Web sleuths tracked her down after watching Child Reindeer and now Fiona Harvey’s legal document—or seemingly lack thereof—has been the subject of dialog. The “actual Martha” mentioned she was compelled to defend herself after receiving loss of life threats and now she’s suing Netflix for defamation.
Comic and actor Richard Gadd conceptualized Child Reindeer after a lady despatched him 41,071 emails, 350 hours’ value of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Fb messages, 106 pages of letters, and quite a lot of bizarre presents, together with a reindeer toy, sleeping drugs, a woolly hat and boxer shorts over the course of 4 years. It started as a one-man present on the Edinburgh Fringe and it received picked up by Netflix started and Gadd as a fictionalized model of himself named Donny Dunn. The present explores his traumas and the way the state of affairs affected his profession and private life.
Whereas Gadd by no means named the folks his characters are primarily based on, it didn’t take lengthy for the web group to establish Harvey because the “Actual Martha”, regardless of Gadd telling GQ that “we’ve gone to such nice lengths to disguise her to the purpose that I don’t suppose she would acknowledge herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional reality, not a fact-by-fact profile of somebody.” In response to all of the hypothesis, Gadd himself tweeted: “Please don’t speculate on who any of the actual life folks may very well be. That’s not the purpose of our present.”
Fiona Harvey‘s legal document, whether or not she even has one, was hotly debated by viewers on-line after she was interviewed on Uncensored With Piers Morgan and can little doubt come into query in court docket. Right here’s the most recent on this drama.
Does Fiona Harvey have a legal document?
Opposite to what’s depicted on the present, Harvey claims she doesn’t have a legal document and that’s why she’s suing Netflix for its defamatory illustration of her (extra on that under). In Child Reindeer, Martha (supposedly primarily based on Harvey) is proven to be arrested, pleading responsible, and spending 9 months in jail. Donny (the fictionalized Gadd) is granted a five-year restraining order and he allegedly by no means sees her once more.
Talking with controversial TV host Piers Morgan, Harvey refuted a lot of what was depicted in Child Reindeer. “They’ve billed it as a real story, and so has he, and it’s not,” she mentioned. “He’s mendacity and they’re mendacity.” When it got here to her being arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime, she mentioned, “That’s utterly unfaithful, very, very defamatory to me, very profession damaging.”
That is tougher to fact-check within the UK than it’s within the US. Within the UK, legal data are publicly obtainable and the legal data workplace has data of each arrest, cost, warning, and conviction. Nevertheless, the Human Rights Act states that legal data will not be publicly viewable except launched by the courts. The Freedom of Data Act permits people to request details about the legal justice system from public authorities, together with prisons and police forces, however the info could also be exempt.
On June 7, 2024, information broke of her lawsuit in opposition to the world’s greatest streaming service—she’s in search of $170 million in damages. “The lies that Defendants advised about Harvey to over 50 million folks worldwide embrace that Harvey is a twice-convicted stalker who was sentenced to 5 years in jail and that Harvey sexually assaulted Gadd,” her grievance says. “Defendants advised these lies, and by no means stopped, as a result of it was a greater story than the reality, and higher tales made cash.”
The lawsuit continues, “On account of Defendants’ lies, malfeasance, and totally reckless misconduct, Harvey’s life had been ruined. Merely, Netflix and Gadd destroyed her repute, her character and her life.”
An interview Harvey did with Piers Morgan in mid-Might 2024 acquired a powerful response from the general public, with many within the feedback part doubting the legitimacy of her story. Others had been disturbed by “Piers Morgan conducting one of the unethical interviews ever.”
“By promising viewers a real story, and by doing such a shoddy job of masking Harvey’s identification, Child Reindeer may need invited us to take a position on what actually occurred,” argued The Guardian‘s Stewart Heritage. “However this has made us complicit. We’re following Fiona Harvey’s story simply as intently as we adopted the collection itself. Child Reindeer is shaping as much as be a lesson in what occurs if everybody—writers, producers, the media, viewers—observe their worst instincts at each flip.”
The Guardian reported a number of days later that an MP has requested Netflix to supply proof that the girl who impressed the character Martha Scott in Child Reindeer is a “convicted stalker” because the present would have us imagine.
In a letter shared on X, the Ochil and South Perthshire MP wrote: “I requested you concerning the Netflix collection Child Reindeer and, particularly, the obligation of care as a result of lady now recognized as Martha from the collection. You advised me the next: ‘[Baby Reindeer] is clearly the true story of the horrific abuse that the author […] suffered, by the hands of a convicted stalker. … Journalists have up to now been unable to discover a document of the conviction to which you referred.”
For extra on Child Reindeer, take a look at Richard Gadd’s e-book
and play that impressed the Netflix collection. The script, which gained an Olivier Award in 2020, “is described as a chilling story about obsession, delusion and the terrifying ramifications of a fleeting mistake.” Gadd writes in Child Reindeer, “I checked out her, wanting her to chortle. Wanting her to share within the joke. However she didn’t. She simply stared. I knew then, in that second – that she had taken it actually…”
