When you see My Stuffed Reindeer and discover that Richard Gadd, the creator and protagonist, is inspired by real events, the first reaction is stupefaction. How much he had to suffer and how he exposed himself on a personal and emotional level to the public. But then a new question can be asked: How does the real Martha Scott, the woman with mental health issues who plagued him for more than four years, feel? We already have an answer: she feels… harassed.
The British media Daily Mail says it has spoken with a woman who prefers to remain anonymous and who inspired Gadd to write the work. “He uses My stuffed reindeer to harass me now,” said the interviewee, who is considering suing the comedian turned genius narrator of trauma for defamation. She is forceful when analyzing the situation: “I am the victim.”
“He wrote a damn series about me,” he said about Gadd. He considers that this is “bullying an older woman on television to obtain fame and money” and that, because of him, there are now those who have discovered his criminal past and he receives “death threats and abuse” from the author’s fans.
If she is indeed the woman Gadd is inspired by for the character of Martha Scott played by Jessica Gunning, she is a woman two decades older than Gadd who, over a period of four years, systematically harassed him: she sent him more of 41,000 emails, 100 pages of letters, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voice messages.
If you take into account that an average of 28 emails go out per day, the volume of messaging chaos in My Stuffed Reindeer is more than plausible with the reality that the creator of the series experienced.
The Netflix series, as we said, is based on two traumatic experiences of Gadd: when she was the victim of sexual assault by a colleague and the harassment she suffered from a woman with a long history of harassment and who became obsessed with him.
Gadd, who in fiction renamed himself Donny but kept much of his experiences and personality intact, protected the identity of his attackers in My Stuffed Reindeer. This, however, has not stopped him from having problems.
The British actor and director Sean Foley, for example, explained on his social networks that “he had informed the police” and that the authorities “are investigating all defamatory, abusive and threatening publications” against him. The reason? There are those who have the theory that he was the man who sexually abused Gadd in reality, having worked together in the past.
“People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are being unfairly caught up in speculation,” Gadd explained from his Instagram account, where he asked his My Stuffed Reindeer viewers not to try find their attackers: “This is not the goal of our series.”
