English actress Jessica Gunning, 38, plays a Scottish woman in her 40s called Martha Scott who lives in Camden.
An unknown woman, who claims to be the inspiration for Jessica Gunning’s Martha in the new, popular series, has stated that she is considering legal action for defamation following the release of the Richard Gadd project.
Baby Reindeer follows Gadd’s Donny Dunn, a poor comic who meets a lonely woman at the pub where he works. The unexpected encounter, in which he offers her a free cup of tea, escalates over several months as Martha is shown to be a dangerous serial stalker. Over the course of several years, she sent him over 41,000 emails, 744 tweets, 100 pages of letters, and 350 hours of voicemail.
The woman said – Gadd was the one obsessed with her. “He’s using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now,” she told me. “I am the victim. “He wrote a bloody show about me.”
She stated that Gadd’s script amounted to “bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune” and that, despite his attempts to conceal her name, she has received online “death threats and abuse from Richard Gadd supporters.”
While Netflix advertised the show as a real story, Gadd previously stated that he couldn’t present the precise story due to legal and artistic constraints, stressing that he needed to take certain precautions. The show’s author even went so far as to ask his fans not to try to figure out Baby Reindeer’s real-life characters, including the accomplished TV writer who mentored Donny just to take advantage of him.