Peter Andre on ‘Ex Drama’ After Katie Price’s Comments About His Wife
Peter Andre has offered his thoughts about navigating drama with exes after Katie Price raised eyebrows with her recent comments. Earlier…
The truth, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, is rarely pure and never simple.
And if evidence were ever needed to back this up, you need look no further than the ongoing saga that is Baby Reindeer, the Netflix drama still proving to be as gripping off screen as it was when it first aired in April 2024.
Billed as a ‘true story’ – a decision which now haunts executives from the world’s biggest streamer in the form of a £134million American lawsuit – the series has become one of the most controversial in television history, amid claims and counter claims about what is real and, crucially, what is not.
Now the Scottish lawyer identified within days of the series’ release as the inspiration for Baby Reindeer’s crazed stalker Martha has ramped up her blistering legal battle against Netflix, which is trying to get her case thrown out of court.
Fiona Harvey describes the autobiographical series – penned by British comedian Richard Gadd, who also plays a thinly veiled version of himself as the struggling stand-up comic at the heart of the story – as the ‘biggest lie in TV history’.
Regardless of Netflix and Gadd’s insistence that Harvey is not Martha, she claims that Baby Reindeer falsely depicts her as a twice-convicted criminal who served five years in prison.
Unlike the character Martha, Harvey also points out she never sexually assaulted Gadd, violently attacked him or waited outside his house for up to 16 hours a day.
Witnesses brought in to lend weight to the Aberdeen law graduate’s claim include a 54-year-old woman from Coventry who was one of the first armchair internet sleuths to say Harvey was the real-life Martha – after a few simple Google searches.
Fiona Harvey describes the Netflix series Baby Reindeer as the ‘biggest lie in TV history’
Richard Gadd claimed he had made his stalker an unrecognisable character in the show
Lawyers for Netflix, meanwhile, are defending the claim vigorously, arguing that 36-year-old Gadd – who described the series as ‘a fictionalised re-telling of my emotional journey’ – has every right to tell his story.
Amid claims 59-year-old Fiona Harvey is seriously ill and, by her own account, may not even live to see this bitter clash play out via the US courts, her lawyer Richard Roth, of The Roth Law Firm in New York, tells me: ‘She’s suffering. She’s under huge stress emotionally. It’s been over a year now and she’s the victim of a multi-billion dollar company that just had no respect for her. It’s continued bullying.’
As for Harvey herself, she claims in legal documents filed in the US this week: ‘I am afraid to go outside out of fear of being attacked. Some weeks I do not leave my apartment. I am suffering from, among other things, constant panic attacks, chest pains, anxiety, nightmares, depression, nervousness, stomach pains, loss of appetite, fear and insomnia.’
Harvey is being represented by Richard Roth, of the Roth law firm based in New York
Her situation is certainly a world away from Gadd’s, whose career as a writer, producer and actor appears to be going from strength to strength.
This month he was spotted on set in Glasgow, where he is working on his upcoming TV drama, Half Man, with actor Jamie Bell.
Baby Reindeer also won key awards at last month’s TV BAFTAs, including a Best Supporting Actress gong for Jessica Gunning for her role as Martha. And while Gadd missed out on the Best Actor and Best Drama awards, he scooped one for writing at the BAFTA Craft Awards in May.
Not surprisingly, when he went up to receive it he made no mention of Harvey or the bitter fall-out from the global sensation which has brought him fame and fortune after years as a penniless artist.
When the series launched, Gadd claimed he had made his stalker an unrecognisable character – insisting in one interview ‘we’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she’d recognise herself.’
Baby Reindeer won key awards at the BAFTAs, including a Best Supporting Actress gong for Jessica Gunning for her role as Martha
Gadd used Harvey’s tweets in the show, with this being crucial for the ensuing court case
But, perhaps inevitably, the ‘true story’ claim which appeared at the beginning of the first and every other episode sparked a frenzied search for the real-life Martha.
And it didn’t take long for viewers to work out who she was: both Harvey and Martha are Scottish, studied law at university, are around 20 years older than Gadd and bear an uncanny physical resemblance to each other.
Crucially, Gadd used some of Harvey’s genuine tweets in the show, including one posted in September 2014 involving a joke about ‘hanging curtains’ – a euphemism for sex – which almost became a catchphrase.
Within three days of Baby Reindeer’s release, viewers were posting on the social media site Reddit that Fiona Harvey was the real-life Martha.
Her name then spread like wildfire on Facebook, X and TikTok.
In Coventry, Kerri-Anne Armstrong claims to have been ‘one of the first to identify her’ by searching social media for her ‘curtains’ comment and, after a scene in which Gadd’s character Donny finds an online newspaper article about Martha’s activities as a stalker, also easily found a real online article about Harvey stalking Scottish MEP Jimmy Wray’s wife, Laura.
‘Both sets of information directly led me to Harvey,’ she said in legal documents filed in California last week.
Harvey’s hairdresser Jon Hala, whose client list includes the likes of Kate Moss, Sigourney Weaver and Elle MacPherson, didn’t even need to search online for the ‘real-life Martha’ to know that it was Harvey, whose hair he had cut for the past seven years.
According to his legal statement, after watching the first episode he turned to his wife and said: ‘That’s Fiona Harvey, my customer.’
He adds: ‘Fiona, like Martha in the series, is a strong and spicy Scottish woman who used to live in Camden. Martha looks like her. Martha sounds like her. Martha dresses like her. Martha is very bright and, at times, extremely funny and endearing, like Fiona Harvey. Martha, also like Fiona Harvey, is a highly stressful individual who does have emotional issues.’
By the end of April last year, Gadd was urging viewers to stop trying to work out the identity of his stalker who, he claims, sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours worth of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters.
But his argument that such speculation was ‘not the point of the show’ was at best naive.
Harvey is suing Netflix for, among other things, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and gross negligence.
The streaming giant, meanwhile, argues that the alleged defamatory statements are non-actionable because they are ‘substantially true’.
One of their witnesses is solicitor Ms Wray, who claims to have suffered at Harvey’s hands over a five-year period after taking her on for a two-week trial at her law firm in 1997.
Ms Wray says she dismissed Harvey within days after becoming alarmed at her behaviour and says she later became so concerned she issued her staff with panic alarms.
She was forced to take out a restraining order – under Scottish law known as an ‘interdict’ – which was granted in April 2002 by the Sheriff Court of Glasgow and Strathkelvin. She also says she instantly recognised the fictional Martha as being Harvey.
Harvey’s lawyers argue that Netflix’s two-pronged approach to the problem is problematic. On the one hand, Gadd has said that Martha is not Harvey. On the other, Netflix is now presenting evidence claiming the 59-year-old ‘pursued a course of conduct towards Richard Gadd that amounted to stalking’.
As Harvey’s lawyers argue: ‘If Harvey is not “Martha” as Gadd insists then there is no relevance in Gadd documenting his “real life experiences with Fiona Harvey”. But more baffling is how Gadd can claim under oath that Harvey is not ”Martha” when every interaction Gadd recalls about Harvey is identically attributed to Martha in the series.’
Last year, the row spilled over into Parliament when Netflix executive Benjamin King told the culture, media and sport select committee the show was ‘the true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist Richard Gadd suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker’.
Harvey’s lawyers slapped Netflix with a defamation lawsuit last June. A US district judge ruled in September that her case could proceed because the series was wrongly billed as a ‘true story’.
Having set out to paint himself as the victim of a stalker, Gadd’s hit series has, in effect, now been flipped on its head – with Harvey the one who is claiming to have been wronged.
The case was due to go to trial this month at the Central District of California Court but Netflix appealed the ruling, meaning it was sent to the US Court of Appeals.
Its lawyers argue that Harvey’s claim should be thrown out because ‘she does not allege a provably false statement of fact about her’. They also claim that she doesn’t have a reputation to defend because it’s already been tarnished by ‘past news stories detailing her previous harassment and stalking of public figures’.
Above all, the case is a reminder of the risks of blurring fact and fiction in television dramas.
Netflix has until June 28 to respond to the documents filed last week – but given the ongoing legal arguments, the case is not likely to be heard in full until 2026.
Even so, Mr Roth says he ‘feels great’ about her case.
‘We are very confident that this appeal by Netflix is going to be thrown out,’ he says. ‘If they want to fight, then we’ll fight. We’ve got to get past this bump in the road and then we’re going full speed ahead.’
