Something about the woman on her television screen made Laura Wray uncomfortable. The lawyer and widow of a Labor MP was relaxing at home, captivated by the first few minutes of Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer, particularly the character Martha, who stalks a struggling comedian.
What was it about Martha that seemed so familiar? Maybe the raucous laugh that seemed to last too long, or the way she clutched her purse against her side when she walked timidly into a pub. Whatever it was about this curly-haired Scot, she reminded Laura of someone from her past. The realization was like an electric shock and Laura fell onto the couch with her mouth open.
Because she knew Martha too well, or rather the real Martha, who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, upended Laura’s happy life with a relentless campaign of harassment that lasted five years. It was so ferocious at one point that Laura was forced to issue panic alarms to staff at her Glasgow law firm.
After watching Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, attorney Laura Wray said, “I know Martha by her real name, but my jaw dropped while watching the series.”
In one scene from the drama, Martha goes from exuberance to screaming with rage in an instant. “That put it out of the question; I’ve seen her do that,” Laura says.
Baby Reindeer, which has been watched by 13 million viewers in just two weeks, topping the Netflix charts in 30 countries, is based on the real-life experience of its creator, Richard Gadd, who plays a version of himself, an aspiring comic.
One day, Martha walks into the pub where she works and brags about being a renowned but, inexplicably, broke lawyer. Compassionate, she makes him a cup of tea. Thus begins the beginning of a terrifying obsession.
Soon he is emailing Gadd hundreds of times a day, showing up in front of his house, and harassing his family and friends.
Over a four-and-a-half-year period, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totaling 106 pages, and 350 hours of voicemails.
The series also hints at Martha’s previous history of bullying. Gadd’s character, Donny, is seen Googling her and finding a newspaper article, fictionalized for the show, with the headline: “Sick stalker attacks lawyer’s deaf son.”
Gadd has insisted that the character of Martha was so well disguised in her script that the real-life person she was based on “wouldn’t recognize herself.” But for Laura (the ‘lawyer’ referred to in those false headlines) the shocking recognition of the woman who had terrorized her family, including her severely disabled son Frankie, was almost instantaneous.
It also didn’t take long for Internet sleuths to discover the real Martha and target her with online abuse.
Speaking to The Mail yesterday on Sunday, the woman, whose identity we have chosen not to reveal, claimed that the Netflix show amounted to “bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune” and that she had received “death threats ” by Gadd supporters. . The comedian, he said, “was now using Baby Reindeer to stalk me.”
But while ‘Martha’ may want to present herself as a victim, for Laura that’s a bit ironic.
If anything, Laura’s nightmare eclipsed Gadd’s. At one point, ‘Martha’ threatened to kill her husband, Jimmy Wray, then MP for Glasgow Baillieston.
But the last straw came in 2002, when the woman falsely accused the couple of assaulting Frankie, who was then almost four years old and who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. “I know Martha by her real name, but I was blown away watching the series,” said Laura, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday for the first time about her ordeal.
“It brought me so many things that I had forgotten. She did the same to me, she made my life a nightmare. He (Gadd) has hit the nail on the head. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. I felt sorry for her. Apparently everyone she’s ever crossed paths with and screwed over has felt the same way.
The real ‘Martha’, now 58, comes from a middle-class family who lived in a village near Stirling.
She had a law degree and first entered Laura’s orbit in October 1997, when she was convinced to give her a two-week trial at her company. “She told me a very bad story: she had no family support, she graduated in Law and was looking for an internship, but no one offered it to her,” says Laura.
‘I had my reservations. She was terribly direct in telling me all these very personal things. Before we even met, she sent me a postcard congratulating me on my engagement to Jimmy. But basically I felt sorry for her.
‘Once she started with us she was rude to everyone. She once threw a book across the room and hit a staff member in the head. One day, she answered a phone line and we discovered that she was recommending rival attorneys.
Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha in Baby Reindeer, which follows the character as she stalks a struggling comedian.
‘She also shouted at Karen, one of my secretaries, and demanded that she stop everything she was doing for me and instead do something for her immediately.
“Then he started threatening people and yelling, like in Baby Reindeer, when he goes from being quite nice to yelling, ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’
‘She did the same thing (in my office) and I told her, ‘We’re a company, I can’t have that kind of behavior.’ I fired her after a week. She was furious and threatened to do this, that and the other to me.
‘He then ran out of my room shouting that he wasn’t going to leave and that he was calling the Law Society. She said that no one in the legal world liked me and that my staff was useless. Then he started yelling, “Jimmy Wray is going to rue the day.”
‘Some of the girls in the office were shaking and upset and thought he was going to attack me or one of the staff. In the end they escorted her out, still cursing me, and later they saw her driving around the office in her car.
Soon he was bombarding Laura with threatening “I’ll get you” phone calls and disparaging her to other lawyers, her family, friends and her husband’s political associates, including Donald Dewar, Scotland’s inaugural First Minister.
In September 2001, the woman even left a message on her MP’s answering machine, threatening to kill Jimmy. Feeling “truly sorry” for her, Laura tried to ignore it. She says: ‘Back then there was no legislation on bullying or harassment.
‘There was no obvious right of recourse for me. The only thing she could have done was sue for defamation, but there was no point, she had no money and the only other option was to resort to civil proceedings which weren’t really designed for that sort of thing.’
However, his reserves of compassion would soon be depleted.
Things got worse when Laura started a course at Strathclyde University the following month to gain some additional qualifications. The first day, she ran into her stalker, who was staring at her from across the room, his gaze like a harpoon. ‘She kept popping up from time to time at the conferences she attended. She was there suddenly.
‘Many times he came and stood next to me while the students waited for the lecture hall doors to open. I have memories of her right next to me, almost breathing on me. She was very disconcerting and I was scared. I had to get some of the other students to walk me to my car.
‘I went to see a teacher and explained everything and he looked at the list and said I wasn’t actually registered as a student. But the university ignored me and did nothing.”
The university later apologized and admitted that the woman had in fact been a student, but had been permanently excluded for her behavior towards other students and staff.
But it was in April 2002 when his behavior finally crossed a line for Laura. She came home with Frankie, then almost four years old, to find two social workers at her door.
“(The woman) had claimed that we hit our son and I was forced to explain all the background,” says Laura. ‘Thankfully the social workers believed me, but it was just appalling and I was absolutely furious.
‘This is a child who couldn’t walk or talk, couldn’t do anything for himself. To think that anyone would suggest that we would do this (hurt them) is heartless and cruel.
‘It was perfectly fine to dismiss someone as mentally ill and simply ignore the bullying. But the last thing was Frankie, and I wasn’t willing to accept that.
Laura applied to the courts for a restraining order, which was granted the next day.
Gadd has insisted that the character of Martha was so well disguised in her script that the real-life person she was based on “wouldn’t recognize herself.”
It gave Laura and her family the peace they longed for. But over the years, she occasionally wondered what happened to her stalker. Did she target others? Did she receive the help she needed?
And then came Baby Reindeer. “It saddens me that she has managed to fly under the radar for so long when she is clearly not well,” Laura says.
She is also dismayed that the woman has now been identified on social media as a result of the Netflix show, despite Gadd’s insistence that he had hidden her identity.
“He had an Edinburgh Fringe show that featured this story and now he has this hit series on Netflix and good luck to him, but it must have occurred to him that people were bound to speculate about who Martha is and whether she did this.” to anyone else,” says Laura.
‘They could have changed things without diluting the content, but they have made it very realistic.
‘They have portrayed her absolutely accurately, it is so obvious that she is the woman who harassed me. It’s so strange.’
Additional reporting: Daisy Graham-Brown