"According to court documents, Ms. Harvey met Mr. Gadd in 2014 at the pub where he worked in London, and went on to stalk and harass him..."

"... including sending countless emails and social media messages, shoving him in the back of his neck and touching him without his consent. The behavior continued until 2017, when Mr. Gadd was granted a harassment warning notice against Ms. Harvey. But in the Netflix show, the character of Martha is said to have stalked a police officer, sexually assaulted Donny, violently attacked Donny and gouged his eyes, and been convicted of stalking and served five years in prison. None of those details were true of Ms. Harvey, the judge said...."

From "Based on a True Story, or a True Story? In ‘Baby Reindeer’ Lawsuit, Words Matter. A defamation suit against Netflix boils down to how the company presented its story about Martha Scott, a fictionalization of what the show’s creator has described as a real-life stalking incident" (NYT).

Notably, the words at the beginning of "Baby Reindeer" are "This is a true story," not "Based on a true story."

The woman who says she's the Martha from "Baby Reindeer" — which Netflix bills as a "true story" — gets cornered by Piers Morgan.

I'm jumping to a point 34 minutes in where Morgan questions Fiona Harvey about the tens of thousands of emails the writer Richard Gadd says she sent to him. Harvey, a lawyer, is threatening to sue, and she knows that if the emails were sent they will be produced in that lawsuit. "These are easily provable things," Morgan says. "He's either got them or he hasn't." Watch the dramatics and tell me if you think she's credible. Either she or Gadd is lying.

Yes, Gadd is an artist, and he should be able to use his own life as source material and to process it into an interesting show, but he has stated that the story is true and the show, which is very successful, is promoted as a true story. Gadd has asserted that he has changed things to protect the privacy of real people, most notably "Martha," a vivid and fascinating stalker, but Martha was easily identified as Fiona Harvey. Direct quotes used in the show appeared in Harvey's social media.

The obvious complexity is that Harvey is saying both that she is and she isn't Martha. You have to first identify her as the character before you can accuse Gadd of lying about her. If you watch the clip, you'll see how difficult her position is. But maybe she's a liar and a stalker. If not, what is she? Should she be on TV explaining herself, cornered and (to my eye) terrified? If she is Martha — and if Gadd's presentation is true — she has serious mental problems.

"Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show."

Said Richard Gadd, whose brilliant Netflix series "Baby Reindeer" is a fictionalized version of his own true story, quoted in "Baby Reindeer creator asks fans to stop speculating about stalker/Richard Gadd says his real-life friends are being unfairly targeted as viewers try to guess the identity of characters in his Netflix series" (London Times).

So the point of the show is not to focus viewers on the question of what really happened and whether there are free-roaming individuals who deserve punishment or public shaming. What then is the point? Having watched the whole series, I'd say it is to open up thinking about the cyclical cause-and-effect of sexual abuse.

I encourage discussion in the comments from people who have seen the show, so I am not asking you to avoid spoilers. If you haven't seen the show, I'd recommend avoiding reading spoilers. Here's the trailer, which spoils a little, so it would be better to just start watching, unless you're wary of a show on this subject and need some encouragement.

Roseanne's political comedy: "Joe Biden raped me."

#believeallwomen. #meshoe #bergdorfdressingroom #loosemeat pic.twitter.com/yzebab8syO

— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) April 23, 2024

Is this good satire?

"Joe Biden. He raped me right here. In the shoe department of Bergdorf Goodman... I need to sue."

I get the point: You can't trust women who say they've recovered a memory of a rape from the distant past. That's not funny as an idea. Does it become funny when a comedienne enacts it? Theoretically, it could. I don't think this did. To me, it works more as a declaration that E. Jean Carroll should not have won her case against Trump.

Does comedy need to be funny? There is some debate these days on that questioning the centrality of funniness in the performances of some artists who are categorized as comedy. For example, "Does comedy have to be funny?," by the sophomore Monika Narain, last year in the Duke student newspaper. Excerpt:

Take for example Tig Notaro’s 2012 performance at the Largo, a major club in Los Angeles... [S]he began with “Hello. Good evening, hello. I have cancer,” and spent the next 29 minutes working out her feelings onstage....

Or take Hannah Gadsby’s special Nanette, where... she unpeels the psychological layers of building a career off of self-deprecating humor, and what that not only does to a person, but the communities they represent. That if you poke fun at the aspects of your identity that make you a “loser,” then who’s really winning?...

There are numerous examples of comedians who have offered up intimate performances that grapple with the darkest parts of society and break expectations of any one definition of what comedy is “supposed” to be. To say that comedy has to be funny is like saying visual art has to be pretty, or music has to be melodic....

The top show on Netflix right now is "Baby Reindeer," a drama about a comedian. We see some of his comedy routines. In Episode 4, we see how his act begins. He's dressed clownishly, romps about manically, and stops and delivers his first line: "So my mom died today."

That's got to be a reference to the highly respected comedy novel, "The Stranger," which famously begins: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." Oh? It's not comedy? It is comedy? I can't be sure.