A lawyer has claimed that she too was stalked by Fiona Harvey, the woman who inspired the Martha character in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer.
Laura Wray, who employed Harvey for a brief period before she met Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd, said that she immediately recognised that Martha was based on Harvey when she watched the show.
Baby Reindeer was written, created by and starred Gadd, and it is a semi-autobiographical story depicting his real experience of being stalked by an older woman named Martha.
The show spent almost a month at the top of Netflix’s viewership rankings and sparked many conversations around reporting and dealing with stalkers.
Following the series’ release, and its declaration of being a “true story”, many viewers tried to find out the real identities of the characters in the show. This led to Fiona Harvey, a woman claiming to be the inspiration behind Martha, coming forward and directly threatening legal action against Gadd.
Harvey also appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored last month (May 9), her first television interview since the show aired.
And now Wray has appeared on the same show to share her experiences with Harvey. In the interview which you can watch below, she said she had been approached by The Sunday Mail after being identified as someone connected with Harvey, and it was only then that she watched the series.
“From the very beginning, it was obvious it was the same woman. It was Fiona Harvey,” Wray told Morgan. “The actress [Gunning], who does a very good job, sounds like her, looks like her [and] mimicked her to a T.”
Laura Wray, who is the widow of the former Labour MP Jimmy Wray, also confirmed that many of the phrases and mannerisms from Harvey’s online presence are recognisable in the show too. “I have a file full of papers which are letters from her, emails, faxes and so forth and it’s all identical,” she said.
She continued by discussing what working with Morgan was like. “She was rude to staff. She shouted at people. She was inappropriate with a male member of staff,” Wray said. “She tried to follow a male member of staff home. I mean all sorts of things happened. She threw a book across the office and hit somebody with it.”
Wray had previously told The Sun that she feared for her safety and for the safety of her staff, to the point that she provided them with personal alarms.
After cutting short Harvey’s stint at the legal firm, Wray said: “Every day I’d come into the office, the answer-phone would be full of messages from her, all threatening, nasty.”
She also claimed that Harvey made complaints to authorities after Wray’s husband died in 2013, trying to get Wray’s son taken into care. “That was the point at which I thought ‘enough is enough’,” she said.
Harvey denied Wray’s allegations from The Sun during her own Morgan interview in May.
Morgan’s interview with Harvey has been viewed over 13 million times. In it, Harvey denied many aspects of the show’s narrative, saying that she did not stalk Gadd, attack his girlfriend, destroy the bar he worked in or contact his parents. She also strongly denied being convicted of any charges, which is the fate that befalls Martha in the show.
Viewers were quick to question the ethics of the interview since Gadd has previously stated that his real stalker was “mentally unwell”. However, Piers Morgan later hit back at the claims, saying Harvey should be allowed to “tell her side of the story”.
“If she was a convicted stalker who had gone to prison and put his life through hell, clearly we had to think long and hard about the public interest justification in giving her the platform,” Morgan told BBC News Culture and Media Editor Katie Razzall.
Previously, Gadd urged people to stop trying to work out the real-life identity of Martha in the show. He added: ”Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of the show.”
Gadd previously told GQ: “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself.”
He also told The Independent: “I can’t emphasise enough how much of a victim she is in all this… Stalking and harassment is a form of mental illness. It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster, because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her.”
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