The real-life ‘Martha’ from Baby Reindeer is now targeting ME: I’ve had a four-day barrage of non-stop calls and terrifying messages just like on the Netflix show, writes NEIL SEARS. As I type, the phone is ringing again…

The most recent voicemail message was the most chilling. “You have made a bitter enemy of me,” she said. “You’re the bastard from hell.”

Those words, spoken in her distinctive Scottish accent, gave me an idea of ​​how she had – supposedly – ​​terrified her victims.

Because this is what the real “Martha,” the woman portrayed as a sick serial stalker on the hit Netflix television show Baby Reindeer, spoke into my answering machine last weekend, the culmination of a four-day barrage of calls and voicemails.

This was followed by a warning never to approach her again, expressed in the legal language that the former law student learned during the legal training that she brags about.

On social media she then blasted me as a big fat liar, an ‘overgrown bipolar schoolboy’, and said she was considering charging £3,000 an hour for the time she spent with me, which she said was her professional right.

To be clear, I think it’s completely legitimate that “Martha” called me. I met and interviewed her for three and a half hours for an article in the Ny Breaking published last Saturday.

In Baby Reindeer, Jessica Gunning plays convicted stalker Martha, who makes life a misery for Richard Gadd’s character Donny

But in thirty years of journalism – including when comedian and conspiracy theorist Russell Brand took offense to what I had written about him and turned his eight million fans on me – I have never encountered such a tsunami of calls.

Let me explain. The Netflix series Baby Reindeer has hit No. 1 for the streamer in 30 countries, including the UK and US. Written by Richard Gadd, who also plays the main character Donny, it is believed to be based on his real-life experience as a struggling stand-up comedian working in a pub in London’s Camden who offers a customer a free cup of tea. called Marta. Strangely, despite claiming to be a high-flying lawyer, she cannot afford to buy herself a drink.

She turns out to be a convicted stalker who makes Donny’s life hell, stalks his address, disrupts his stand-up shows, sometimes smashes a glass in his face, other times attacks his trans girlfriend and claims his father. is a pedophile. Ultimately she is imprisoned.

Viewers are told that the drama is based on a “true story,” and Gadd has made it clear in interviews that while the details have changed — the real stalker, for example, was never jailed — the character Martha is based on the woman who got him sent. 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, letters totaling 106 pages, and 350 hours of phone messages left.

Gadd’s character works at a bar in the show and Martha chases him, at one point smashing a glass in his face and attacking his trans girlfriend.

In the show, Martha even claims that Donny’s father is a pedophile. Ultimately she is imprisoned

The popularity of the series launched an army of determined internet sleuths who quickly identified Martha as a 58-year-old Scottish woman – whom the Mail has not named – living in London. The record of tweets she posted a decade ago, coupled with an injunction against her for stalking the family of a Scottish MP more than two decades ago, certainly seemed damning – and after she agreed to speak to me, disappeared the hours I spent with her. no doubt in my mind.

She even agreed that she should be the inspiration for Martha – although she denied that there was any wrongdoing, or that any orders had been issued, and insisted that Gadd effectively stalked HER by profiting from his show, after she ‘ rejected him’. .

Last week I met the real Martha in her new one-bedroom council flat in a high-rise in central London. A short, stocky woman – she told me she had gained weight during lockdown, like many of us – with brown shoulder-length hair, surrounded by boxes of belongings.

Perhaps due to shortcomings of the city’s contracted moving company – which she had a lot of say in – her only furniture seemed to be a dining room chair, a rocking chair and a small table.

She explained that she had moved into the flat the day before and apologized for her clothes (sweatpants) and said she still had to unpack her clothes.

As we chatted she let slip that she has a weekly food budget of £30 and this seemed, given her surroundings, quite at odds with her repeated boasts that she was both a top lawyer and a talented singer.

“I’m not practicing at the moment, but I will soon be launching my own law firm in Abbey Road, London, which will exclusively represent musicians,” she told me. “We all had staff lined up, but it was delayed by the pandemic.”

Later she told me she was trying to record an album herself. “It looks like Susan Boyle stuff.”

Over the course of the interview, she told me several times that she “turned Gadd down” because she “had a boyfriend.” She spoke about her ‘old partner’ who she claimed was a ‘QC’ and suggested she was in a long-term relationship.

(When I spoke to her former neighbors in the Camden council flat she had just left after living there for about ten years, they thought she was unemployed. They were skeptical about the existence of a boyfriend.)

‘Martha’ happily posed for the Mail photographer – even while sitting at a bus stop, as Martha does in Baby Reindeer as she stalks Donny – although we have decided not to publish them.

About three hours after we met, she started talking openly about Richard Gadd. Initially, she claimed she had “only met him once,” but by the end of the chat it was “maybe four times.”

She criticized him, claiming that her ‘photographic memory’ gave her a detailed picture of his behavior.

It was 9:30 PM when I left ‘Martha’ and told her that we would publish the article in the next few days.

I fully expected to hear from her. I gave her my number because it is completely understandable that an interviewee would want to contact the journalist who would tell her story to the world, perhaps with additional thoughts and observations or to correct some facts.

But not within ten minutes of my departure. Then the phone calls started. She called three times during my short drive home, all of which I answered and lasted a total of 19 minutes.

The next day there were ten calls, the next 14 and the day after that 24 – all from a number without caller ID on the screen.

And when I didn’t answer – and I must admit I started to do so as the “No Caller ID” message kept popping up – there were the heady stream of consciousness messages – just like the messages the fictional Martha leaves on the TV show.

Donny, like Richard Gadd in real life, even tries his hand at stand-up comedy, although he is not a great success

Five messages totaling ten minutes on the first full day, nine totaling 20 minutes on the second, and 16 totaling 53 minutes on the third.

These messages were not attacks on me, but on Richard Gadd, other staff who had worked at the Camden pub, Scottish MPs and their families.

Then on Saturday there were 19 phone calls – and when I tried to communicate with her via email instead, it left 18 voicemail messages, totaling 40 minutes.

The most insulting message came after she belatedly read the story published in the Mail that I had worked on with lead writer Barbara Davies.

As I said, the real ‘Martha’ was not named, but the historical stalking allegations against her in Scotland were laid out. But in her view, it did not give enough space to her denials of those allegations.

This time the message I received was intensely personal.

“If you ever approach me, I will call the police,” she said. ‘I’m suing you and that newspaper, and the bimbo who wrote the article with you.

“I hope it’s clear even to an idiot like you, and I’ll demand that the newspaper fire you. I don’t like you, I never liked you.’

Then came the abuse unleashed on her Facebook page, which was watched by thousands of Baby Reindeer fans.

She told them I was “fat and ugly,” “not very smart,” a “crazy,” “sick,” “a total asshole” who “wouldn’t get off my phone,” and falsely claimed that I was other had abused journalists and ‘hated’ Gadd.

The multiple messages continued well into the night and for several days.

Personally, she had told me in dazzling detail – and out of the blue – about a one-night stand ‘with a lawyer’. When we next spoke on the phone, she suddenly claimed that her QC partner had ‘passed away’ – before saying she was living with her ‘boyfriend’.

Although I never questioned her relationships, she soon went on a rant on Facebook: “I hate that little creep Neil who fails daily and asks me about past boyfriends and current ones…

“I felt like a rape victim in the stands.”

While the fallout from the Mail article is certainly unusual, the abuse is a piece of cake for me as an experienced national newspaper journalist. For her victims, however, it is easy to see how such obsessive calls can, over months and years, become unbearable.

In my case, my teenage children, who happen to be fans of Baby Reindeer, were initially alarmed by my contact with Martha. Now they call me ‘Daddy Reindeer’.

In the final episode of Baby Reindeer, Gadd’s character Donny says how bitterly he regrets the moment Martha got his phone number.

Even as I type this article, close to midnight, the repeated ‘No Caller ID’ calls are starting again…