Disclaimer: This article contains mentions of stalking and harassment. Reader discretion is advised.
Scottish comedian and actor Richard Gadd, famous for his stand-up show Monkey See Monkey Do, recently starred in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. Gadd plays the fictionalized character Donny, representing his real-life experience with a stalker when he was in his 20s. In 2019, he wrote Baby Reindeer as a one-man play and now adapted it under the same name into a miniseries. The title reportedly came from a pet name that Martha gave him.
According to People Magazine, the events in the seven-part series depict Gadd’s life from 2015 when a woman (named Martha in the series) began stalking him. The comedian has never publicly named his stalker to protect her despite having faced harassment for nearly four years. He recently told GQ that he mildly altered Martha’s character for the same purpose.
What happened to Richard Gadd’s stalker?
People Magazine noted that Richard Gadd’s stalker came into his life after an encounter at a bar. The woman, who was reportedly two decades older than him, met Gadd at a pub. There, she claimed that she couldn’t afford a drink and out of sympathy, the comedian gave her a free-of-charge drink. Baby Reindeer depicts a series of similar events.
The woman then began harassing Gadd, and it continued for four years. She reportedly started to email and stalk him. The stalker sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, and 106 pages of letters. Additionally, she gave him the “Baby Reindeer” pet name. Besides the harassment, Gadd told The Times that “she started to invade” his personal life. He said she was “following me, turning up at my gigs, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”
Richard Gadd claimed that reporting the incident to authorities was not beneficial in this case. He said that when a man is a stalking victim, it becomes “a sexy thing” and a story for “films and television.” “Like a femme fatale who gradually becomes more sinister. It doesn’t carry as much threat of physical violence, is less common and can be trivialized,” he said.
People Magazine reported that Gadd also expressed the fear he felt at that point. He claimed to have been “physically scared.” The comedian stated that he was unsure how far his stalker “could take it.” He further elaborated, “She could have a knife, but I did think how terrifying it would be if she was a tall scary man.”
Gadd has never revealed the real identity of his stalker, who is named Martha in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. In an interview with GQ, he described the woman as “quite an idiosyncratic person” and stated that they went to “great lengths to disguise her.” He said they changed her character “to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself and only “borrowed an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
Per People Magazine and Today.com, the comedian has refused to share details about what happened to real-life Martha. He told The Times that the situation has been “resolved.” He claimed he had “mixed feelings about it” because of his stalker’s mental illness. Gadd said, “I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison,” possibly suggesting that she did not go to prison.
What did Richard Gadd say about his stalker and the experience?
Richard Gadd also told Variety that he was not concerned about the stalker trying to contact him. He said it wasn’t “a concern” for him anymore because of how things ended in real life. Citing The Independent, Forbes wrote that the comedian further said that he “can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all this.” The comedian believes “stalking and harassment is a form of mental illness.” He further explained that showing “her as a monster” would be wrong “because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her.”
Per Independent, he mentioned how law enforcement let him down and spoke of the lack of help his stalker faced. “Going through the police process on [the stalking case],” he said he faced a “lack of resources.” He also addressed the “emotional ramifications” of this harrowing experience that continue to “live on” even today.
“When you go through quite a relentless ordeal of stalking, it does imprint itself upon your soul a little bit. I still live in its aftermath a bit, for sure, but I guess that’s why I do the art: to work through it, to understand it, to try and let go of all these kinds of things,” he said.
Additionally, Richard Gadd touched upon his decision to bring his one-man stage play to the small screen. He said, “I couldn’t keep my life separate from what I’d been through anymore.” He mentioned the difficulty he faced in playing “the frivolous funnyman when I’d been through these kinds of things.” The comedian stated “he had no choice, really, but to conflate the two” because he couldn’t have “survived” repressing it. “It was almost a survival choice. Because I was struggling so much,” he added.
Baby Reindeer premiered on April 11, 2024, and is now streaming on Netflix.
