The stalker from Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer harassed my family for five years… she even threatened to kill my MP husband

Something about the woman on her television screen made Laura Wray feel uneasy. The lawyer and widow of a Labor MP was relaxing at home, fascinated by the opening minutes of Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer, especially the character Martha who stalks a struggling comedian.

What was it about Martha that seemed so familiar? Maybe the raucous laugh that seemed to last just a little too long, or the way she held her handbag close to her as she shyly entered a café. Whatever it was about this curly-haired Scotsman, she reminded Laura of someone from her past. The realization came like an electric shock and Laura sank back on the couch with her mouth open.

For she knew Martha all too well, or rather the real Martha, who turned Laura’s happy life upside down more than a quarter of a century earlier with a brutal five-year campaign of intimidation. At one point the situation became so bad that Laura was forced to alert staff at her law firm in Glasgow to panic alarms.

In one scene from the drama, Martha goes from exuberance to screaming rage in the blink of an eye. “That left no doubt whatsoever: I saw her do that,” says Laura.

Baby Reindeer, which has been 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 strip.

One day Martha walks into the pub where he works and claims she’s a great lawyer but inexplicably broke. Out of pity, he makes her a cup of tea. Thus begins the beginning of a terrifying obsession.

Soon she is 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 says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totaling 106 pages, and 350 hours of voicemail messages.

The series also references Martha’s history of stalking. Gadd’s character Donny googles her and finds a newspaper article – fictionalized for the show – with the headline: “Sick stalker targets lawyer’s deaf child.”

Gadd has insisted that Martha’s character was so well hidden in his script that the real person she was based on “wouldn’t recognize herself.” But for Laura – the “lawyer” referred to 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 abuse online.

Speaking to The Mail yesterday, the woman – whose identity we have chosen not to reveal – claimed the Netflix show amounted to ‘bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune’ and that she had received ‘death threats’ of Gadd’s supporters. . The comedian, she said, “was now using Baby Reindeer to stalk me.”

But although ‘Martha’ wants to portray herself as a victim, for Laura this is a bit ironic.

If anything, Laura’s nightmare overshadowed Gadd’s. At one point ‘Martha’ made a death threat 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 abusing Frankie, then almost four years old, who had been born with a rare chromosomal disorder. “I know Martha by her real name but my jaw dropped when I watched the series,” said Laura, who spoke exclusively to The Mail on Sunday about her ordeal for the first time

‘It brought back so many things I had forgotten. She did the same to me and made my life a nightmare. He [Gadd] has its place on the road. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. I felt sorry for her. Everyone she has encountered and bullied the life out of her has felt the same way, it seems.”

The real ‘Martha’, now 58, comes from a middle-class family who lived in a village near Stirling.

A law graduate, she first came into contact with Laura in October 1997, when Laura was persuaded to give her a two-week trial period at her company. “She told me a very unhappy story about how she had no support from her family, how she got her law degree and was looking for an internship, but no one would give it to her,” says Laura.

‘I had my reservations. She was terribly honest and told me all these very personal things. Before we even met, she sent me a postcard congratulating me on my engagement to Jimmy. But actually I felt sorry for her.

‘When she started with us, she was rude to everyone. On one occasion, she threw a book across the room and hit an employee in the head. One day she was manning a phone line and we discovered she was recommending rival lawyers.

‘She also shouted at Karen, one of my secretaries, demanding that she drop everything else she was doing for me and do something for her immediately instead.

“Then she started threatening people and yelling, like in Baby Reindeer, where she goes from being very friendly to yelling, ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’

‘She did the same [in my office] and I said to her, ‘We are a company, I can’t have that kind of behavior.’ I fired her after a week. She was furious and threatened that she would do this, that and the other to me.

‘She then ran out of my room shouting that she wasn’t going to leave and that she was calling the Law Society. She said everyone in the legal community hated me and that my staff was useless. Then she started shouting, ‘Jimmy Wray will rue the day.’

‘Some of the girls in the office were shaking and upset and thought they were going to attack me or another member of staff. She was eventually escorted out, still calling me vile names, and was later seen driving around the office in her car.”

She soon bombarded Laura with threatening phone calls saying, “I’ll get you,” discrediting her to other lawyers, her family, friends and her husband’s political associates, including Donald Dewar, Scotland’s inaugural First Minister .

In September 2001, the woman even left a message on her MP’s answering machine, threatening to kill Jimmy. Laura felt ‘genuinely sorry’ for her and tried to ignore it. She says: ‘There was no legislation about stalking or intimidation at the time.

‘There was no clear right of recourse for me. The only thing I could have done was to sue for defamation, but there was no point, she had no money and the only other option was to use a civil suit, which wasn’t really intended for that.”

Yet her reserves of sympathy would soon run out.

Things escalated when Laura started a course at the University of Strathclyde the following month to gain some additional qualifications. On the first day, she ran into her stalker and stared at her from across the room, her gaze like a harpoon. ‘She occasionally came to lectures I went to. She was just there suddenly.

“She came and stood next to me a few times as students waited for the lecture hall doors to open. I have memories of her right next to me – almost breathing over me. It was very nerve-wracking and I was scared. I had to get some other students to walk me to my car.

‘I went to a professor and explained everything. He looked up the list and said she isn’t actually registered as a student. But the university ignored me and did nothing.”

The university later apologized and admitted that the woman had in fact been a student but had been permanently expelled due to her behavior towards other students and staff.

But it was in April 2002 that her behavior finally crossed a line for Laura. She came home with Frankie, then almost four, and saw two social workers at her door.

‘[The woman] had claimed that we had hit our son and I was forced to explain the whole background,” says Laura. ‘Thankfully the social workers believed me, but it was just awful and I was absolutely furious.

“This is a child who couldn’t walk or talk or do anything for himself. To think anyone could suggest we do this [harm him] is mean and cruel.

“It was all well and good to write someone off as mentally ill and just ignore the harassment. But the last thing was Frankie, and I didn’t have that.”

Laura applied to the court for a restraining order, which was granted the next day.

For Laura and her family it meant the long-awaited rest. But over the years, she occasionally wondered what happened to her stalker. Did she focus on others? Did she get the help she needed?

And then came Baby Reindeer. “I think it’s sad that she slipped through the cracks for so long when she was clearly not feeling well,” says Laura.

She is also stunned that the woman has now been identified on social media as a result of the Netflix show – despite Gadd’s insistence that he had covered up her identity.

‘He’s had an Edinburgh Fringe show that featured this story and now he’s got this hit series on Netflix and he definitely wishes him the best of luck, but it must have occurred to him that people should speculate about who Martha is – and whether she did this to someone else,” says Laura.

‘They could have changed things without watering down the content, but they made it so realistic.

‘They portrayed her absolutely perfectly, she is so clearly the woman who stalked me. It’s so creepy.’

Additional reporting: Daisy Graham-Brown