Jessica Gunning in “Baby Reindeer.”
Netflix/Ed Miller
The real “Martha” from Baby Reindeer is claiming Piers Morgan was trying to trip her up in her Thursday interview.
Fiona Harvey, who claims to be the inspiration for Richard Gadd’s alleged stalker in the Netflix hit
Netflix
series, sat down with Morgan for what the TV host called a “world exclusive” interview.
Announcing the interview on his X account Wednesday, Morgan — who is pictured with Harvey in the post — teased the interview by writing, “The real-life Martha from Baby Reindeer breaks cover and gives me her first TV interview about the smash hit Netflix show . Fiona Harvey wants to have her say & ‘set the record straight.’ Is she a psycho stalker?”
During the interview, Harvey told Morgan how internet sleuths tracked her down and that she received online death threats because of the series.
In a recent interview with the Daily Mailthe then unnamed Harvey said she was threatening to sue Gadd because she was “being bullied for fame.”
Harvey doubled down on her claims in her interview with Morgan, saying she considered legal action against both Gadd and Netflix.
In the Netflix limited series that debuted on April 11, Gadd tells a fictionalized version of his harrowing tale as Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian and bartender who is stalked by a woman he calls “Martha” (played by Jessica Gunning) after he shows the lonely woman a bit of kindness at the pub he works at.
Baby Reindeer is based on Gadd’s 2019 one-man stage show in the UK. Martha is said to have sent Gadd more than 41,000 emails and left 350 hours of voicemails over four-plus years.
Morgan asked Harvey about the emails, and she said she only sent a few, along with a few text messages and about 18 tweets. She estimated that she maybe sent about 10 emails to Gadd.
In a Wednesday interview with the Daily Record posted after Morgan’s X announcement, Harvey said of her talk with host, “There was a heavy emphasis from Piers Morgan on Gadd and the emails I am supposed to have sent. I have my own thoughts on it that I’d like to keep to myself but I wouldn’t say I was happy. It was very quick to try to trip me up. He did it quickly paced to catch me off guard.”
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As such, Harvey said, “Piers kept saying to me ‘are you sure you haven’t sent this guy 41,000 emails and phone calls?’ A lot of the interview, for a good 10 minutes, he kept coming back to this.”
In interviews about the series, Gadd said while Baby Reindeer was fictionalized for the Netflix series, he noted that, “Emotionally, it’s all 100% true.”
Harvey countered Gadd’s story in the Morgan interview, saying, “I just generally think he’s got extreme psychiatric problems… It’s a work of fiction. It’s a work of hyperbole, as I’ve always said. And there are two true facts in that. His name is Richard Gadd, and he works as a jobbing bartender on benefits, in the Hawley Arms. And we met, two or three times…”
In her interview with the Daily Record about the Morgan interview, Harvey also questioned the claims of the series’ truthfulness.
“I said, ‘Look, even if I had sent some emails, it doesn’t mean I’m guilty of the rest of the stuff,’” Harvey told the Daily Record. “As I said, in order to bill something as a true story, it’s got to be pretty much 100% true. It seemed to me that I was set up. I feel a bit used.”
Harvey Says Morgan Referred To The Interview As A ‘Sparring Match’
In the aftermath of her video interview with Piers Morgan, Fiona Harvey recalled how the TV host said the sit-down “went well.”
“He referred to it as a sparring match,” Harvey told the Daily Record. “He landed a few punches on me and I landed a few punches on him.”
She didn’t take kindly, however, to one particular question. “He asked me if I loved Richard Gadd and I said you’ve got to be joking,” Harvey told the Daily Record.
Harvey noted for the publication that Morgan contacted her last week for the interview and that other shows have been contacting her to talk.
“I’ve had people telling me they are publicists or agents but it’s difficult to know who to trust,” Harvey told the Daily Record. “I’ve had people using the most foul language on the phone telling me they could make me a lot of money.”
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Baby Reindeer has amassed big viewership for Netflix since the series debut. In numbers released by the streaming platform this week, Baby Reindeer topped Netflix’s Global Top 10 TV Shows chart for the week of April 29 to May 5 with 18.6 million views, which translates to 73.6 million viewing hours.
The series has attracted such high profile viewers as horror novelist Stephen King.
Richard Gadd, meanwhile, participated in a Netflix interview panel for Television Academy members earlier this week, where expressed empathy for the woman he calls “Martha” in the series.
“I saw someone who was kind of lost by the system, really,” Gadd said during the panel. “I saw someone who needed help and wasn’t getting it.”
Baby Reindeer is streaming on Netflix.
Note: This article has been updated to include quotes from Piers Morgan’s interview with Fiona Harvey. In addition, the lede—The real “Martha” from Baby Reindeer is claiming she “was set up” in her Thursday interview with Piers Morgan—was incorrectly attributed to the Morgan interview. It instead was taken from a quote from her interview about the series with the Daily Record. A correction has been made.
