Fiona Harvey has emphatically denied that she did most of the things the fictional version of herself did in Netflix’s hit series Baby Reindeer—but she wasn’t terribly convincing.
Weeks after fans of the show identified her as the real-life inspiration behind Martha, the show’s stalker character, through some old tweets, Harvey had her first sit-down interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan. In the interview, which aired Thursday afternoon, Harvey officially came forward as the real-life Martha and called Richard Gadd, the writer and star of the series who plays a fictionalized version of himself, a “liar” and “misogynist” who’s profiting off her misery by embellishing their interactions with one another. Both Gadd and Netflix have said the series is “a true story.”
Baby Reindeer follows Gadd’s complicated relationship with his stalker, as he’s plagued by Martha’s constant presence and correspondence, which he says consisted of 41,000 emails, 350 voicemails, 744 tweets, 48 Facebook messages, and 106 letters. But Harvey said this week that none of that ever happened—and she plans to sue Gadd, Netflix, and anyone else who’s “going along and being in that play and doing this to somebody.”
According to Harvey, she and Gadd only met “two or three times” in real life. “I don’t lie,” she told Morgan in their interview. But she was somehow both emphatic in her denial and uncertain at the same time. Harvey told Morgan that her only message to Gadd would be, “Leave me alone please. Get a life, get a proper job,.” She added, “I am horrified at what you’ve done,” and called him “the ultimate misogynist” and “psychopath.”
However, Harvey got a bit wobbly when asked to defend herself. Questioned about whether or not she’d sent Gadd 41,000 emails, Harvey doubled down that the show is “a figure of [Gadd’s] imagination,” but later admitted, “There may have been a couple of emails,” but just “jokey banter ones.” She said that at the time, “I didn’t think [Gadd] was a complete psychopath that would attack me.”
“Even if it were true” that she’d sent Gadd 41,000 emails (“just playing devil’s advocate here,” she said), “I didn’t lunge at him across the bar, I didn’t go to jail,” as depicted in the series. Morgan pointed out that law enforcement could likely pinpoint which device the emails came from and whether it belonged to her—and now that the world has heard her voice, it could easily be determined whether or not she’d left him the 350 voicemails. His line of questioning ultimately drove Harvey to clash with her interviewer. “You’ve gone on at length for a good 10 minutes about the emails,” she said to Morgan, sounding heated.
“I wouldn’t be suing if I thought 41,000 emails were out there,” she added, with the caveat that “it wouldn’t blow the case” if that many emails were found. She also let slip that she has “four phones” and “six email addresses”—but only because she likes separate communications on different devices, she said.
As far as the alleged 350 voicemails, Harvey initially said she “doubt[s]” Gadd really has that many voicemails and said, “I’ve not phoned the guy”—but she later admitted to calling him before and even writing him a letter. If Gadd is able to provide 350 voicemails as evidence, Harvey said it’d only be because he’d taped her in the interest of drumming up media attention for his series. “He’s maybe forged things. People have forged a lot of things these days,” she said of the other 105 handwritten letters she said she didn’t write.
Keeping up with the flip-flopping theme of the conversation, Harvey first told Morgan that she’d be willing to take a lie detector test to prove that she hadn’t stalked Gadd, since “I don’t fancy little boys without jobs.” But on second thought, “A lie detector test for what?” she asked, pushing the conversation to a different topic: “They used [lie detectors] for mass murder and things. They don’t use them that much.”
In all, Harvey said the way she’s been depicted in the series is “completely untrue” and has been “very career-damaging” to her job as an attorney, ever since social media users discovered her identity. “Internet sleuths tracked me down, hounded me, gave me death threats,” she said.
“[Gadd and Netflix] are milking it for all it’s worth, for the money,” she continued, adding that the actress playing Martha, Jessica Gunning, doesn’t even look like her—a point on which many viewers have disagreed.
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