Netflix is vowing to fight a lawsuit filed by a woman who claims she was “tormented” after being identified by online sleuths as the inspiration behind a stalker character in the popular “Baby Reindeer” series.
Fiona Harvey is suing the streaming service for $170 million for the show's portrayal of Martha, a person obsessed with another character, Donny, played by Richard Gadd, the drama's creator.
The character is routinely shown spending hours outside of Donny's home, repeatedly contacting him and subjecting him to sexual and physical assault, events that did not actually occur, according to the complaint filed Thursday in Los Angeles federal court.
Harvey, a Scottish lawyer living in London, did patronize the London bar where Gadd worked but has no criminal record, as Martha's character does in the limited series that premiered in April, according to the your demand She was identified as the Martha character due to an expression used on the show that she tweeted in 2014, tagging Gadd.
“Defamed by Netflix and Richard Gadd to an unprecedented magnitude and scale,” Harvey could no longer go out in public, according to the suit.
Netflix promises to “vigorously defend this matter and uphold Richard Gadd's right to tell his story,” the company told The Associated Press in an email.
Harvey told British broadcaster Piers Morgan last month that he had sent “a couple of emails,” posted about 18 tweets tagging Gadd and sent a letter in the mail, while also considering him a friend. She denied Gadd's claim that he based the character of Martha on a person who sent her more than 40,000 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets and 46 Facebook messages on four fake accounts and more than 100 pages of letters over a period of three years. .
Gadd took to Instagram to ask fans of the show to stop trying to identify the real people behind their characters. He cleared the name of a man who had been mistakenly identified as another character.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
