Which of them is the victim?

The personality of a woman who persecuted a man was revealed on the Internet. He shot a series about this, and now she herself complains about herbs

"Baby Reinder) is a British series from Netflix about stalking and sexualized violence based on real events. Despite the efforts of the authors to disguise the prototypes of the heroes, on the Internet they have already found a woman with whom the main character is written off. Now she herself complains about grass. "Cold" tells how the story from the series affects real life.

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A young man enters the police station. Confused, he tells the duty officer that he was pursued by a woman: she comes to his house and work, sends hundreds of messages to e -mail. "Why have you pulled a statement for so long?" - asks the policeman. But the man himself does not know the answer to this question. Thus begins the story of the Olenenka, one of the most discussed series of the last weeks.

According to the plot, the 30-year-old Scot Donni Dunn (Richard Gadd) moved to London to become a comedian, but has not yet achieved glory. He works as a bartender in a pub, lives in the house of his ex -girlfriend’s mother, and the audience reacts coolly to his rare performances. Once, a 42-year-old woman named Marta (Jessica Hanning) looks at Donnie to a bar. It seems to be a lawyer working for the government, but admits that she has no money at all. Donnie is imbued with sympathy for a woman and offers her a cup of tea at the expense of the institution.

Soon Martha becomes a permanent visitor to the pub: she comes to the opening and leaves late at night, spending the whole shift of Donny there. At first, Donnie flattes the following attention: he likes to mix Marta and receive compliments. Donnie perceives her only as a girlfriend, but Martha believes that they have a romantic relationship. At one of the meetings, she grabs Donnie by the hand and refuses to let go, and when he breaks out, she breaks into a cry.

The hero is trying to build borders, but this only fuels the obsession with Martha. At some point, she finds the email address of Donnie and floods it with letters: from messages with sexual subtext to controlling and jealous. In these messages, she calls Donnie her “deer”. Martha comes to his performances, tracks him in social networks, pursues him on the way home, but he continues to sympathize with her.

Real story

Richard Gadd, the author of the script and the main role, says that he wrote a script based on personal experience. In 2015, the 26-year-old Richard, like his hero, worked in the London pub and once out of pity, treated a woman with tea, who could not afford it. In life, she was 20 years older than Richard.

After that, the woman began to pursue Richard.

“At first, everyone in the pub thoughts that it was funny, that I had a fan,” Gadd said in an interview . “Then she began to invade my life, pursuing me, appearing at my concerts, waiting near my house, sending thousands of voice messages and emails.” The stalker subjected to Karassment and relatives of Richard: his parents and the trans-tribute to whom he met.

For four and a half years, she sent Richard 41071 email, left 350 hours of voice messages, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of paper letters and many strange gifts, including a toy deer, sleeping pill, hat and boxers.

On the basis of this persecution story, Richard Gadd wrote the Baby Reinder monospace, which showed at the Fringe Art Festival in Edinburgh in 2019. He said that Stalking continued during the show of performance.

In the past, Richard already wrote plays based on his own painful experience. In 2016, he performed with the personal show “Monkey See, Monkey Do”, in which he investigated his experience in experiencing sexualized violence by senior colleague. The "deer", published on Netflix in April 2024, combined the plots of both plays. According to Gadd, work on the show helped him cope with the experience of violence better than any therapy.

Giving an interview after the premiere of the show, Richard Gadd reluctantly talked about the prototype of Martha. According to him, although she left him alone, this story affected his mental state and still affects his life.

At the same time, working on the plot of the deer, he tried not to demonize Marta and make the audience sympathize with her. “Pursuit is a mental dysfunction, a disease. I felt that I was dealing with someone vulnerable, mentally unhealthy, who could not stop, because I believed that he had in his head, and not with someone's insidious, ” said Richard Gadd after the premiere of the series.

According to him, Martha is also a “victim in all this” and it would be wrong to portray her with a monster: she was unhealthy, and the system failed her with its inaction - no one helped her in time.

“I do not want to politicize this interview too much, but it seems to me that in the [British] public services there is now a crisis. Watching the investigation [in the case of persecution], I felt how much resources they lack, ”he said .

Who is the victim?

The authors of the show changed some details of the story and tried to process images so that the heroes, especially the persecutor, could not be recognized .

“She was a very peculiar person. We made every effort to disguise it to such an extent that it did not recognize itself. We retained the emotional truth, not a literal description of a person, ” said Richard.

But this did not stop Internet investigators: since the show was released, they began to look for the alleged prototypes of heroes through social networks.

In particular, the director and writer, a nominee for the Tony Award, Sean Fowley, encountered fans of the fans. It looks like an actor who played the rapist in the series. Fowley turned to the police , after he began to accuse him of the network of the fact that in the past he harassed Richard Gadd.

Fans of the series managed to calculate the woman who became the prototype of Martha - one of her tweets. In the series, March asks Donnie to hang curtains in her house, in response to which the hero is joking that this is an euphemism for sex. On September 23, 2014, a Twitter user named Fion Harvey wrote to Richard Gaddu: “You really need to hang my curtains.”

Fiona Harvey is 58 years old. She lives alone in a municipal apartment in the center of London and actively leads a page on Facebook . In many of her posts, she mentions Gadd: he criticizes his work and doubts that he was actually subjected to sexualized violence. The posts on her page are really stylistically similar to the messages that Martha sends Donnie in the series: long messages without punctuation marks

At first, Fiona Harvey gave an anonymous interview, where she confirmed that she was familiar with Gadd, but in early May decided to reveal her identity .

According to Harvey, she really met Richard Gadd in a pub, but the scenes where Martha was enough by Donnie's hand in the cafe, and then screams when he tries to free himself, in fact was not . Harvey claims that Gadd saw only a couple of times, there were always other people around and she never pursued him. According to Harvey, they did not go to dinner together or on picnics, there was no romantic relationship between them and the last time they saw each other 12 years ago. According to her, even then, Gadd unfairly called her a stalker .

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Fion Harvey called the series “The Reflash” “Breaking an elderly woman on television for glory and wealth.” According to her, after the show was released, she received threats and insults on the Internet.

She believes that Richard Gadd uses the series to pursue her. “I am a victim. He wrote a damn show about me! " - said Harvey.

The essence of the show is not that

Fiona Harvey and the heroine of the Martha series really have many similar features: both women of the Scots, both studied the right at the university, both about 20 years older than Gadd. They are similar in appearance, Harvey herself admits this: "She is something similar to me after I gained weight during self-isolation."

Harvey, like the heroine of the series, has a history of persecution in the past. In the series, Donnie learns that Marta used to be in prison for the persecution of the family of a former employer who had a child with disabilities. In 1997, Fiona Kharvi, a graduate of the Faculty of Law, was hired an internship in a law firm. However, soon her boss, Laura Ray’s lawyer, fired her for “inappropriate behavior”: Harvey wrote false complaints to the guardianship that Laura and her husband Jimmy Ray brutally treated her son, who has a rare disease. According to Ray, Harvey regularly called her, came without an invitation and wrote threats. As a result, the court forbade Harvey to approach Jimmy and Laura Ray.

Now she is going to sue Netflix and plans to represent her interests herself, because she has no money for lawyers.

Richard Gadd, meanwhile, calls on the fans to stop the search for real prototypes of the heroes of his series.

“The people whom I love, with whom I worked and I admire (including Sean Fowley), are unfairly drawn into speculation. Please stop looking for prototypes. This is not the point of our show, ”Gadd wrote in his social networks.

The connection of his heroine Martha and Fiona Harvey Gadd did not comment.