Richard Gadd’s commitment to telling the truth of his experience is having some unfortunate repercussions.Credit:Netflix
An amalgamation of his 2016 one-man stage showMonkey See,Monkey Do and its 2019 follow-upBaby Reindeer,which Gadd claims are based on his real-life experiences of being stalked and sexually abused,the seven-part Netflix series has been watched a total of 17.9 million times,debuting at number five globally in its first week and rising to number one in its second.
In the series,Donny Dunn,a fictionalised version of Gadd,recounts his tale of being stalked relentlessly by a woman called Martha. In its harrowing fourth episode,Dunn reveals that he allowed Martha into his life partly because of the crippling self-loathing he attributes to having been sexually abused by an older man called Darrien O’Connor,a well-regarded TV writer-producer who befriended him at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012.
Last week,a well-known actor,writer and director for British stage and television stepped down from a senior role in the theatre industry. That,along with the striking physical resemblance he bears to Tom Goodman-Hill,the actor who plays O’Connor,was enough to have some internet pundits joining the dots.
Meanwhile,at least three women have been identified by internet sleuths as the “real” Martha,with people cross-referencing publicly available information on real-life stalking cases with the copious clues offered by the show.
Baby Reindeer makes extensive use of the emails,voice messages and texts sent by “Martha”,and in its promotional material Netflix has claimed “all of these emails are real”.
On the Netflix blog Tudum,Gadd emphasisedthe veracity of the tale,from the very first time he realised he would tell it on stage.