Something about the woman on her television screen made Laura Wray uneasy. The lawyer and widow of a Labor MP was relaxing at home, captivated by the first minutes of Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer, including the character Martha who stalks a struggling comedian.
What was so familiar about Martha? Perhaps the loud laughter that seemed to go on a little too long, or the way she held her handbag to the side as she shyly entered a pub. Whatever it was about this curly-haired Scottish girl, she reminded Laura of someone from her past. The realization was like an electric shock and Laura fell back on her couch, speechless.
For she knew Martha all too well, or rather the real Martha, who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, had turned Laura’s happy life upside down with a relentless campaign of harassment for five years. At one point the situation was so violent that Laura was forced to send panic alarms to staff at her Glasgow law firm.
After watching Baby Reindeer’s Lawyer on Netflix, Laura Wray said: “I know Martha by her real name, but I was speechless watching the show.”
In one scene in the drama, Martha instantly goes from exuberance to screaming rage. “There’s no doubt about it – I saw her do it,” Laura says.
Baby Reindeer, which was watched by 13 million viewers in just two weeks and topped 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 comedian.
One day, Martha walks into the pub where he works and boasts that she is a top lawyer although, inexplicably, broke. Taken with pity, he prepares her a cup of tea. Thus begins the beginning of a terrifying obsession.
Soon she was emailing Gadd hundreds of times a day, showing up outside his house and harassing his family and friends.
Over a period of four and a half years, Gadd claims to have received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totaling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemails.
The series also alludes to Martha’s history of stalking. We see Gadd’s character Donny Google her and find a newspaper article – fictional for the series – with the headline: “Sick Stalker Targets Lawyer’s Deaf Child.”
Gadd insisted that the character of Martha was so well disguised in her script that the real person she was based on “wouldn’t recognize herself”. But for Laura – the “lawyer” mentioned in those fake 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 on Sunday yesterday, the woman – whose identity we have chosen not to disclose – claimed the Netflix show amounted to “bullying an older woman on TV for fame and fortune” and that she had received “death threats” from Gadd supporters. . The comedian, she said, was “using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now.”
But even if “Martha” wants to present herself as a victim, for Laura, it’s a bit ironic.
If anything, Laura’s nightmare overshadowed Gadd’s. At one point, “Martha” made death threats against her husband, Jimmy Wray, then MP for Glasgow Baillieston.
But the final straw came in 2002 when the woman falsely accused the couple of molesting Frankie, then almost four years old, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. “I know Martha by her real name, but I was speechless watching the show,” said Laura, speaking exclusively to the Mail on Sunday for the first time about her ordeal.
“It reminded me of so many things I had forgotten. She did the same thing to me, she made my life a nightmare. He (Gadd) understood. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. I felt sorry for her. It seems like everyone she met and harassed felt the same way.
The real “Martha”, now aged 58, came from a middle-class family who lived in a village near Stirling.
She was a law graduate and first came into Laura’s orbit in October 1997, when Laura was persuaded to give her a two-week trial at her firm. “She told me a really unfortunate story, that she had no family support, that she had graduated from law school and was looking for an internship, but no one was offering her one,” says Laura.
“I had my reservations. She was terribly frank, telling me all these very personal things. Before we even met, she sent me a postcard congratulating me on my engagement to Jimmy. But deep down, I felt sorry for her.
“Once she started with us, she was rude to everyone. One day, she threw a book across the room and hit a staff member in the head. One day she was running a phone line and we found out she was recommending rival lawyers.
Jessica Gunning who plays Martha in Baby Reindeer, which follows the character as she tracks down a struggling comedian
“She also yelled at Karen, one of my secretaries, and demanded that she drop everything she was doing for me and do something for her immediately.
“Then she started threatening people and yelling, like in Baby Reindeer where she goes from being pleasant to yelling, ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’
“She did the same thing (in my office) and I told her, ‘We’re a business, 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.
“She then ran out of my room screaming that she wasn’t going to leave and to call the Law Society. She said that everyone in the legal world didn’t like me and that my staff was useless. Then she started yelling, “Jimmy Wray is going to regret this day.”
“Some of the girls in the office were shaking and upset and thought she was going to attack me or another member of staff. Eventually, she was escorted out, still calling me vile names, and was later seen driving around the office in her car.
Soon she was bombarding Laura with threatening phone calls saying “I’ll get you” and denigrating her to other lawyers, family, friends and her husband’s political associates, including Donald Dewar, the first Prime Minister of Scotland.
In September 2001, the woman even left a message on her MP’s answering machine, threatening to kill Jimmy. Feeling “really sorry” for her, Laura tried to ignore her. She said: “At the time there was no legislation regarding stalking or stalking.
“There was no obvious right of appeal for me. The only thing I could have done was sue her for defamation, but it was no use, she had no money and the only other option was to resort to civil proceedings which were not really designed for this sort of thing.
Yet his reserves of compassion would soon run out.
Things came to a head when Laura started a course at the University of Strathclyde the following month to gain further qualifications. The first day, she came across her stalker – who was staring at her from across a room, his gaze like a harpoon. “She would come back from time to time to the conferences I went to. She was there suddenly.
“On several occasions, she came and stood next to me while students waited for the classroom doors to open. I remember her right next to me – almost breathing on me. It was very disturbing and I was scared. I had to ask other students to walk me to my car.
“I went to see a teacher and explained everything to him. He looked at the list and told me she wasn’t actually registered as a student. But the university ignored me and did nothing.
The university later apologised, admitting that the woman had in fact been a student but had been permanently excluded due to her behavior towards other students and staff.
But it was in April 2002 that his behavior finally crossed a line for Laura. She arrived home with Frankie, then almost four, to find two social workers at her door.
“(The woman) had claimed that we had hit our son and I had to explain the whole context,” Laura explains. “Luckily the social workers believed me, but it was just appalling and I was absolutely furious.
“He was a child who couldn’t walk or talk, and couldn’t do anything for himself. To think that anyone would suggest that we would do that (hurt him) is vicious and cruel.
“It was all well and good to dismiss someone as mentally ill and just ignore the harassment. But the last thing was Frankie, and I didn’t have that.
Laura asked the courts for a restraining order, which was granted the next day.
Gadd insisted that the character of Martha was so well disguised in her script that the real person she was based on “wouldn’t recognize herself”.
For Laura and her family, it brought them the long-awaited peace. But over the years, she sometimes wondered what happened to her stalker. Did she target others? Did she get the help she needed?
And then came Baby Reindeer. “I’m sad that she’s managed to slip through the cracks for so long when she’s clearly not doing well,” Laura says.
She is also dismayed that the woman has now been identified on social media following the Netflix show – despite Gadd’s insistence that he had obscured her identity.
“He had a show at the Edinburgh Fringe that featured this story and now he has this hit series on Netflix and good luck to him, but he must have thought people were forced to speculate about who Martha is – and whether she has did that to someone else,” Laura said.
“They could have changed things without diluting the content, but they made it so realistic.
“They portrayed her absolutely perfect, she’s obviously the woman who stalked me. It’s so strange.
Additional reporting: Daisy Graham-Brown
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