Half the world is speculating who the fanatical and unstoppable woman is who inspired Martha, the mentally ill bully of the spring’s most popular Netflix series, Baby Deer. The gruesome true story excites viewers so much precisely because of its truthfulness, while its creator does everything to prevent the real names involved in the case from being revealed.
Netflix’s algorithms are unknowable. Thanks to this, no one could have expected that in the second half of April, a tiny, rather intimate British mini-series would move to the top of the ratings list and would not want to leave it. Our astonishment is only enhanced by the fact that the series is not at all enticing to watch at first Baby deer listens to the title, and besides, it has nothing to do with Bambi.
Martha, who does not stop
Martha, an unemployed woman who claims to be a lawyer, has a law degree, but has been practicing as a lawyer for a long time (or maybe never?), calls Donny, the young man, to whom she whispers after taking pity on him as a bartender and inviting him to a drink at the bar. It’s a kind gesture, a humane moment, nothing more, but it means the world to Martha.
She quickly becomes a regular at Donny’s, constantly flirting with him, and then bombarding him with e-mails and messages. Although the bartender/wannabe comedian is currently in a budding relationship, he doesn’t stop Martha at first. Although he is aware that what the woman is doing is harassment, it is still good for his wounded ego to be flattered and to feel that he is important to someone, that he matters to someone.
Of course, Martha’s infatuation quickly deteriorates, she attacks Donny and hurts Donny’s girlfriend, and after being banned from the pub, she waits for him all day long at his workplace or at the bus stop next to his apartment, to insult him as he passes by. After a while, he sends tons of messages not only to her, but also to every woman who has a photo with Donny on Facebook. And in his final desperation, he starts harassing Donny’s parents too, spreading rumors at his father’s workplace that they employ a pedophile, and he even goes to all the stand-up performances of his heart’s choice, just to confuse and upset him.
Baby deer (Photo: Netflix)
Since Martha is a lawyer and already a routine harasser (Donny’s not the first such case), she knows well where the limits are, how far she can go without the police catching her, and Donny also makes a lot of mistakes in his reporting. And the case, which lasted for years, completely destroys not only the man’s soul – already battered by previous sexual violence – but also his work and private life, while it damages his relationships with other people and makes it impossible for him to fulfill his old dream and stand up comedy become a speaker.
He told it on stage for the first time
THE Baby deer many people associate its success with the true crime craze that is becoming more and more dominant on streaming services. Although it is not a documentary, the series starts from the get-go with the fact that we see/hear a true story, and the sometimes quite absurd, at first seemingly unbelievable, but psychologically authentically explained and presented moments seen in the story are only more exciting if we know that the events actually happened inspired. Such events, moreover, happened to the writer-protagonist Richard Gaddel in his early twenties. The Scottish writer-comedian, who is now in his thirties, was not really in the spotlight before, perhaps his greatest success is that he was able to write an episode as a writer for the highly successful Sex education from the series.
THE Baby deer his story had been brewing in him for a long time, and it wasn’t the first time he told it to the public in the series. In 2019, he presented the story live to the audience as a one-man show, a kind of one-man story-telling play, and later developed it into a mini-series. Apparently, this also inspired the scene in one of the episodes of the series when, instead of traditional stand-up, he pours out his soul and tells his story to the astonished audience.
It took enormous courage for Gadd to tell the story of the most humiliating and unpleasant period of his life in front of a small audience at the time, and now on Netflix, he really undertook this in front of the country and the world, and he not only wrote it as a script, but also plays himself. This was a particularly brave move given that in the middle episode, we watch the main character being drugged and repeatedly raped by an influential writer.
In pursuit of the real bullies
In almost every interview, Gadd emphasizes that he did not tell his story to take revenge on anyone.
These cases happened a long time ago, she has now left this stage of her life behind her, and she takes on these unpleasant stories with full shoulder width because she hopes that, on the one hand, people can get a better idea of the depths and sides of bullying, and on the other hand the authorities can also learn from it, because according to the man, whistleblowers are often not taken seriously enough, many things are not declared as harassment that they should be, and they often intervene only after too much damage (even on the emotional side) has already been caused.
Of course, even though Gadd has shied away from publicly naming his bullies, the public hasn’t yet shied away from finding the culprits. Despite the fact that the creator of the series asked people to stop investigating in an Instastory on April 22, a veritable search campaign was launched against them. Many people became curious about who inspired Darrien, the rapist writer seen in the series, and who could be the real Martha, whom the Baby deerin Jessica Gunning with such awesome diversity, in so many ways Kathy Bates Tortureshaped by reminding of the shape seen in
By the way, Gadd deliberately made it difficult for anyone to find the real perpetrators, for good reason:
There are certain protection mechanisms in the law, because of which you cannot just take other people’s names and lives and put them on the screens. Several of the characters in my story are vulnerable people, and I had no intention of making their lives more difficult. So we had to change a lot of things to protect myself and protect them.
Emotional truth instead of truth
According to Richard Gadd, the important thing was not that everything in the series happened exactly as it happened in reality, but that the emotional truth and content of the story were preserved. According to him, those who are looking for women in their lives who look like Martha are on the wrong path, because in reality she does not resemble the actress who played her at all. The creator said that he met his bully in his early twenties, who then intruded into his life for about four years, during which he sent 41 thousand e-mails, 350 hours of voice messages, 106 pages of letters, as well as numerous Twitter and Facebook messages. him, and then we didn’t mention the bizarre gifts and personal inquiries.
Furthermore, we also know – SPOILER follows – that
contrary to what was seen in the series, he never sent the real perpetrator to prison, because he did not want to hurt such a mentally unstable person in this way.
What happened to him since then? He didn’t say that, but it is certain that Gadd is not at all afraid of him today, and feels that both of them are so different in their lives today that he sees no chance of his return. And he put a lot of emphasis on being able to protect it. As he told GQ:
We went so far in changing him that he might not recognize the series anymore. In fact, we are not presenting a real character, but his emotional truth is very much present.
“Let’s find the real Martha!” named online manhunt, thank God, has not been successful so far, but at the same time, many people thought they had found the real Darrien Sean Foley in writer-director, mostly because he looks a bit like the actor, who is a Baby deerplays a writer who commits sexual violence. Gadd personally came to his defense, saying that he didn’t want people to pick on his kind former co-workers like Foley.
The piquancy of the case is that the viewers, outraged by what happened in the series, started doing exactly what they found outrageous: they bombarded an innocent man with harassing messages, threats and comments.
Sources: (1) (2) (3) (4)
Seven episodes of Baby Deer are available on Netflix.
Tags: thousand emails hours voice messages pages letters Bizarre Netflix series worlds persistent bully
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