What I Want to Say to the Real People Inside Baby Reindeer

POP CULTURE & TRAUMA • May 20, 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

An Open Letter to Richard Gadd: What Do Artists Owe the Truth?

The laptop fan hums. That’s the only sound in my office at nine on a Tuesday night, the cursor blinking on a blank page while I try to figure out how to say this carefully. Baby Reindeer has been sitting with me for weeks, the way certain stories do, less like content and more like a low hum under everything else. It has grown into something larger than a show. It’s become a referendum on what a person is allowed to do with the worst thing that ever happened to them, and what happens to everyone standing near that decision when the cameras start rolling.

Richard, I want to start with something true: what you did took nerve. Naming the shame that stalking and sexual violence leave in a man’s body, on a British television series, in a culture that still treats male victimhood as a punchline or an impossibility, is not a small thing. You gave language to an experience that most men carry silently for a lifetime. I’ve sat across from enough clients wrestling with exactly that silence to know what it costs to break it publicly instead of privately.

And here’s where the letter gets harder to write. The distance between memoir and dramatization collapses the moment real, identifiable people are woven into a fictionalized story, and that collapse creates an ethical debt that doesn’t clear just because the art is good. You didn’t invent Martha from nothing. The woman whose choices, appearance, and biography she borrows from is a real person who did not consent to become a character study for forty million viewers. I don’t think you set out to hurt her. I think the mechanics of adaptation outran the ethics of it, and that gap is worth sitting in rather than rushing past.

What strikes me most, watching my own field respond to this show, is how much of the conversation it opened. Clients have brought me scenes from family trauma they’d never quite named before seeing Donny’s, and the series functions for a lot of people the way a good trauma memoir does: as a mirror that’s safer to look into than the original event. That’s real value. It doesn’t cancel out the cost to the woman on the other side of the screen. Both things sit in the same room.

I also want to name something about craft, because it matters clinically as much as it matters artistically. Donny’s arc refuses the easy redemption structure most trauma narratives lean on. He doesn’t have a single cathartic breakthrough scene that fixes him. He makes bad choices after the stalking starts, some of them genuinely harmful to people around him, and the show lets that complexity stand instead of resolving it into a clean hero’s journey. That refusal is, clinically, more honest than almost anything else on television right now. Real recovery from prolonged trauma rarely looks like a single scene of catharsis. It looks like years of small, unglamorous corrections, most of which never make it into any story at all.

That honesty is precisely why the stakes around the real people involved are so high. A tidier show would have made Martha a simpler villain and the real woman behind her easier to dismiss as a footnote. This show’s complexity is what makes it good art, and that same complexity is what makes the ethical debt to its real-life sources so much harder to settle cleanly. You can’t have the nuance without also inheriting the responsibility that nuance creates.

An Open Letter to the Woman Who Inspired Martha

To you: I don’t know your name, and I’m not going to go looking for it, because that’s precisely the appetite this letter is trying to push back against. What I do know is that whatever your actual history with Richard Gadd was, you didn’t sign up to have millions of strangers try to identify your face, your job, and your psychiatric history in a group chat. That is not commentary. That is a hunt, dressed up as curiosity.

Here’s a definition worth sitting with before we go further, because it clarifies why this particular kind of exposure does lasting damage rather than passing damage.

Doxxing you, or trying to, is institutional betrayal at internet scale. Reddit threads and TikTok sleuths aren’t a court and they aren’t a newsroom, but they behave with the same confidence as both while carrying none of the accountability of either. The show gave the public a story with real emotional stakes. The public then decided that entitled it to your actual identity, your actual life, as if fiction and biography were the same species of property.

I want to say the obvious thing plainly, because it gets lost in true-crime Twitter threads constantly: whatever happened between you and Richard Gadd, your safety and privacy do not become negotiable the moment a television series becomes popular. Mental health struggles, if you have them, are not evidence against your right to dignity. They’re context, not a verdict. My hope for you is uncomplicated. I hope you have people around you who protect your peace more fiercely than the internet is currently trying to violate it.

An Open Letter to the Audience: What Is Your Role in This?

To you, watching from your couch with a second screen open: I want to ask something of you that isn’t a lecture, because you didn’t create this appetite alone. The hunger to solve a true-crime mystery predates Baby Reindeer by decades. But you are, right now, deciding what to do with that hunger, and that decision has a real person’s name attached to it, even if you never learn what that name is.

I think a lot about what happens in the seconds between finishing an episode and opening a search bar. That gap is where the ethical decision actually lives, not in some grand philosophical stance you take about true crime as a genre, but in that small, almost automatic reach for a phone. Reddit threads devoted to identifying the real Martha didn’t spring up because thousands of individually cruel people decided to hunt one woman. They emerged because that gap between curiosity and action got filled, one search at a time, by ordinary viewers who didn’t pause long enough to ask what they were actually doing.

I don’t say that to shame you if you’ve clicked on one of those threads. Curiosity about real stories is not a character flaw. It’s a basic human response to compelling narrative, and it’s been that way since long before Netflix existed. What’s changed is the speed and scale at which that curiosity can convert into concrete harm. A hundred years ago, wondering who inspired a novel’s antagonist meant idle speculation over dinner. Today it means a searchable, permanent digital trail that a real woman now has to live inside.

The show is genuinely good at what it does. It opens a door into trauma bonds and stalking that most television flattens into thriller tropes. I’ve had clients, women like Angel, a 48-year-old hospital administrator I’ve worked with, describe recognizing something in Donny’s paralysis that she’d never had language for in her own history of betrayal trauma. That recognition is legitimate and valuable. It is not, however, a license to become an amateur detective about the people the story is based on.

Here’s the distinction I’d ask you to hold: using a story to understand yourself is different from using a story to expose someone else. Cassandra, another client, once told me that watching Martha’s disintegration on screen let her finally name a pattern of stalking behavior she’d minimized in her own life for years, because she’d never seen it depicted with this much nuance. That’s what art can do at its best. It gives you a private door into your own history. It was never meant to become a public door into someone else’s.

So here’s my ask, direct and unadorned. Feel what the show stirs in you. Bring it to therapy or coaching if it touches something old. Talk about it with friends. Just don’t turn your curiosity into someone else’s crisis. The line between engaged viewer and unpaid stalker is thinner than true-crime culture wants you to believe, and you’re the only one who can hold it.

What Does Trauma-Informed Storytelling Actually Require?

Trauma-informed storytelling isn’t a marketing phrase. It’s a discipline, and it asks a specific question at every stage of production: who could be hurt by this choice, and have we done everything reasonable to reduce that harm without flattening the story into nothing. That question should sit beside plot and character development, not below them.

What makes this genuinely hard is that the most compelling true stories are almost always the ones closest to real, identifiable pain. Sanitizing a story into unrecognizability protects the source but often kills the thing that made the story worth telling. Fictionalizing it too aggressively creates its own dishonesty. There’s no formula that resolves this tension cleanly. There’s only the ongoing, uncomfortable work of asking the question again at every decision point: composite the details more, change the identifying markers further, sit with legal counsel one more round before locking the cut.

I think about this constantly in my own writing, where every composite client I describe is built from patterns across dozens of people specifically so no single person’s story is recognizable to anyone but them. It’s slower. It’s less viscerally specific than a true story told straight. It’s also the only version of this work I’m willing to publish. Richard Gadd’s team clearly made different calculations, and the fallout for the real Martha is the visible cost of those calculations.

None of this is a call to stop making art from lived experience. It’s a call to build the safeguards into the process itself rather than hoping the audience behaves better than audiences historically have. If you want to go deeper on how this plays out across other true-crime-adjacent work, I’ve written more in The Collateral Damage of Psychopaths and Sociopaths.

There’s a practical version of this I recommend to any writer or producer working from real material, and it’s simpler than it sounds: composite before you dramatize. Combine two or three real situations into a single character rather than mapping one character onto one recognizable life. Change enough identifying detail, profession, city, timeline, that the person closest to the source material could still recognize themselves privately without the rest of the world being able to. That single habit would have changed the entire aftermath of this show without softening a single dramatic beat.

I’d also ask producers to think seriously about a post-release plan for the real people involved, well beyond a legal disclaimer buried in the credits. Something as simple as coordinated media guidance, a point of contact for harassment reports, or advance warning before a project goes wide would have given the real woman behind Martha resources she never had. Ethics doesn’t end at the last day of shooting. It should extend at least as far as the platform’s own promotional reach does.

I recognize this is a lot to ask of an industry built on speed and deadlines. I’d argue it’s a smaller ask than it sounds, because most of these protections cost very little relative to a production’s total budget. What they require is intention, deciding early that a real person’s safety matters as much as the third act, and then actually building a plan around that decision instead of hoping goodwill covers the gap after the fact.

Why Does Fame Cast a Shadow Over the People Who Inspired It?

Fame does something specific to a true story: it converts a private wound into public property, usually without asking the wound’s permission. For Richard, the show’s success brought recognition, awards, and a platform. For the woman behind Martha, it brought a different kind of visibility entirely, the kind where strangers feel entitled to your biography because you were, unwillingly, adjacent to someone else’s success.

This isn’t accountability, whatever the internet tells itself. Digital pile-ons dressed up as justice rarely have the patience for context, contradiction, or the basic fact that most people are more complicated than a two-minute clip suggests. Genuine accountability tends to be slow, procedural, and unglamorous. It looks like therapy, legal consequence where warranted, and structural change. It does not look like a subreddit deciding it has solved a person.

The show does one thing unusually well, and it’s worth naming directly: it takes male victimhood seriously in a culture that mostly doesn’t. Donny’s shame, his difficulty being believed, and his own complicity in dangerous choices are rendered without the tidy heroism most media assigns to survivors. That’s a genuine contribution. It sits right alongside the damage the same story caused someone who never asked to be part of the conversation, and I don’t think those two facts cancel each other out. I think they’re both just true.

Fame also does something to the storyteller that’s worth naming honestly. Success on this scale creates its own pressure to keep mining the same well, because it worked once and audiences are asking for more. I’d gently caution Richard, and anyone in a similar position, against treating their own trauma as an inexhaustible creative resource simply because the first excavation was well received. There’s a version of this where the next project extracts real material from someone else’s life with even less protection built in, because the commercial incentive to move fast outpaces the ethical incentive to move carefully. That’s not a hypothetical risk. It’s the default trajectory of a hit.

I think about a client, Angel again, who works in hospital administration and watched her own difficult divorce become dinner-party material among mutual friends after her ex-husband, a moderately well-known local figure, gave a candid interview about their marriage. She wasn’t a public figure. She didn’t consent to any of it. The scale was smaller than a Netflix series, but the mechanism was identical: someone else’s platform converting her private history into other people’s entertainment. Fame doesn’t have to be global to cast this particular shadow. It just has to be bigger than the shadow of the person standing inside it.

Both/And: Art, Healing, and Public Discourse

Baby Reindeer is a genuinely well-made piece of television that opened necessary public conversation about stalking, male victimhood, and the texture of trauma bonds. And it caused real, ongoing harm to a real woman who had no say in how her likeness was used. Both of these are fully true at once. Neither one softens the other, and I’d ask you to resist the urge to pick a side, because picking a side is exactly the kind of simplification that got the real Martha doxxed in the first place.

Art heals when it gives shape to something formless. Angel told me that watching Donny’s shame spiral let her finally cry about an experience she’d narrated dryly, almost clinically, for three years in our sessions. That’s not a small clinical outcome. It’s also happening at the same time that a real woman is fielding unwanted attention because a fictionalized version of her trauma became a cultural event. You don’t have to resolve that tension to hold it. You just have to stop pretending it isn’t there.

Public discourse sparked by the show has real value, provided it stays discourse and doesn’t curdle into a hunt. That distinction, between talking about a pattern and hunting a person, is the whole ethical hinge of this letter. Hold both truths. Let the show teach you something about trauma. Let it also teach you where your curiosity needs a fence around it.

The Systemic Lens: Beyond the Individual Narrative

Zoom out from Martha and Donny as characters, and Baby Reindeer is also a story about systems that failed before the show ever aired: a mental health system that didn’t reach a woman in crisis, a policing system that couldn’t take a man’s stalking complaint seriously because he was a man, and a media ecosystem built to reward exactly the kind of speculative sleuthing that turned a fictional character back into a real target.

Ask the systemic question about Martha’s real-life counterpart instead of the individual one. Not “what’s wrong with her,” but where were the interventions that could have reached her before her distress calcified into the behaviors the show depicts. That’s not a soft question. It’s the harder, more useful one, because it points at policy and resourcing instead of a single woman’s psychology.

The same lens applies to Donny. His difficulty being believed by police isn’t a personal failing. It’s a predictable output of a system trained to expect male victims to be rare, when in fact they’re simply underreported. Naming that systemic gap does more to prevent the next Donny than any amount of individual analysis of this particular character ever could.

A systemic lens also implicates the platforms that let identification threads flourish in the first place. Algorithmic amplification rewards speculation because speculation generates engagement, regardless of the human cost sitting at the center of the speculation. That’s not an excuse for any individual’s choice to go digging. It’s the environment that makes digging feel almost inevitable, and it’s worth naming if we want fewer people to end up in this exact position next time.

What Does Compassionate Engagement Look Like Now?

I keep returning to a single question underneath all of this. Not who was right, Richard or the woman he wrote about or the internet that went looking for her, but what does it look like to engage with a true story without adding to anyone’s harm. That’s a smaller, quieter question than the internet wants to ask, and I think it’s the only one that actually matters here.

For Richard, my hope is that the next project comes with more built-in protection for the people it’s drawn from, not less ambition. For the woman behind Martha, my hope is precisely what I said earlier: privacy, safety, and people around her who treat her as a person rather than a mystery to be solved. For you, reading this, my hope is that the next time a true-crime-adjacent story grips you, you notice the moment your curiosity tips from self-recognition into surveillance, and you choose to stop there.

I think about this letter as something closer to a working document than a final verdict, because none of the three positions in it are static. Richard’s next project will either deepen the protections this one lacked or repeat the same gap at a larger scale, and we’ll learn which the moment it airs. The real woman behind Martha is, right now, living through the part of this story that never makes it onto a screen: the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a sense of privacy after it’s been publicly breached. And you, watching, get a fresh version of this same choice every time a new true-crime series drops, which is often enough that the choice deserves more than passing attention.

What I keep coming back to, in my own quieter moments with this material, is how rarely any of us get to see harm this clearly while it’s still happening rather than in retrospect. Usually we only name a pattern once the damage is finished and the person has moved on or moved away. Here, the identification threads are still active, the real woman is still fielding whatever attention they generate, and the choice about whether to participate is still, for every reader of this letter, entirely live. That immediacy is uncomfortable. It’s also useful, because it means the compassionate choice is still available to make, rather than something to regret only after the fact.

If this piece is resonating because you’re sitting with your own history of stalking, betrayal, or a trauma bond you’ve never quite named, that’s worth bringing into a room with a real person rather than a group chat. You can connect with me directly, explore what working one-on-one looks like, or start with my self-assessment quiz if you’re not ready for a conversation yet. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is, incidentally, one of the more careful examples of exactly the trauma-informed storytelling this letter is asking for, and it’s worth your time regardless of where you land on this show.

Related Reading

• Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1997. (Clinical text)
• Gadd, Richard. Baby Reindeer. Netflix, 2024. (Film/Show)
• Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf Press, 2019. (Memoir)
• Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. (Clinical text)

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
2. Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Woodman, Marion. Addiction to perfection. Inner City books, 1982.
• Carnes, Patrick. Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. Hazelden, 2001.

Medical Disclaimer