Jan Moir: Baby Reindeer’s armchair sleuths are as bad as stalkers themselves

Can there be too much real life in a real-life drama?

What if the true crime in a true crime series is telling too much that is true? And who owns the moral rights to anyone’s life story anyway?

All these questions have been thrown into focus by Baby Reindeer, comedian Richard Gadd’s seven-part television series about his own experience as a victim of stalking.

To his surprise as much as anyone’s, the modestly budgeted show has become an unexpected global hit.

Since it was launched two weeks ago, coincidentally — one hopes — just in time for national Stalking Awareness Week, Baby Reindeer has become the number-one Netflix streaming show around the world, topping the charts from America to Australia and beyond.

Millions have watched the unflinching and occasionally squalid tale of how struggling comedian Donny (played by Gadd himself) was stalked by Martha (Jessica Gunning) — and also groomed, then raped, by television executive Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill) for good measure.

The problem — the big problem! — is that the real-life Martha has now been identified and the wrong television executive identified by the same kind of ghoulish, Googling, bad faith, online armchair sleuths who got involved with the disappearance and death of Nicola Bulley last year.

Despite pleas from Gadd and others to desist, the sleuths went right ahead and named the real Martha online, while an entirely innocent television producer has had his reputation shredded because of their clumsy and erroneous Inspector Clouseau-like meddling.

Both have received death threats and abuse; both are said to be consulting their lawyers. In addition, “Martha” has been named in some newspapers, although we have chosen not to do so.

In published interviews and on her social media feeds this week, Real Martha showed the kind of salty reactions and dishevelled thinking that chime precisely with those displayed by the Fictional Martha.

“‘He stalked me,” she said of Gadd, while accusing him of bullying her.

“He is using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now; I’m the victim. He’s written a bloody show about me.”

Last month, long before these perilous developments, Gadd told Variety magazine that the character of Martha and his real-life stalker were not similar.

“We had to make them different for legal reasons,” he said.

“You have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”

Well that worked out well, didn’t it? Yet I don’t believe this is Richard Gadd’s fault. He should be allowed to tell his own story, and he has done so with admirable candour and no little compassion.

In many ways Baby Reindeer is harder on Gadd himself than it is on Martha; the author never forgets, despite severe provocations, that mental illness is to blame for her behaviour.

And he even admits onscreen to his own weak complicity when, crippled by self-hatred, he is flattered by her greasy attentions.

Some have said that Gadd could have done more to protect Real Martha, deleting his tell-all, decade-old social media posts for a start.

But it looks to me like that is exactly what he did — or restricted access to them at the very least.

However, in an online world where little is private and even less is out of bounds to the dedicated voyeur, it is amazing what nuggets these truffling pigs can dig up.

And isn’t it ironic that they are fuelled by the same kind of dark compulsions as stalkers themselves; obsessed to the point where both perspective and humanity dissolve into the moral murk.

One of the main reasons that Baby Reindeer became so popular was its honesty — what a pity if that honesty also turns out to be its undoing.

At the centre of the drama is Gunning’s mesmerising portrayal of Martha as a woman who was vulnerable and damaged, but also capable of terrible physical and mental violence.

Baby Reindeer should be given a public health award for depicting the ugly reality that faces both the stalker and the stalked.

It was as true a depiction of the clammy horror of stalking as you will find onscreen; Martha waiting at the bus stop every day, Martha sending thousands and thousands of emails and foul texts, Martha becoming increasingly threatening and unstable as the twin grip of obsession and delusion takes hold.

Stalkers such as Martha often suffer from a form of erotomania; festering in a sexual obsession focused on the innocent object of their misplaced desire.

Yet to its credit, Baby Reindeer is not sexy and glossy and mysterious, as stalking dramas often are.

Instead, it depicts stalking as the life-wrecking, gut-wrenching, grinding harassment that results in restraining orders, family calamity, new identities and sometimes even murder.

Today, there is a stalking crisis in Hollywood. There is barely a female British television presenter who doesn’t have a stalker or some kind of stalking problem.

And stalking incidences have increased so much in the UK that many police forces now have their own dedicated specialist stalking officers.

Baby Reindeer is a hard watch but, despite all its darkness, it should be given a public health award for depicting the ugly reality that faces both the stalker and the stalked.

If cyber sleuths force Richard Gadd — and others behind real-life dramas — to disguise reality too much, we are in danger of moving the dial ever further away from the truth.

If that happens, how could dramas such as Mr Bates vs The Post Office, The Sixth Commandment or even The Crown ever get made?

And I didn’t hear anyone quibbling about the Royal Family’s mental health or wellbeing when Peter Morgan stuck the boot in, week after week.

Viewers in their millions responded to the truth of Baby Reindeer, they recognised its gritty veracity instantly and instinctively. And no wonder.

Far too often audiences are insulted by television dramas all bent out of shape by woke concerns and the kind of anxious social engineering that results in the over-representation and beatification of minorities, who are never the bad hats nor the guilty parties.

By contrast, unvarnished Baby Reindeer was down in the weeds, bereft of red herrings, modish truth-warping or clever conceits — and all the better for it.

I didn’t love Baby Reindeer and I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I did admire the honesty and the energy and the fact that it is too important to ignore.