‘My stalker was a bigger victim than me’
Richard Gadd tells Eleanor Steafel that the stranger who made his life a living hell was herself let down by the police
The crying woman who had just walked into the bar was clearly in a state. She was also that particular breed of stranger who most of us walk nervously past. When Richard Gadd made her a cup of tea and spent a few minutes chatting to her, trying to make her feel less alone, he could never have known that years later he would have endured what a police officer described as one of the worst cases of sustained harassment he’d ever seen.
Gadd, 30, is telling me about this extraordinarily difficult period of his life over coffee in his dressing room at the Bush Theatre in west London. His show, Baby Reindeer, about the many years when he was stalked by “Martha”, is coming to the end of its run this Saturday, after taking the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by storm in the summer. As he talks me through his ordeal, it seems incredible that he came out of it with such humility (Gadd insists he was partly responsible for what happened to him), and even more so that he felt able to write a show about it.
Baby Reindeer is not a one-sided victim story. Rather, it paints Gadd as being partly complicit; he could have done a version in which “I offered a woman a cup of tea, and then she stalked me for God knows how many years”, he says, but “I felt that that wasn’t really telling the truth. The truth of the story is that I didn’t behave particularly well. I’m not the only the victim. She’s probably an even bigger victim than I am, because she needs help, and she’s been let down by the state.”
That may be true, but what Gadd has endured beggars belief. Over a period of several years, Martha sent him 41,071 emails, left 350 hours of voicemail, sent 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, sleeping pills, a woolly hat, a pair of boxer shorts and a cuddly reindeer toy. She turned up outside his house, at his shows, at that same bar where they had briefly met. And still, the police were unconvinced that she was a threat.
Their chance encounter led to years of distress. “I gave her a free cup of tea. And the second time she came into the bar, I always remember she’d had her hair cut and she’d put make-up on, and I knew even then, I thought, ‘Oh, I think that’s for me’,” he recalls.
“But I kept being nice to her. That would have been the place to shut it down, but she was belligerent. Eventually when it got a bit too intense I tried just ignoring her.
“But she wouldn’t quit. She never quit until it got to the point when she legally had to.”
That moment didn’t come quickly.
Gadd is prevented legally from going into specific details, but says it was years before he was taken seriously, despite the fact that she had a history of stalking. When the police kept him at arm’s length, he was forced to play detective. “I had to trawl through all the emails, listen to all the voicemails, try to find some evidence for them,” he says, wringing his hands anxiously.
“It’s traumatising, it’s exhausting. I remember once putting a load of voicemails on an SD card. I handed it in, and they didn’t know what it was.” When he went back a couple of weeks later, “they’d lost [it]”.
At one point, he was chastised for “harassing them about being harassed”. It crossed his mind that the police might take him more seriously if he was a woman being stalked by a man. “And I think they probably should take that more seriously,” he is quick to add.
Why does he suspect they were so unwilling to investigate? “I think the fact she was unwell made them a bit reticent. I think they are just so overstretched, it’s unbelievable.”
In spite of his generosity towards the authorities that let him down so badly, he admits there were times when life felt desperate. “It was debilitating beyond belief. I’d listen to her voicemails and just feel my eyes welling up. They were tears of frustration. Proper brain-heavy stress. Honestly, it was awful.”
For many, the idea of reliving this every night on stage might seem an odd choice, but to Gadd turning trauma into art comes naturally. His 2016 Edinburgh show Monkey See Monkey Do, for which he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award, culminated in the revelation that he had been sexually assaulted four years earlier by a man at a party. He didn’t go into details, focusing instead on how his sense of self had crumbled in the aftermath.
It’s partly why, he thinks, he was more open to talking to the crying woman in the bar that day. “I was going through massive trauma and post-traumatic stress. And then this woman came into the bar, and I think when you’re going through a bad time … you’re more emotionally open to the world.”
He came up with Baby Reindeer over two-and-a-half years, writing and rewriting until he felt he had done the situation justice. “I had to tell this story knowing that she’s unwell, and it treads a very fine moral line. I needed to not paint her as evil.
“I was aware that [it] could make everything worse, but I thought that the show in all its messy complicated legal difficulty was important to say.”
On stage, his stalker’s messages are projected on to the walls around Gadd, her voicemails blasted over loudspeakers. There are still parts, he says, which he finds difficult to listen to every night, particularly the interviews with his parents, which have made him “very good at not listening, I still find that bit difficult”.
He is indebted, he says, to these two deeply personal shows which have seen him through a decade in which he had always planned to pursue comedy (he plans to return to stand-up eventually). “My twenties have been hard, and I feel like a lot of the clouds have lifted, and I owe a lot of that to the shows.”
Does he ever wonder what the woman in question, who has finally been legally prevented from approaching Gadd or anyone who knows him, thinks of it? “I don’t know how she’s reacting to it really, but I’m sure with a sense of embarrassment.”
He is frustrated by the “systemic failure” which, as he sees it, let his stalker down. “There have been ramifications in so many people’s lives including me, my family, people in my life … Had [the state] looked after her, about 20 or 30 people’s lives would have been a lot better.”
It has taken a toll on his relationships, too. “I think about that rule that you need four things in your life to be happy – family, love, health, career,” he says.
“She managed to drive a freight train through every single one of those in quite an unbelievable way.”
Now, though, he is moving forward. “There are maybe two shows I want to do that are quite personal. Once they’re done I’ll do something else,” he says. I imagine the people closest to him hope his next act will be rather less painful.
‘She never quit until it got to the point where she legally had to’