Baby Reindeer on Netflix: The shocking true story behind the hit show

Baby Reindeer has become one of Netflix’s most acclaimed shows in years, but the horrifying true story will chill you to your bones.

Netflix series Baby Reindeer has taken the world by storm with its wild twists and turns, so it’s shocking to many to realise it’s all based on real life events.

The series is adapted from creator and star Richard Gadd’s stage play of the same name, which first debuted back in 2019.

Baby Reindeer has become a huge hit for Netflix around the world. Picture: Netflix

It follows a fictionalised version of Gadd, named Donny, who meets an unhinged woman named Martha while working at a pub in London.

What begins as Donny offering her a cup of tea out of sympathy turns into a twisted and complex relationship where Martha slowly but surely brings destruction and chaos to his life.

Throughout the journey, Donny is forced to confront several shocking aspects about his personal life, including a past history with sexual assault and drug use, as well as coming to terms with his own sexuality.

Opening up about the series, Gadd has insisted in an interview that despite the shocking nature of the show, it’s “emotionally 100 per cent true.”

He said that the shocking incidents within the series are “borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met”.

“But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons,” he told Variety, revealing that while certain things have been changed to “protect” vulnerable people, the story at its heart that’s depicted on the show is true to life.

Richard Gadd wrote the series after experiencing a real-life stalker from hell. Picture: Netflix

“I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television,” he explained. “And obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult. So you have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”

In reality, Gadd was stalked for four years by a woman who called him “Baby Reindeer.”

At the beginning, Gadd and his friends didn’t think much of it, until things started becoming increasingly unhinged. He was harassed with 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters.

She also sent him gifts including a reindeer toy, sleeping pills, a woolly hat and boxer shorts.

“At first everyone at the pub thought it was funny that I had an admirer,” Gadd told the The Times. “Then she started to invade my life, following me, turning up at my gigs, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”

“I wasn’t a perfect person [back then], so there’s no point saying I was,” admitted the star. “And I know as I’m doing those sections that people are thinking I’m not a nice person – which make them difficult to perform.”

Baby Reindeer, the limited series, holds a perfect score of 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to stream on Netflix.