The woman believed to be the real-life Martha from Netflix’s hit series “Baby Reindeer” appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” to refute the series – and her supposed portrayal in it – as “very, very defamatory to me, very career-damaging.”
Fiona Harvey’s pre-taped interview aired Thursday night, in which she spent a bulk of her time denying sending over 41,000 emails and 100 letters to Richard Gadd. He’s the man who turned his experience first into a one-man play and later the Netflix series he also stars in.
“That’s simply not true,” Harvey said. “If somebody was sending somebody 41,000 emails or something, they’d be doing how many a day? Lots.”
Morgan responded by agreeing it would be “obsessive” before pressing her on what she might have sent instead. Again, Harvey denied Gadd received anything from her before admitting a couple “jokey” emails were sent.
“I don’t think I sent him anything … No, I think there may have been a couple of emails exchanging, but that was it,” she clarified. “Just jokey banter emails.”
A large part of the series’ success rests on Jessica Gunning’s performance as Martha – the character Gadd allegedly based on Harvey. Despite the accolades for both the show and Gunning’s character specifically, Harvey refuses to watch “Baby Reindeer” as it’s “a fiction … based on his imagination.”
“No, I think I’d be sick,” she told Morgan. “It’s taken over enough of my life. I find it quite obscene. I find it horrifying, misogynistic. Some of the death threats have been really terrible online. People phoning me up. You know, it’s been absolutely horrendous.”
Harvey also made it clear she expects an apology from either Netflix or Gadd himself for the “completely untrue” depiction of her.
“We’ve had no apologies from Netflix or him, nothing,” she said. “I mean, for someone who says he feels sorry for me, I’ve had no apology. My character seems to have smashed up a bar, sexually assaulted him in a canal, been to prison. There are a number of other allegations, and … that’s not true.”
“Baby Reindeer” enjoyed a meteoric rise following its April 11 debut. Gadd explained during a Q&A held in Los Angeles after the show’s success that he went to an “obsessive” place while writing the series.
“I wrote a lot of it literally surrounded by white walls on a garden deck chair and a laptop on my lap,” he said. “It’s amazing I didn’t go insane. It was a crazy, mad thing. I had to go into a very obsessive place. I did mad hours on it. My best writing was like, 5 a.m. onwards. I would get up at half four and obsessively write almost til I went to bed the next day.”
Watch the entire “Piers Morgan Uncensored” interview, below:
