Richard Gadd on Baby Reindeer — the shocking truth behind the Netflix hit

When I met Richard Gadd in an east London café last month, he bought us coffees and found a table without attracting any attention. He looked like just another skinny thirtysomething man with an on-trend boyish haircut, wearing a stripy T-shirt. A month later, 14 million people have pored over every detail of the worst thing that has happened to him.

Gadd’s drama Baby Reindeer is No 1 on Netflix, and it turned viewers into detectives set on working out what in it is true and who its real-life characters are. It even inspired an Aldi advert.

It’s the story of how a woman Gadd felt sorry for became his stalker. At first everyone at the pub where he worked “thought it was funny that I had an admirer”, he told me. Then she started following him, waiting for him outside his flat and bombarding him with thousands of messages. In real life this went on for four and a half years (in the show it’s six months).

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But it’s not only that. What makes Baby Reindeer so original and often painful to watch is how Gadd, a 34-year-old comedian who calls his character Donny in the show, blames himself for encouraging the stalking because of what happened to him previously. “I made so many bad mistakes, behaving with a certain degree of vanity. I wanted to own up to them,” he told me with an intense look.

When Gadd meets his stalker, who in the show is called Martha, he is in a state of trauma after being groomed, drugged and raped by an influential figure in the comedy world who promised him a job on a big show. His self-esteem is so low, and his comedy career so non-existent, that he is flattered Martha is taking an interest in him, even if she is overweight and penniless (despite claiming to be a hotshot lawyer on texting terms with Gordon Brown).

Gadd says he was careful to make Martha unrecognisable but the show piqued the curiosity of viewers and a trainee solicitor has been identified as having sent tweets similar to those on the show. She says she will be doing a television interview telling her side of the story. A lawyer called Laura Wray has also claimed that the real Martha stalked her and her family too.

Meanwhile, the comedy writer and director Sean Foley has been falsely identified as the abuser, partly because he bears a physical resemblance to the actor Tom Goodman-Hill, who plays him. The author Richard Osman said on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast this week that “people in the industry know who that person is”. Gadd has said such speculation is not the point of the programme.

When I met Gadd, I pressed him on whether he felt wary about revealing such personal details — and reliving the experience by writing about it. “If people see it they will know almost everything about me,” he said, sounding remarkably calm at the prospect. “They might judge, they might not agree, and that innately comes with some degree of anxiety, but that’s what I signed up for. You hate Martha a lot of the time and a lot of the time you hate me.”

Yet he had no hesitation about turning it into a drama: “Making shows about it was all I had — and there was definitely catharsis in talking about it. When it was going on it was so relentless I remember crying in frustration. Through performing it, you gain ownership and an ability to think about it in a different way, especially after it has been kept inside for so long — that’s particularly true with sexual abuse.” He did, however, ban his parents, who still live in Fife, where he grew up, from watching it — and he pays for their Netflix so he will know if they do.

What he was anxious about, though, was whether I felt it was a good show, repeatedly asking me what I thought of it, with a searching expression. It’s based on two live shows he performed at Edinburgh: Baby Reindeer in 2019 and Monkey See, Monkey Do, which won the 2016 Perrier award and was about the sexual assault. “That’s an insecurity of mine, I wanted to keep the energy and pace of the live show,” he said.

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Before he performed Baby Reindeer at Edinburgh, he did worry. “I thought people would hate me, there would be picket lines,” he said. “So I was surprised when it was embraced. The adrenaline of feeling like the audience is on your side is addictive.”

The show has also raised awareness of stalking and its low prosecution rates: only 6.6 per cent of reports of stalking in England and Wales result in a charge, and just 1.4 per cent of cases end in the stalker being convicted, with victims often dismissed or made to feel paranoid.

When Gadd went to the police about Martha, they found it difficult to believe that he was being threatened by a woman. “When a man gets stalked it can be portrayed in films and television as a sexy thing, like a femme fatale who gradually becomes more sinister,” he told me. “It doesn’t carry as much threat of physical violence, is less common and can be trivialised. I was physically scared because I didn’t know how far she could take it — she could have a knife — but I did think how terrifying it would be if she was a tall, scary man.”

He had mixed feelings about even going to the police. “I felt a great deal of empathy for the real-life Martha. I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.” In the show she receives nine months in prison and a five-year restraining order after Gadd trawls through her messages to prove she was a threat. In real life he can’t say too much about the real Martha other than “it is resolved”.

After his live shows, Gadd received messages from others who were stalked and he advised them to speak to the charities We Are Survivors and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. He thinks men, in general, find it harder to ask for help. “Men tend to exist in a prism of self-denial, that’s how they tend to react to anything they can wrongfully see as a dent to their masculinity or male pride.”

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In the show, he dates a trans woman whom he meets online (played by the trans actress Nava Mau). Gadd is bisexual and Teri is based on someone he dated “during the messiness of my early twenties”. In Monkey See, Monkey Do he said that his rape led to a “masculinity crisis” — until then he had assumed he was straight.

Now he is single and less quick to trust new people. “I used to enter situations with such abandonment, never thinking ahead and throwing my trust into people, and I got burnt,” he said. “Now getting close to people can be hard.” He has had “every type of therapy” and described what happened to him as “post-traumatic stress”.

Given the nature of Baby Reindeer, it is perhaps no surprise that Gadd wants to focus on writing fictional drama. Before all this, he was a writer on Sex Education and he has now written a six-part drama for the BBC called Lions about a toxic relationship between two brothers over 40 years. Writing for television is what he’s always wanted to do.

Having seen what Gadd has been through, I felt relieved when he told me with a grin that he was “all right at the moment, I think. It’s been an intense time but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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