| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Internet Sleuths Expose Her
00:04:16
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|
| Did you believe her? | |
| There's sort of three possibilities, truthful, lying, which is a volitional thing, or a severe personality disorder. | |
| I don't really believe a lot of what either side is saying. | |
| We can't find any convictions of her spending nine months in prison. | |
| If that is not true, she's got a whale of a case. | |
| She did slip up on the email. | |
| Somebody sending 41,000 emails has got a problem. | |
| If you were trying to build up some kind of narrative of a stalker, you would not need 41,000 emails to do that. | |
| By Netflix going all in at the start saying this is a true story. | |
| No, we did everything we could to protect identity. | |
| No, you didn't. | |
| People found her in 10 seconds. | |
| Yes. | |
| That's not a duty of care. | |
| I just cannot believe that everybody dropped the ball on this. | |
| The person we're yet to hear from is Richard Gadd. | |
| Gad himself is a self-confessed, very damaged guy. | |
| You know, maybe as she said, maybe he's concocted some of this himself. | |
| I don't know. | |
| How reliable a witness is he? | |
| Reckless drug use, that is enough to lay down complete distortions. | |
| We do have a problem if he has invented her conviction for stalking him. | |
| We'll tell you this, it's about as close to a slam done if that's true. | |
| I've interviewed many dangerous people in my career, including convicted serial killers and medically diagnosed psychopaths. | |
| The common denominator of all these people tends to be that they're very skilled liars. | |
| I think they often truly believe what they're telling me. | |
| Well, Fiona Harvey hasn't killed anybody, but if she did everything that she's accused of doing as Martha in Baby Reindeer, then she would be an unstable, obsessive, and threatening and sinister stalker who made Richard Gadd's life utter hell and indeed other people's lives utter hell. | |
| But is it all true? | |
| Netflix says explicitly at the beginning of the series that this is a true story, not based on a true story or inspired by real events. | |
| A true story. | |
| Unless there be any doubt about what the streamer company thinks about this, and Netflix policy chief said this to a parliamentary committee in the UK this week. | |
| Baby Reindeer is an extraordinary story and it is obviously a true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist Richard Gadd suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker. | |
| We did take every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story. | |
| Well the series ends with Martha already a convicted stalker in the series sent to jail for her harassment of the comedian and his family and in fact it shows her admitting that she had done all this before she is sentenced but no journalists or internet sleuths have found any evidence so far of Fiona Harvey being convicted for anything let alone harassing or stalking Richard Gadd. | |
| It's not a difficult thing to check and that alone if it turns out that she hasn't actually been convicted of any crime in relation to Richard Gadd or indeed anybody else would surely call into massive question the credibility of a lot of the rest of the drama and indeed what he claims about Martha Fiona Harvey. | |
| Because if that fundamental fact is not true, what else is not true? | |
| At what point does fact become fiction? | |
| Netflix and Gad have also claimed, and we just heard one of the Netflix officials claim it in Parliament, that they did everything they could possibly do to hide her identity and the identity of other people depicted in the series. | |
| But the reality is that she was traced within hours by internet sleuths simply by cross-referencing her real-life social media posts with the ones that were used in the show. | |
| And having interviewed Fiona for nearly an hour, it's also clear to me they deliberately chose an actress who bears a striking resemblance to her, both physically and in the way that she speaks in the series. | |
| Now, all of this points to what I would say is a massive duty of care failure by Netflix, by Richard Gadd, and by Clark and Well Films, which produced the series. | |
| But let's be clear, none of that means that I think Fiona Harvey told me the whole truth. | |
|
Facts vs. Netflix Claims
00:11:31
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|
| I found her to be intelligent, coherent, combative and quick thinking. | |
| And on a human level, I felt sorry for her that she's become the object of global ridicule and, as she says, the recipient of serious death threats. | |
| But there were plenty of moments in the interview that rang alarm bells to me. | |
| Moments where I think she was frankly lying, as we're about to discuss. | |
| But if Richard Gadd feels entitled to make millions airing his side of the story and in the process make very serious allegations against Fiona Harvey, on whom Martha is clearly based in the process, then she is surely entitled to respond and defend herself as she chose to do. | |
| As for who is exploiting whom, well, I'll leave that to the court of public opinion to decide, or indeed an actual court if it comes to it. | |
| Well, join me and I discuss that and the bombshell interview that's made waves across the world. | |
| Seven day criminal defense lawyer Mark Garagos from Los Angeles, addiction specialist Dr. Drew, I think he's also in LA and from Scotland, YouTube's premier pop culture critic, The Critical Drinker. | |
| And here in the studio with me, uncensored contributors Esther Kraku and lawyer Paula Roan-Adrian. | |
| Well, welcome to all of you. | |
| Let me start with Paula and Esther, who are with me here. | |
| I mean, Paula, you've all had a chance to watch the interview here. | |
| What did you make of it? | |
| Utterly fascinating. | |
| And actually what you have done is you provided a window into the world of what happens in a courtroom. | |
| You asked a lot of questions, Piers, that I would put to somebody who I was cross-examining in terms of this type of action. | |
| Did you believe her? | |
| It doesn't matter whether I believe her. | |
| Well, it does. | |
| No, let me explain to you why, because you and I have this discussion a lot about the truth. | |
| And my answer to you always is, whose truth? | |
| There's only one truth. | |
| No, there isn't. | |
| You're so wrong. | |
| I mean, this whole my truth. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| And clearly, this whole my truth bullshit is bullshit. | |
| There is the truth, which is based on actual facts, evidential facts. | |
| And my problem with this whole baby reindeer saga is I don't really believe a lot of what either side is saying here. | |
| I think a lot of Richard Gadd's stuff that he's come out with is not borne out by facts. | |
| And if it turns out that Martha, with her confession in the denouement of this series, confessing to harassing and stalking him and getting a prison sentence, if that turns out to not be true, then the slapdash way they've allowed Fiona Harvey to be identified immediately as the person depicted in what they claim is a true story is going to have very good calls. | |
| And I'll come to Mark Garagos from a legal perspective in a moment. | |
| Very good call, certainly under UK law, I would think, to sue for defamation. | |
| So it does matter, Paula. | |
| Piers, no, what you asked me was, or what you said was, there is only one truth. | |
| And I disagreed with you on that. | |
| And let me explain to you why, because in this country, we have beyond reasonable doubt, and we have on the balance of probabilities, we do not have a 100% safe proof in terms of how we can find the truth. | |
| We do our best to find the truth, and we do that on the basis of the evidence that is put before the court. | |
| Now, your viewers are going to see some of that evidence in relation to whether they've watched the Netflix series. | |
| They're going to see some of that evidence in relation to the expert way, quite frankly, that you put questions to Fiona. | |
| But that still isn't all the evidence. | |
| And so I don't think that's the problem. | |
| No, and to be clear, before I come to you, Esther, I do not know exactly where the truth lies. | |
| It may be that after this interview has aired and everyone's now dissecting it and talking about it and examining it, and journalists will be testing it, that they, you know, other stuff may emerge. | |
| Nothing would surprise me. | |
| I think this is a crazy story from start to finish. | |
| But Esther, so nothing would surprise me. | |
| But as things sit, there does seem to be a massive disparity between what has appeared in the Netflix series and everything that Fiona Harvey told me. | |
| Now, I don't believe everything she told me, but on certain key points which can be verified, yes or no, it's going to be a lot of wrestling on this because the credibility of the whole show will rest on whether those key things, like was she convicted or not, well, what happens? | |
| Is that true or not? | |
| Yeah, well, this is the bit where you have to use a bit of common sense. | |
| If it's found that she has not been convicted of anything and she didn't spend nine months in prison like this series is alleging, there is no assumption of probability or anything like that. | |
| It's either true or it's not true. | |
| And you can look up someone's records and find if they've spent nine months in prison like this series is alleging. | |
| I actually happen to think that Martha's story or a version of the truth is probably closer to the actual truth. | |
| Yes, there is a spectrum here. | |
| None of us were there. | |
| None of us were direct witnesses and we can't talk about Richard Gad's feelings or his truth. | |
| Fine. | |
| But there are some things that are not based on feelings and are facts. | |
| Like if she was convicted, like if she assaulted the girlfriend, like if she sent 41,000 emails, which is ludicrous. | |
| I mean, I do think she sent some emails, not like what she said in the series. | |
| I think on the emails. | |
| I do think she sent emails. | |
| Well, let's play that bit actually from the interview. | |
| This is Fiona Harvey talking to me about the emails. | |
| So all of this would come out in a court case. | |
| In disclosure, yes. | |
| And you're prepared to do that. | |
| Yes. | |
| Because I didn't write him the emails. | |
| Who do you think did? | |
| I have no idea. | |
| I think he probably made them up in sales. | |
| I've no idea. | |
| 41,000 emails. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, would you accept that someone who did that would be very obsessive about someone? | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, that's a lot of emails. | |
| Now, what was interesting was when I kept pushing her on this, because I thought it was a very important part of the interview, she did then say, Esther, well, even if I did, even if I had sent those emails, it still doesn't mean the rest is true. | |
| It was one of the few moments I felt she slipped up. | |
| Where if I'm a criminal lawyer, again, we'll come to Mark in a moment, who's more expert in these matters. | |
| But that seemed to me a very important moment where she was raising the specter that she may have done, but it still didn't mean the rest is true. | |
| Which, by the way, if that's the case, she was right to say that. | |
| But she didn't actually admit I sent them. | |
| For what it's worth, I think she probably did. | |
| I think that Netflix and Richard Gadd must have actual evidence or they wouldn't have been so precise about the number of emails, text and so on. | |
| It's kind of absurd to imply that Richard Gadd might have sent them himself, that he was trying to build up some kind of narrative of a stalker. | |
| You would not need 41,000 emails to do that. | |
| I agree. | |
| Exactly. | |
| A few dozen would have been enough. | |
| I agree. | |
| I agree. | |
| And Critical Drinker, I want to come to you actually just on a wider point about Baby Ranger and escape. | |
| Let me just go to Mark Gerrigaso because, Mark, from a legal perspective, it's probably a different set of rules here. | |
| If this was judged on airing in America to the UK, we have tougher defamation laws here, for example. | |
| But from what you've gleaned about this, and given her emphatic denial that she was ever even charged, let alone convicted and confessed to the crime, where would she sit legally? | |
| Well, you're right. | |
| England has, to my mind, much better rules when it comes to defamation. | |
| But having said that, and as somebody who is currently adverse to Netflix, I will tell you, in my experience, at least, they do tend to take great liberties when they represent what the particular facts are. | |
| And specifically in America, you have a doctrine, both defamation by defamation per se, the accusing her of being a criminal and kind of doubling down on it by saying she served time. | |
| If that is not true, she's got a whale of a case. | |
| I think so. | |
| Yeah, I think so. | |
| Hang on one second. | |
| I just want to bring in Esther first, just because I was going to come to you. | |
| Did you believe a lot of what she was saying? | |
| But she was so, because she was so emphatic with a number of her denials. | |
| How credible did you find her in that interview with me? | |
| I found about 75% of what she was saying to be true, particularly on the conviction point, because I don't think that you can lie about that. | |
| And so far, all the evidence from what we've seen is bearing out. | |
| We can't find any convictions of her spending nine months in prison. | |
| I do think that she did probably make some inappropriate advances towards him. | |
| But this is also, I mean, he admits, he admits leading her on. | |
| Well, yes, but also this is multiple times. | |
| And I don't want to be lewd, this is someone who admitted to masturbating to pictures of Martha. | |
| So clearly, he was not someone of sound mind or the most credible person. | |
| He had his own issues. | |
| And the way he interpreted any kind of interaction with them, I also think is also due. | |
| Well, it'd be valid to scrutinize it as well, because this is not someone that I thought was all there, quite frankly. | |
| I think the bigger issue here is the fact the lengths that Netflix has gone to to create this fiction, because they can't actually create a story like this because they'll be liable to all the kind of social commentary of them glamorizing, stalking, and all of that. | |
| They decided to put the base on a true story label to protect themselves because they don't actually want to put original content out there that they think what people would find interesting. | |
| They wanted to make this look like it's exactly Richard. | |
| Well, let me tell you, let me bring in Critical Drinker, Will Jordan, because actually, I don't think Netflix could have had a clue how big this was going to blow. | |
| I was absolutely stunned how big my interview with Fiona Harvey went from the moment we announced it. | |
| To put it in context, I think that I did one post on X just announcing I'd done the interview and it's had, I think, 10 million views. | |
| Just one post on X. | |
| I mean, crazy numbers we were getting for all of this. | |
| And crazy numbers of people, I'm sure, will watch it over the next week or so. | |
| But put it into context for those who are not familiar with the whole baby radio phenomenon. | |
| How big has this been worldwide? | |
| I mean, it's something that a lot of people are talking about. | |
| And I think it's just the nature of the medium. | |
| Like sometimes certain things just go viral and absolutely take off way beyond what anyone expected. | |
| It was the same deal with something like Tiger King back during lockdown. | |
| An obscure documentary, but for some reason, it just captured the public consciousness and suddenly everyone was talking about it. | |
| And it just every once in a while it happens. | |
| And it's definitely Been one of those shows. | |
| I mean, it definitely helps that it's a very well-acted show. | |
| It's well-written, it's well-produced, it's genuinely a good piece of drama, and it deals with a lot of interesting issues that are definitely worth talking about. | |
| So, all of those things were working in its favor, and as a result, yeah, it's become probably way bigger than Netflix ever predicted that it would. | |
| If it was a work of drama, and they said it's a fictional account, but maybe loosely based on something that may have happened. | |
| That's one thing. | |
| I think by Netflix going all in at the start, saying this is a true story, and by their executives going into parliament and speaking under oath and saying this is a true story, and saying she was convicted with, I don't think they've got the evidence to support that statement, and then saying that, you know, we did everything we could to protect identity. | |
|
Personality Disorders and Distortion
00:04:45
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|
| No, you didn't. | |
| You chose an actress who looks very like her physically, and you made her speak very like her, and you made her behave and talk very like her. | |
| I know because I've now sat down and interviewed the real Martha. | |
| I'll be bringing Dr. Drew. | |
| Dr. Drew, you're one of the great psychologists I've ever met in my life. | |
| So give me a bit of psychoanalysts about all this. | |
| Well, there's a lot going on here, Pierce. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| By the way, your job in the interview was absolutely masterful because people get very frustrated that somehow you're supposed to go at people when you question their veracity of what they're saying, when in fact, the reality is what you want to do is exactly what you did, present the facts and then ask questions. | |
| We express wonderment at what might be going on here. | |
| And she did slip up on the email. | |
| She did say, well, if I'd sent the email. | |
| So somebody sending 41,000 emails has got a problem. | |
| And there's sort of three possibilities. | |
| She's lying, she's truthful, or she has something called anasognosia, which is a block in the ability to see reality. | |
| Serious mental illness, serious personality disorders literally distort reality and cannot assess it accurately. | |
| And I mean, she was obviously very intelligent, no question of that. | |
| When you watched her, I mean, she spoke, you know, we did an interview for 45 minutes. | |
| I wouldn't say I'm the easiest interview you're ever going to conduct in her kind of position, but I thought she conducted herself pretty formidably well, actually, all things considered. | |
| I don't think she's ever done a television interview before, and she was being held to account. | |
| I don't think I held back with her, albeit I don't actually know where the truth lies. | |
| I don't want to go too hard or too soft. | |
| But what was your assessment of her as an individual? | |
| Again, you can't know whether I didn't, I've not assessed her, so I have no direct knowledge. | |
| And there really, as I said, three possibilities. | |
| Truthful, lying, which is a volitional thing, or a severe personality disorder. | |
| Consider things like dissociative identity disorder, where people really don't even remember what they've been doing. | |
| So you're talking to somebody who's in a different reality. | |
| Those kinds of personality disorders can literally distort everything. | |
| And by the way, he has some evidence, you know, the stuff as he is portrayed in the series, he has some significant stuff as well. | |
| So what he is portraying as reality may also be distorted. | |
| And on the question, Drew, of stalkers generally. | |
| Let's assume for a moment she's guilty as they depict her in the thing. | |
| Most public figures have had experience with stalkers in some way. | |
| I know that you have. | |
| I know that I have. | |
| I know friends of mine who've had terrible experiences, really terrible. | |
| You know, the BBC star who's now doing a podcast, Emily Malis, has had nearly 30 years of hell, which has been documented through courts and stuff. | |
| Very, very hard to deal with these kinds of people when they do get fixated. | |
| How much of this kind of stalking goes on where it doesn't involve a sort of explicable attachment to somebody in the public eye? | |
| Where maybe people watch people on television or entertainers, whatever, and they get obsessed with that. | |
| I can sort of understand that dynamic. | |
| It's harder to understand on a sort of local pub level where someone makes someone a cup of tea and all hell erupts from that moment. | |
| But is it more common than we think? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| Simple stalking, which is really what this is a case of. | |
| It's people with personality disorders, which is something we have a lot of these days who become obsessed, usually with a romantic attachment that is brief and then off it goes. | |
| And it can go for decades. | |
| And the object of the stalking needs to end all contact. | |
| Any negative contact, even with law enforcement, tends to actually exacerbate things. | |
| So there's two ends of the stalking spectrum. | |
| One is called simple stalking, which is not so simple. | |
| And the other end is psychotic stalking. | |
| And psychotic stalking is what I had. | |
| Somebody who was actually a meth addict had a delusion about a relationship with me. | |
| And those guys, you actually can grab. | |
| Law enforcement's very good at getting those and bringing them into treatment. | |
| And they get better. | |
| But the ones with the personality disorders can just go on almost interminably. | |
| Right. | |
| Mark Garrigas, I want to play a clip from Fiona Harvey watching the court scene from the Netflix drama. | |
| There's one key point in the drama that has Martha's character pleading guilty to intimidating Richard Gadd in court and sentenced to nine months prison time. | |
| Let's watch. | |
| You're charged with the stalking of Mr. Donald Dunn between the dates of the 14th of August 2015 and the 22nd of March 2017. | |
|
The Guilty Plea Controversy
00:07:57
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|
| Are you guilty or not guilty? | |
| Guilty? | |
| You were charged with the harassment of Gerald Dunn and Eleanor Dunn between the dates of the 6th of June 2016 and the 22nd of March 2017. | |
| Are you guilty or not guilty? | |
| Guilty? | |
| Hello, Reader. | |
| Now, again, there is obviously a resemblance between... | |
| Do you think so? | |
| Well, I don't mean to faddy you or not faddle you. | |
| I just think there is a resemblance, you know, having met you and you both speak Scottish people. | |
| But the fundamental point of this is, did you take part in that scene? | |
| Did you go to jail? | |
| Did you have a job? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| Of course not. | |
| Have you ever been to prison? | |
| No. | |
| Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence? | |
| No. | |
| Never? | |
| No. | |
| Nothing. | |
| Nothing. | |
| So that scene is completely influenced. | |
| That's completely false. | |
| Now, Mark Garrigus, what's interesting is the other charge there, where she's supposedly admitting to that as well, involved a woman and her MP husband who she worked briefly for the legal firm and then apparently harassed them for a long time afterwards. | |
| She emphatically denies that, but it appears that at worst there, she may have been served some kind of interim legal thing. | |
| But certainly it never got as far as anything to do with a courtroom or any charging of any criminal offence, let alone a conviction. | |
| So again, there are two separate things here, both of which she emphatically denies, and both of which so far there is zero evidence that she ever went into court. | |
| So let's talk just about, before I get to that, the duty of care aspect for a company like Netflix, one of the most successful media companies in the world, in fact in history, raking in billions of dollars a year. | |
| What kind of duty of care do they have if they slap this is a true story over something like this? | |
| And it turns out it may not be true. | |
| Well, it's almost inexplicable that they would allow an executive to go and testify, that they would then have this as a central feature of the series and then would just concoct this. | |
| I mean, I'm dealing with now and I've dealt with in the past their legal department, and it's about as robust as you can get. | |
| So both their in-house counsel and their outside counsel. | |
| So a lot of this does not make sense to me or has some kind of, there's something peculiar going on. | |
| Even her reaction, though, to watching that seemed just a wee bit peculiar to me as well. | |
| So there seems to echo some of your other guests here, there seems to be a something that is there that we haven't discovered yet and that the truth has not come out here in terms of what actually happened because I cannot believe Netflix and their legal team has let this go this far. | |
| We did ask Netflix for a response. | |
| They decided not to comment. | |
| I mean, Paula, there was also, there's a graphic male rape scene in there, but it involves a lot of heavy-duty drug taking leading up to it, which Richard Gadd is very honest about. | |
| He said he had a lot of problems. | |
| He had a lot of sexual experimentation, a lot of drug taking and so on. | |
| That's not to say the rape didn't happen. | |
| But what did happen as a consequence of this, again, pertaining to the duty of care aspect, is that rather than the actual person who is believed to have committed the rape being identified, somebody else in the television industry was wrongly identified, smeared all over social media. | |
| He also got threats and unwanted attention. | |
| And the real person has not yet been identified. | |
| So the whole thing is a complete mess. | |
| But this idea that Netflix went out of their way to protect people who they were depicting, I think is for the birds, frankly. | |
| There are a lot of questions. | |
| It's kind of interesting. | |
| Sorry to jump in there that they were able to identify this woman within a matter of hours, a relatively obscure private citizen. | |
| And yet this person who committed the rape against Richard Gadd, who's presumably a public figure and quite senior and well-known, nobody seems to have been able to track down the real person. | |
| Well, and Richard Osman has said on, I think, on his podcast that everyone knows who it is, including him. | |
| I mean, I would have thought someone should say then, well, who is this person? | |
| Or at the very least, go to the authorities and have this properly investigated. | |
| So again, Paula, it's all a mess. | |
| I mean, I watched it and Richard Gadd is obviously quite a damaged guy. | |
| He's obviously talented. | |
| He's obviously had a lot of success with this. | |
| But it's an interesting journey. | |
| He started off doing it on stage in front of small audiences. | |
| And it could be that he just saw an opportunity, which is what Fiona Harvey told me, to make a lot of money out of this and didn't ever consider the potential consequences of not everything being completely true. | |
| Dealing first of all with Netflix and their duty of care, there are a lot of question marks, aren't there, Piers? | |
| First of all, did they consult with any stalking organizations, for example, to understand what the impact of this show was going to have on the wider audience? | |
| Apparently they did. | |
| So that they did. | |
| But what they cannot get away from is that they have this actress and they have Fiona Harvey and they look like they could be pretty similar people and they're both speaking Scottish. | |
| The actress is not actually Scottish, but she speaks in a Scottish accent, very similar to Fiona Harvey. | |
| And a lot of the stuff that they put on screen, which includes actual phraseology, which came directly from tweets which Fiona Harvey had posted. | |
| So that's how the sluice founders. | |
| They just put in things like the curtains quote and so on. | |
| And up she came straight away. | |
| Turned out she was retweeting me quite a lot as well at the time. | |
| So she was quite an active social media user. | |
| But people found her in 10 seconds. | |
| Yes. | |
| That's not a duty of care. | |
| Well, then the next question mark is in terms of that duty of care when they were considering this project, as it would have been then. | |
| Why choose the entertainment route as opposed to the documentary route? | |
| And what were the questions that were being asked about that? | |
| Because you have to understand that as a viewer, what we are being told is that we are sitting down and watching crude entertainment. | |
| We are being told that this is a true story. | |
| It's a harrowing story. | |
| And I just wonder if this was really going to be about showing evidencing somebody who had been severely harassed, suffered, you know, countless criminal actions against them and against others. | |
| Why they didn't choose to go down to the past. | |
| I mean, we spoke to her, our team spoke to her today. | |
| And Esther, she is still getting bombarded with phone calls. | |
| People found her number very easily. | |
| And she's getting a lot of threats from people who believe that she is this psycho stalker who got convicted for the psycho-stalking without there actually being so far any evidence. | |
| And you've got to think, if Netflix had any evidence she had been convicted, we'd have seen it by now. | |
| It's a pretty serious thing to put at the end of a true story series if that turns out not to have happened. | |
| Yeah, and you have to wonder why Netflix decided to go down the route of calling it a true story. | |
| I hate to draw parallels here with the Royal Family, but I feel like this is kind of like a Megan Harry Royal family search because you have one party speaking their truth and going to the media and saying whatever they want. | |
| And you have the other party that you know is probably not going to say anything just because of protocol and what is expected of them. | |
|
Questioning the True Story
00:10:00
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|
| I actually think Netflix banked on the fact that Martha, real life Martha, would never actually speak out. | |
| I think they banked on the fact that she would do an interview and say her side of the story and say, listen, none of this happened, at least not in the way that's been depicted. | |
| There are no conversations. | |
| Well, let me bring in Dr. Drew on this point, which is Richard Gadd himself is a self-confessed, very damaged guy. | |
| He admits that very openly, honestly. | |
| He took a lot of drugs. | |
| You see that depicted in the series. | |
| He had relationships with trans women. | |
| He had relationships with gay men, with straight women and so on. | |
| He admits to a lot of experimentation with that, a lot of it fueled by drugs and so on. | |
| How reliable a witness is he to even his own life? | |
| No, absolutely. | |
| That was a point I made a few minutes ago, which is that he is also distorted in his, not just memory, but his actual perception of reality. | |
| Just take the reckless drug use. | |
| That is enough to lay down complete distortions of what was actually happening at the time, plus the trauma, plus the recurrent traumas, plus he must have some character logical things going on as well from all those traumas. | |
| Thing about being a trauma survivor, particularly in childhood trauma, his father was a trauma survivor. | |
| These things have a way of recurring themselves. | |
| And the distortions of how they happen can be profound. | |
| So who knows where the truth actually is? | |
| It's going to be very difficult to tell, but you are zeroing in on the one thing, which is what is the evidence? | |
| Let's look at the emails. | |
| Let's look at the letters. | |
| Let's look at the court documents and see what actually there is hard evidence of. | |
| And if there is actually a court, if she does sue them and it gets to discovery, then all this will come out because I can't believe she's been able to, if it is her, but sent all this stuff. | |
| I mean, I thought actually the crucial thing for me were the left, the handwritten letters, because Richard Gag claims to have 106, I think. | |
| She admitted to sending him one. | |
| Well, it's very easy for experts to look at a, I'm sure, Mark Garrigos, let me just bring you in quickly on this point. | |
| It's very easy, isn't it, for experts to look at a handwritten letter and compared to a 105 others and work out whether they're all the same person. | |
| You almost don't even need an expert for that. | |
| And there's you can do requests for admissions, you can do a document production, and if they don't have it, that's a real problem. | |
| Critical thinker, critical thinker, you are, you are a critical thinker, but crucially, you're also a critical drinker. | |
| And look, you're in Scotland. | |
| What's the vibe in Scotland? | |
| The Daily Record today splashed on an interview with her about my interview with her. | |
| Obviously, a lot of interest, but what's the general feeling about it? | |
| I mean, I don't claim to speak for all the people of Scotland on this interview, but, you know, both of the people that were involved in this were Scottish anyway. | |
| So I think there's just general interest in the case. | |
| It's stirred up a lot of interest and discussions about, you know, the whole nature of stalking, the fact that, yes, it can happen to men as well as women. | |
| And I think, I guess that's a useful conversation to have. | |
| It's a useful realization to have. | |
| And what about the people who say immediately to me the moment I announced I was doing the interview, how dare you exploit a mentally ill woman? | |
| What would you have in the interview? | |
| Do you think that's the way it came over? | |
| I mean, it's not my place to make a ruling on her mental state when it comes to this stuff. | |
| If she came forward as a functioning adult who was able to make her own decisions and decided she wanted to do the interview, that's her decision. | |
| It's not for me to say whether she should have or not. | |
| I also think that's quite unfair because you're making a judgment of her mental health based on basically what's looking more like a fictional life series. | |
| And also her whole point of doing the interview is that she believes she has been exploited by Richard Gadd, by Netflix and by Clark and Well Films. | |
| That's why she did the interview. | |
| She thinks she's been deliberately exploited. | |
| Let's take a look at another clip. | |
| This is her talking about the money being made here. | |
| To ask a question, do you happen to know how much he's made out of this Netflix thing? | |
| I would imagine several million pounds. | |
| Yes, I would say three to four million. | |
| A lawyer I know well thought he was a wee nobody and he suggested 750 to 100,000. | |
| I said, no, I think you're looking more about three or four million. | |
| And I think the more he publicizes, it goes up, you know, according to how much it's streamed. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know the contract they signed. | |
| I think he's done bloody well out of defense. | |
| Do you resent that? | |
| I don't resent any Scott getting on. | |
| This is not what this is about. | |
| But he's effectively making money out of what he's doing. | |
| He's making money out of it. | |
| What he says is you stalking him. | |
| Yeah, he's making money out of untrue fights. | |
| Paula, I mean, what's interesting is a Daily Mail journalist interviewed her and then she did start to bombard him with calls. | |
| You know, he says he got over 50 calls in a few hours and so on. | |
| So that is indicative of somebody who may have done this before. | |
| It doesn't mean she necessarily did everything she was accused of doing, but it's interesting. | |
| It is interesting. | |
| What else is interesting that I found from your interview is that she was able to recognize herself, she says, from when the baby reindeer was a theatre show. | |
| And I found that quite intriguing because I didn't understand why somebody who considered themselves to not have anything to do with a gentleman, to have perhaps met them five or six times, to have perhaps sent one letter, to have perhaps sent five or six emails, would then suddenly be able to recognize themselves from a theatre show. | |
| Yeah, I wasn't clear about how she made that link. | |
| An off-the-cuff comment about the baby reindeer as well. | |
| Interestingly, she did. | |
| Interestingly, she has gone on to identify herself, as well as I accept being identified by the sofa sleuths. | |
| But she's also, she has also continued to identify herself as being that character. | |
| The only person we're yet to hear from identify her as that character is Richard Gadd. | |
| Now, when we talk about Richard making money out of this, do I have a problem with that? | |
| Not particularly. | |
| There's lots of criminals even who are serving sentences. | |
| Yeah, but hang on. | |
| Who will make it? | |
| I do have a problem if he has invented her conviction for stalking him. | |
| I think if he's making a lot of money out of a false narrative. | |
| Yes. | |
| And Mark Garagos, again, coming back to the legality of this, is why I think she may have, if what she's saying is correct about that, I think that you may conclude watching the interview, look, I don't think she's telling the truth here, here, here, and here. | |
| But on that central point, if she is able to establish beyond any doubt that she was not convicted of any offence, let alone admit it, and has never been to court in relation to any of this stuff, I think she has a pretty open and shut case. | |
| Well, I, you know, there's nothing that I've ever seen that's open and shut, but I will tell you this. | |
| It's about as close to a slam dunk if that's true. | |
| But I'll tell you, there's some just peculiar reactions. | |
| There's some peculiar things. | |
| And like I said before, the robust in-house and outside counsel that they have, I just cannot believe that everybody dropped the ball on this. | |
| That just seems unbelievable to me. | |
| I mean, that's the real scandal here, Netflix. | |
| I mean, well, I'll tell you what, you know, I've asked, listen, I'm a big fan of Netflix. | |
| I watch it all the time. | |
| I think it's run by very smart guys. | |
| I know some of them personally. | |
| If they want to come on and talk about this, absolutely, we have an open platform to hear their side of events. | |
| I'd love to know what Richard Gadd told them or whether they relied on everything he said and what evidence he gave them. | |
| And, you know, maybe as she said, maybe he's concocted some of this himself. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't think any of us can say with any real certainty at the moment exactly what we think has happened here or how much of either account is true. | |
| And that's what makes it, of course, as Critical Drinker rightly said, it makes it such a talked about thing because there are so many unanswered questions. | |
| And, you know, I always come back to Richard Gadd admits that he did lead her on quite a lot. | |
| He did perform sex acts to her picture on his laptop. | |
| That's weird, right? | |
| I mean, I don't care what your view of the whole thing is, but that doesn't say to me that you're necessarily... | |
| It's not good enough. | |
| I feel like he's dressing it up. | |
| Just because you admit, oh, I may have done something wrong, or I may not have been in the best mental state, doesn't mean you get to basically lie about her criminal convictions. | |
| That's what I have the biggest issue with. | |
| Whereas my big issue in listening to this, and I'm a little bit uncomfortable with some of the things that I've heard you say, Piers. | |
| For example, that, oh, he was using drugs. | |
| Oh, for instance, yes, but why is that? | |
| It's in the series. | |
| Yes, I know that. | |
| I've watched it. | |
| But what I'm concerned about is the vulnerable people who may be watching this who are thinking, oh, okay, my skirt was a little bit too short. | |
| Oh, okay, maybe I had too much to drink. | |
| I must say that. | |
| That's not what I'm saying. | |
| That's why I'm saying this. | |
| That's why I'm saying this. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Don't misquote me. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I was going to his credibility and whether if you take a lot of hard drugs for a sustained period of time, as he openly shows us he did, then that can affect, as Dr. Drew rightly said, and Mark Garagos, I'm sure, would say the same in a court of law. | |
| It obviously impacts on your credibility. | |
| He's also referenced why he thought that he had been abused and why he thought he had been raped. | |
| When you watch the show, he explains. | |
| I think that's Paul. | |
| On a general point, I think that Baby Reindeer is an unbelievably compelling watch. | |
| No one, I don't think, doubts that. | |
| If you sat and watched it as I did at the weekend, it is completely compelling. | |
| Brilliantly acted, very well written, very powerful. | |
|
Drama or Reality
00:01:24
|
|
| But is it drama or is it reality? | |
| And that's the reality of the debate. | |
| Let me just go to Critical Drinker about... | |
| The possibility, of course, when a streamer has a massive hit like this, the natural inclination normally is to order the sequel. | |
| Are we going to see the sequel? | |
| And if so, am I going to be in it? | |
| And if so, what are the chances of getting Brad Pitt? | |
| Who is going to play you indeed? | |
| Yeah, I mean, we could have now Martha's Revenge where she goes on this trip to clear her name. | |
| You just, you don't know where they could potentially take it. | |
| But yeah, when you get something of this level of success, they're either going to try and continue the story or they're going to try and do things in a similar vein. | |
| It'll become a series of true life stories of revenge or stalking or whatever you want to call it. | |
| So yeah, there's a lot of potential there. | |
| And if they can make money out of it, I'm sure they will. | |
| Listen, thank you to all of you. | |
| A brilliant panel. | |
| I have to say, I thought you all were great on this. | |
| It is a fantastically fascinating story. | |
| And I do not know how this will play out. | |
| Other than I fundamentally believe that Fiona Harvey had every right to have her say. | |
| And what she said to me will now be properly examined, I'm sure, by the world's media. | |
| And maybe, maybe we will get to the real truth about all this. | |
| But I suspect we'll end up where we are at the moment, which is the truth is it was a hell of a mess. | |
| And that's where we are with this. | |
| Anyway, thank you to my panel. | |
| Much appreciated. | |
| Thank you. | |