Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Real Story Behind Baby Reindeer

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

This is the story of Richard Gadd, Fiona Harvey, and Baby Reindeer on Netflix

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So this woman, she allegedly starts stalking a guy, and because of that, she might end up a multi-millionaire. Now, her name's Fiona, and one night, Fiona walks into a bar, and she sits down in the bar area. And poor Fiona, she is broke. Like she can't afford a drink? Now the bartender, his name's Richard. And Richard, he's a nice guy, and he feels bad for her. So he offers to get her a drink. And Fiona and Richard, they chat back and forth a bit, and Fiona starts to know.

Notice, damn, Richard's looking kind of flying. Like he is foin, like, okay. So they chat for a bit and eventually she heads out. But even after she leaves, Fiona can't stop thinking about Richard. He is always on her mind. He is so foin, and most importantly, he was paying attention to her. And from here on, she thinks about Richard every single night. She can't get him out of her head, and she has to go back and see him.

So she not only goes back to the bar, but she starts showing up there regularly every time he works hoping to see him hoping to get any chance to talk with him and get his attention and richard you know he's polite he chats with her he's friendly but he's just not romantically interested in her now here's the thing about richard richard is not only a bartender he's also an amateur stand-up comedian like he gets up on stage and he does comedy shows and sometimes he puts on one-man shows and stuff like that and Fiona because she's always thinking about Richard, she's like, oh, he's a comedian. Cool, I'll just go to his stand-up shows and I'll support him. And she does. She starts showing up to all his shows and she'll

like sit in the audience and she'll laugh at all these jokes. And Richard, he thinks, you know, the support is nice. Like, it's always nice to have fans of your work. But then Fiona takes it even further. She starts following him and waiting outside his house at night and just randomly appearing in places he's at and just being a creep. But in her mind, she feels like she has to be around him and she has to be in contact with him. So she gets a hold of his contact details and she starts calling him all the time,

texting him and emailing him and contacting him on social media and tweeting at him and saying sexually suggestive things like, my curtains need hung badly. And she also writes him letters and sends him packages and anything so that he'll notice her, and maybe eventually he'll want to smash. But Richard simply isn't interested. Plus, she's almost twice his age.

He's like 23, 24 at this point. She's around 50 years old. So at this point, Richard is starting to get freaked out. He feels like Fiona is stalking him, and he doesn't really know her all that well, and he doesn't know how far she'll take this whole stalking thing. Like, she could show up to his comedy show one day with a knife. He don't know.

So finally, Richard's had enough, and he goes and he reports her to police. But unfortunately, police, they don't help him all that much. Basically, they're skeptical. According to Richard, police say they don't think a woman stalking a man is all that big of a threat. So now, with nothing stopping her, Fiona continues stalking Richard. She keeps trying to contact him and she does everything she can to be near him. She starts hanging around his friends. She even finds his parents' contact info and starts to start to contact info and starts to contact him.

and starts calling and harassing his parents. And then, at one point, Richard meets a nice woman, and he starts dating her, and they get into a relationship. And Fiona learns that he's seeing someone, and she's like, oh, hell no, who is this bitch? And she starts harassing this woman until the point it ruins this poor woman's relationship with Richard. And so the stalking continues.

And this goes on for like three or four years. And in that time, Fiona sends Richard over 41,000, thousand emails, over 740 tweets, 106 pages worth of letters, and 350 hours worth of voicemail messages. Homegirl is sprung. Meanwhile, while all this has been going on, Richard, he's been working hard, trying to hone his comedy routine. And he's been working on a one-man show, and it's about how he got essayed by another man early on in his career. And the show's called Monkey See, Monkey Do. And it's raw, and it's vulnerable, and when the show's finally ready, he premieres it at a well-known performing arts festival,

called the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And this one-man show is immediately a hit with festival audiences, and it wins an award for Best Comedy Show. And after that, his one-man show blows up a little locally, like it has several sell-out runs at the Soho Theater. He tours the show around the UK and Europe. Then he writes a second one-man show, and this show is actually about the crazy experience he had with

Fiona stalking him. And he calls this second show Baby Rain Deer, after a pet name that Fiona had often used for him. Like he tours it around and it wins a bunch of awards and he starts adapting the show for TV where he basically combines his first one-man show, Monkey See Monkey Do, with the second show, Baby Rainier, into one long-form drama series. And then he sells that series to Netflix. So Netflix picks it up and Richard himself stars in the Netflix show playing himself. Now, admittedly, the series is a bit embellished. It's not 100% true, but it is based on some true events. And Richard is careful to change all the characters' names and identifying information so that nobody's true identity is revealed.

Not even Fiona. And crazy enough, that show blows the fuck up. And it quickly gets to number one on Netflix in 30 countries. And all of a sudden, things are going great for Richard. But then, people watch his series on streaming and they're like, hey, wait, Wait a minute, if this is based on a true story, I want to know who this stalker really is. Like, where can we find this woman? Now, in the show, they don't use her real name.

They call the stalker Martha. So suddenly, everyone on the internet is looking for the real Martha so they can, I don't know, shame her, I guess. I don't know. So fans of the show, they start digging around. Now remember, Fiona used to tweet at Richard, you know, often enough. So fans, they start looking at all the people who used to tweet at Richard back in the day, and they find a bunch of tweets from a Twitter user named Fiona Harvey 2014,

including one tweet that says, My curtains need hung badly. And collectively, the internet is like, it's her! This woman is the real Martha! Like they found her literally within hours of the show premiering. And so they start hitting her up and they're like, are you the real stalker from baby reindeer?

Now, at this point, Fiona could ignore all this. Because years before, after she had been stalking him for like three or four years, Richard was finally able to go to police, and he got a first-instance harassment warning against her, which is just a formalized way of saying if she harasses him again, she could be arrested. And after he was able to get that, she kind of disappeared out of his life, and he hasn't seen her in years. So Fiona has been out of his life for years, and she could ignore all these people hitting up her social media, or she could say, like, oh, you got the wrong person. But that is not.

what Fiona does. Instead, she not only publicly confirms that the show is talking about her, but a few months later, she goes on TV and does an interview with Pierce Morgan to try and defend herself. Now, since all these accusations against her are alleged, I want to be fair to Fiona's side of the story. So Fiona, of course, denies all of this. She denies she ever stalked Richard. She says they only met like two or three times and she never called him. She says he was trying to smash with her and that she ended up rejecting him. We ever in love with him? Is that serious question?

Yeah. No. I gave him the brush off. He asked me to sleep with him with a big green spot in his face one day. I said, no, I'm sorry, I'm not interested. Now, this story wouldn't be complete without a good old-fashioned lawsuit. So Fiona's currently suing Netflix and Richard for defamation and negligence. and she's suing them for $170 million in damages.

So if she wins this, she's gonna be a rich woman. Meanwhile, Netflix, they put out a statement saying, they stand by the story and they stand by Richard. And that's as far as the story goes right now, and it'll be fun to see how this one plays out.