Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Baby Reindeer, Netflix, TV and Film
Lucy Devine
If you've been hooked to Netflix's new show Baby Reindeer - which has been well and truly wedged in the top spot for over a week now - you probably know that it's based on a true story.
The show has left viewers ‘speechless’ as it follows Richard Gadd’s real ‘warped relationship’ with his female stalker.
The comedian stars as a fictional version of himself named Donny Dunn, as he wrote the mini-series named after the name his stalker gave him.
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But which parts of the series are real and which are fabricated for the show?
We've separated the facts from the fiction.
In the Netflix show, the pair first meet after Gadd's character Donny offers Martha a cup of tea.
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He admits that he felt sorry for Martha, and when she said she couldn't afford a drink, he offers her one on the house.
This is true and kicked off a series of events which saw 'Martha' showing up at Gadd's workplace and sending thousands of emails, letters and voicemails.
“At first everyone at the pub thought it was funny that I had an admirer,” he told The Times.
“Then she started to invade my life, following me, turning up at my gigs, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”
Over four and a half years, Gadd's stalker sent 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters.
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In real life, she also sent a reindeer toy, sleeping pills, a woolly hat and boxers - something that was not featured in the Netflix series.
Netflix has confirmed that every single email Donny receives in the show is real, which means the eerie 'sent from my iPhone' is also an accurate representation of what happened.
All of the emails end in the words 'sent from my iPhone' - despite the fact she didn't have an iPhone and wasn't emailing from one.
In the series, Donny wasn't taken seriously when he first reported Martha.
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According to Gadd, it was six years before the police finally intervened in what had been happening.
“I’ve been through two police investigations in my life and they’ve both been hilarious, fly-on-the-wall terrible," he told The Guardian.
"Honestly my advice to someone who ever thought of pressing charges would be: it’s a f**king nightmare process, and it takes years.”
While the show is based on real-life events, some details have been changed to protect identities.
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Gadd spoke about this himself, explaining that 'Martha' had been disguised to such an extent that he doesn't think she'd 'recognise herself'.
“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself,” he told GQ.
“What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
It's also unclear whether the real-life Martha went to prison.
In the show, Martha leaves a voicemail with the threat she could potentially stab ‘someone’ and was arrested.
During her hearing, she was sentenced to nine months in prison and given a five-year restraining order.
But speaking about the real events, Gadd told The Independent: “Stalking and harassment is a form of mental illness. It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster, because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her."
He also added to The Times that he 'didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison'.
Baby Reindeer is available to watch on Netflix now.
If you're experiencing distressing thoughts and feelings, the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) is there to support you. They're open from 5pm–midnight, 365 days a year. Their national number is 0800 58 58 58 and they also have a webchat service if you're not comfortable talking on the phone.