The plot thickens.
A second person has come forward and alleged that the “Baby Reindeer” stalker targeted her, too.
British lawyer Laura Wray, 62 – widow of ex-Labour MP Jimmy Wray – gave an interview to Piers Morgan on his show “Uncensored,” following Fiona Harvey’s interview in May.
“I do feel threatened,” she said. “I always felt threatened by her because I just never knew what she was capable of.”
The Scottish legal advocate explained: “I seem to have been her major obsession over all these years,” adding this had been “for many years, for longer than Richard Gadd.”
Wray met Harvey through work, and Wray alleged, “She was dreadful … rude to staff. She shouted at people. She was inappropriate with a male member of staff. She tried to follow a male member of staff home. I mean all sorts of things happen. She threw a book across the office and hit somebody with it.”
Based on events from creator-star Richard Gadd’s life, “Baby Reindeer” (now streaming, with nearly 60 million viewers tuning in for its first month) is a thriller following Donny (Gadd), a struggling comedian who meets Martha (Jessica Gunning) while he’s working as a bartender. When he shows her a moment of kindness, that backfires. Soon, Martha turns into an obsessed stalker — doing acts such as sending him over 41,000 emails.
Gadd initially said that although the show is based on his life, he didn’t want viewers trying to sleuth out who the real Martha was.
“That’s not the point of our show,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.
Nevertheless, keyboard detectives pointed fingers at 58-year-old Fiona Harvey, née Muir. On May 9, she gave her first TV interview to Morgan on “Uncensored,” where she denied stalking Gadd.
When asked what message she had for Gadd, she said, “Leave me alone, please. Get a life, get a proper job. I am horrified at what you’ve done.”
Harvey also revealed she has not watched the show, but found it “quite obscene.”
“I find it horrifying, misogynistic. Some of the death threats have been really terrible online. People phoning me up,” she went on. “You know, it’s been absolutely horrendous. I wouldn’t give credence to something like that, and it’s not really my kind of drama.”
Wray, for her part, “couldn’t believe” what she was seeing on the Netflix series.
“From the very beginning, it was obvious it was the same woman. It was Fiona Harvey,” she told Morgan. “The actress does a very good job. Sounds like her, looks like her, mimicked her to a T … I have a file full of papers which are letters from her — emails, faxes and so forth, and it’s all identical.”
Wray said that viewers also sleuthed out her identity. “I think it’s because it was so unusual, that she was a female stalker stalking another female. And so I was actually identified by the press before she was.”
She added: “It had a really bad effect on me and now after five weeks or so when I’m getting over [it] a bit, it’s still very triggering every time I see something … I mean, I’m a reasonably robust person. I’m an advocate. I appear in court all the time, so not easily prone to tears. But this has got me very, very anxious and upset.”
The “Baby Reindeer” cast has already spoken out about how they haven’t watched Harvey’s interview.
In an interview with The Daily Record newspaper, Gadd said he thought “Baby Reindeer” would just be “a little cult artistic gem” rather than a huge hit, and he thinks that explains why Netflix didn’t do more to obscure identities.
“It was, like, crazy. I never expected it to sort of blow up like this,” Gadd said. “I believed it would be successful, but I didn’t expect overnight — I don’t even like to use this word — fame.”
Netflix has not commented on Harvey’s interview, but during an appearance in British Parliament on Wednesday, the streamer’s UK public policy director Benjamin King said, “I cannot get into the specifics of what happened around the making of the show because it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment.”
Regarding the Netflix boss claiming that “Martha’s” identity was obscured in the show, Wray said, “I disagree completely with what he says. That is just not the case … I am considering suing her, and certainly if Netflix gives her 11 million pounds I’ll be suing her. The problem is that if she has no money, reparation claims are very expensive to mount. There’s very little point in me suing her if she’s got nothing.”
The Post has reached out to Netflix for comment.
