‘Baby Reindeer’: fiction turns into insidious fact
• New Netflix show attracts online sleuths wreaking havoc on innocents
Great personal pain often makes for the material of great art, but what happens when that art enters a world full of wannabe online sleuths determined to dissect it and identify the real people in it, rather than accept it on its own “inspired by a true story” creative terms?
That’s the uncomfortable question facing comedian Richard Gadd whose new Netflix show, Baby Reindeer, is airing. It’s a deeply uncomfortable drama based on his experiences as the target of a dangerous stalker and how the traumas he suffered as victim of sexual abuse at the hands of an older colleague complicated his relationship with his stalker.
Gadd’s show, easily one of the most original and queasy but compelling experiences viewers have recently encountered on the small screen, was released on the platform last week and shot to the top of the Netflix charts in the UK, US and several other countries. While the names and some details of the real people — including his stalker and abuser — have been changed to protect their identities, that hasn’t stopped overeager internet detectives doing their best to unpeel the layers of fiction from Gadd’s story so as to identify his real life tormentors.
On Monday, Gadd was forced to issue a statement pleading with viewers not to continue their investigations as people he loves and admires were “unfairly getting caught up in speculation”, asking those responsible for online harassment of innocent people in his life to please not “speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of the show.”
The show is adapted from Gadd’s Edinburgh Festival award-winning one-man show of the same name, which he performed in 2018. It tells, in difficult to stomach detail, the story of Gadd’s demented relationship with an older woman who he took pity on while working at a London pub in his late 20s. She soon became dangerously obsessed and sent him hundreds of emails every day, some of them horribly explicit, before she began to threaten his family, attack his friends and become a danger to him and those around him.
The determination of some viewers to uncover the real-life people and events has created an ironic situation in which a brave, difficult act of creative self-immolation on the part of its creator about traumatic stalking events led to more stalking by its audience. What was meant to be a warning about the dangers of interaction in the online age unwittingly released many of the online world’s worst types of people who think nothing of harassing people they don’t know online because they believe them to be something or someone they really aren’t.
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Some have argued that Gadd’s entreaties to online trollers are too little too late and that he should have been aware that by not fudging the details of the real people more, he was creating the potential for the situation he finds himself in. This seems a disingenuous criticism of an artist who has gone to a very dark place in his own story and psyche to turn it into art that may help others escape a similar fate.
Had Gadd instead created a show that he claimed to be entirely fiction, it may be true that it wouldn’t have landed with the kind of gut-wrenching punch that it has, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge what it must have taken for him to tell his story and respect his decision to try to tell it without implicating anyone in the real world, other than himself.
Gadd’s particular stroke of genius is to spend much time in Baby Reindeer, in which he plays the slightly fictionalised role of struggling comedian Donny, dealing with his own complicity in the incidents that almost ruined his life. As he told The Guardian in a recent interview, “People are afraid to admit they made mistakes, and I think a lot of mistakes by humans are made through people pleasing. You stay in a lie because it’s easier to circumvent the tension of a situation. I never wanted to upset someone who was vulnerable.”
That should apply as much to viewers as it does to the show’s creator. While it may play to some sort of Hercule Poirot fantasy to be able to strip away the layers of the show to identify the real life characters, what purpose does it serve if it results in their being attacked online?
It should be enough to appreciate the pain that has gone into the creation of the show and its mature and uncomfortable treatment of that pain, learn something from that and thank yourself that it isn’t your story.
It’s also worth remembering that, while it may be based on truth, it is ultimately art. There may be other stalking nightmares that would be the subject of true crime series in which names and identities are not hidden, but Baby Reindeer isn’t and shouldn’t be treated as if it’s one of them.
IT ’ S A DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE DRAMA BASED ON HIS EXPERIENCES AS THE TARGET OF A STALKER