pub where he worked in 2015. “At first everyone in the pub thought it was funny that I had an admirer,” he said The times. “Then she started invading my life, following me, showing up at my shows, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”
Over the next four and a half years, Gadd says Martha sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters and an assortment of strange gifts. Each email that appears in the Netflix series is a message that Gaad received in real life. She also harassed several people close to Gaad, including his parents and a trans woman (named Teri on the show and played by Nava Mau) who he began dating shortly before the stalking began.
When Gadd tried to go to the police, he discovered that the laws surrounding harassment and abuse are, in his own words, “So stupid.” Despite the show presenting Martha as having previously been convicted of similar charges, Gadd was told that he needed concrete evidence of direct threats for authorities to take any action.
“They look for black and white, good and bad, and that’s not how it works,” he said The Independent. “You can really affect someone’s life within the parameters of legality, and that’s kind of crazy.”
How are things today?
On the show, Martha ultimately receives a nine-month prison sentence and a five-year restraining order for stalking Donny. In real life, Gaad never revealed the details of how the situation was resolved, other than the fact that he had “mixed feelings” about this.
“I can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all of this,” he said The Independent. “Stalking and harassment are a form of mental illness. It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster because she is not well and the system has failed her.”
As for how Gaad’s sexual assault continued to impact his life, the ending culminates in a final sequence in which Donny shows up at Darrien’s house to confront him, only to accept an offer to work on his new show. A distressed Donny then finds himself in a bar where he is offered a drink on the house in a moment that turns his first interaction with Martha upside down.
“I think that was almost the truest scene in the entire show. What abuse does is create psychological as well as physical harm,” Gadd said. HQ. “There is a pattern where many people who have been abused feel like they need their abusers. I don’t think it was a cynical ending, but it showed an element of abuse that had never been seen on television before, which is, unfortunately, the deep-seated, negative psychological effects of the attachment you can sometimes have with your abuser.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
