The most recent voicemail message was the most chilling. ‘You have made a bitter enemy of me,’ she said. ‘You are the c*** from hell.’
Those words, delivered in her distinctive Scottish accent, gave me a glimpse of how she had – allegedly – terrified her victims.
For this was what the real-life ‘Martha’, the woman portrayed as a sick serial stalker in the hit Netflix television show Baby Reindeer, speaking to my answerphone last weekend, the culmination of a four-day barrage of calls and voicemails.
It was followed by a warning never to approach her again, couched in legalese which the former law student picked up in the course of the legal training she boasts of.
On social media, she went on to denounce me as a fat liar, an ‘overgrown bipolar schoolboy’, and said she was considering charging £3,000 an hour for the time she spent talking to me, which she claimed was her professional due.
To be clear, I feel it was perfectly legitimate for ‘Martha’ to call me. I had met and interviewed her for three and a half hours for an article in the Daily Mail published last Saturday.
Neil Sears met the real-life Martha at her new, one-bedroom council flat in a central London high rise last week
In Baby Reindeer Jessica Gunning plays convicted stalker Martha, who makes the life of Richard Gadd’s character Donny a misery
But in 30 years of journalism – including the occasion when comedian-turned-conspiracy theorist Russell Brand took offence at what I’d written about him and turned his eight million fans on me – I have never encountered such a tsunami of calls.
Let me explain. The Netflix series Baby Reindeer has shot to No1 for the streamer in the in 30 countries, including the UK and the US. It is written by Richard Gadd who also plays the central character, Donny, and is supposedly based on his real-life experience as a struggling stand-up comic working in a pub in London’s Camden, who offers a free cup of tea to a customer called Martha. Oddly, despite claiming to be a high-flying lawyer, she can’t afford to buy herself a drink.
She turns out to be a convicted stalker who goes on to make Donny’s life a misery, haunting his address, disrupting his stand-up shows, at one point smashing a glass in his face, at another attacking his trans girlfriend, and claiming his father is a paedophile. Ultimately, she is jailed.
Viewers are told the drama is based on a ‘true story’, and Gadd has made it clear in interviews that while details have been changed – the real stalker was never imprisoned, for instance – the character Martha is based on the woman who sent him 41,071 emails, 744 Tweets, 46 Facebook messages, letters totalling 106 pages, and left 350 hours’ worth of phone messages.
Gadd’s character works in a bar in the show and Martha haunts him, at one point smashing a glass in his face and attacking his trans girlfriend
In the show Martha even claims that Donny’s father is a paedophile. Ultimately, she is jailed
The popularity of the series set off an army of determined internet sleuths who, before long, had identified Martha as a 58-year-old Scottish woman – who the Mail has chosen not to name – living in London. The record of tweets she posted a decade ago, coupled with an injunction against her for stalking a Scottish MP’s family more than 20 years ago, certainly seemed damning – and, after she agreed to talk to me, the several hours I spent with her left no doubt in my mind.
Indeed, she herself agreed she must be the inspiration for Martha – although she denied any wrongdoing, or that any injunctions had been taken out, and maintained that Gadd was effectively stalking HER by profiting from his show, after she had ‘turned him down’.
I met the real-life Martha at her new, one-bedroom council flat in a central London high-rise last week. A short, solid woman – she told me she had put on weight during lockdown, like many of us – with brown shoulder-length hair, she sat surrounded by boxes of possessions.
Perhaps as a result of failings by the council-contracted removal firm – which she had plenty to say about – her only furniture appeared to be one dining chair, a rocking chair, and a small table.
She explained she had moved to the flat the day before and apologised for her attire – jogging trousers – saying she had yet to unpack her clothes.
While we chatted she let slip that she has a weekly food budget of £30 and this, taken with her surroundings, seemed rather at odds with her repeated boasts that she was both a top lawyer and talented singer.
‘I’m not practising just now, but I’m launching my own law firm soon, in London’s Abbey Road, to represent only musicians,’ she told me. ‘We had staff all lined up but it was delayed by the pandemic.’
Later she told me that she was trying to record an album herself. ‘It’s like Susan Boyle stuff.’
During the course of the interview, she told me several times that she had ‘turned Gadd down’ because she ‘had a boyfriend’. She talked of her ‘long-time partner’ who she claimed was a ‘QC’ and suggested she was in an ongoing relationship.
(When I spoke to her former neighbours at the Camden council flat she’d just left after living there for around a decade, they believed her to be unemployed. They were sceptical about the existence of a boyfriend.)
‘Martha’ happily posed for the Mail photographer – even sitting at a bus stop in the way as Martha does in Baby Reindeer while stalking Donny – although we have decided not to publish them.
It was some three hours into our encounter that she began speaking openly about Richard Gadd. Initially, she claimed she had only ‘met him once’ but by the end of the chat, it was ‘maybe four times’.
She levelled all manner of criticisms at him, claiming her ‘photographic memory’ gave her a detailed recall of his behaviour.
It was 9.30pm when I left ‘Martha’, telling her that we would publish the article in the coming days.
I was fully expecting to hear from her. I gave her my number because it is perfectly understandable that an interviewee would wish to contact the journalist who would be telling her story to the world, perhaps with additional thoughts and observations or to correct some facts.
But not within ten minutes of my departure. That’s when the calls had begun. She called three times during my short drive home, all of which I answered and which lasted in total 19 minutes.
The next day there were ten calls, the one after that 14, and the day afterwards 24 – all of them from a No Caller ID number on screen.
And when I failed to answer – as, I have to admit I began to do as that ‘No Caller ID’ message kept popping up – there were the rambling stream-of-consciousness messages – just like the ones the fictional Martha leaves in the TV show.
Donny, like Richard Gadd in real life, even tries his hand at stand-up comedy, although he is not a great success
Five messages totalling ten minutes on the first full day, nine totalling 20 minutes on the second, 16 totalling 53 minutes on the third.
These messages were not attacks on me, but on Richard Gadd, other staff who’d worked at the Camden pub, on Scottish MPs and their families.
Then on the Saturday there were 19 calls – and, as I attempted to communicate with her by email instead, 18 voice messages were left, totalling 40 minutes.
The most abusive message came after she had belatedly read the story published in Mail that I had worked on with feature writer Barbara Davies.
As I said, it did not name the real-life ‘Martha’ but it laid out the historic stalking allegations against her in Scotland. But in her view it gave what she believed was too little space to her denials of those allegations.
This time the message I received was intensely personal.
‘I will call the police if you ever approach me,’ she said. ‘I am suing you and that newspaper, and the bimbo who wrote the article with you.
‘I hope that’s clear even to a moron like you, and I will be demanding the newspaper sack you. I don’t like you, I’ve never liked you.’
Then came the abuse unleashed on her Facebook page – looked at by ever-growing thousands of Baby Reindeer fans.
She told them I was ‘fat and ugly’, ‘not very bright’, a ‘nutter’, ‘sick’, ‘a total c***’ who ‘wouldn’t get off my phone’, and falsely claimed that I had abused other journalists and ‘hated’ Gadd.
The multiple postings went on well into the night, and over several days.
In person she had told me in eye-popping detail – and out of the blue – of a one-night stand ‘with a barrister’. When we subsequently talked on the phone, she suddenly claimed her QC partner ‘had died’ – before then saying that she lived with her ‘boyfriend’.
While I had never raised her relationships for discussion, soon she was ranting on Facebook: ‘I resent that wee creep neil at the daily fail asking me about previous boyfriends and current…
‘I felt like a rape victim on the stand.’
While the fall-out from the Mail article is certainly unusual, the abuse is water off a duck’s back to me as an experienced national newspaper journalist. For her victims, however, it is easy to see how such obsessive calls, over months and years, can become unbearable.
In my case, my teenage children who happen to be fans of Baby Reindeer, were initially alarmed by my contact with Martha. Now they have taken to calling me ‘Daddy Reindeer’.
In the concluding episode of Baby Reindeer, Gadd’s character Donny says how bitterly he regrets the moment Martha got hold of his telephone number.
Even as I type this article, approaching midnight, the repeated ‘No Caller ID’ calls are beginning again…
