The Internet has been in a scramble to find the real identities of the characters, but the creator of the hit Netflix show is asking people to not do so. After Gary Reich was theorized to be Baby Reindeer‘s Darrien, Richard Gadd and his friends are making official statements.
Richard Gadd conceptualized Baby Reindeer after a woman sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours’ worth of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, and a variety of weird gifts, including a reindeer toy, sleeping pills, a woolly hat and boxer shorts over the course of four years. It began as a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe and it got picked up by Netflix began and Gadd as a fictionalized version of himself named Donny Dunn. The show explores his traumas and how the situation affected his career and personal life.
Among those traumas is an instance where Gadd was groomed and abused by a peer in the comedy community. In the show, Dunn goes over to a character named Darrien’s house and together they get high. But Dunn gets the realization that he’s been sexually abused by Darrien, but still continues to go over to his house.
“Stalking on television tends to be very sexed-up. It has a mystique,” Gadd told Netflix’s Tudum. It’s somebody in a dark alley way. It’s somebody who’s really sexy, who’s very normal, but then they go strange bit by bit,” Gadd explains. “But stalking is a mental illness. I really wanted to show the layers of stalking with a human quality I hadn’t seen on television before. It’s a stalker story turned on its head. It takes a trope and turns it on its head.”
Speculation about Darrien’s identity spread after the show shot up to be one of the most popular shows on Netflix. Gadd went on the record to tell people to stop searching for the real Martha and it seems to be extended to other characters in the show.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, free and confidential help is available. Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline on 1-800-656-4673.
Is Gary Reich the real-life Darrien?
According to The Sun, Gary Reich was “falsely accused” of being Richard Gadd’s abuser. Gary Reich is a comedy writer who has worked on Idris Elba’s Netflix show Turn Up Charlie and Noel Fielding’s The Mighty Boosh.
Gadd pleaded with fans to not go looking for the real people behind the story in an Instagram post after his friend Sean Foley was accused of being his abuser. “People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation. Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
Foley issued a statement on X,”Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me.”
What have other people said about Richard Gadd’s abuser?
Richard Osman talked on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with journalist Marina Hyde about turning trauma into art, and how allegedly everyone in the industry knows who his abuser is. “Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Osman then tells his co-host. “As you say, there’s a very, very serious thing that happens with a male comedy producer and Richard Gadd, who, as you say, did the show in Edinburgh and has been very open to people in the industry about who that person was, so people in the industry know who that person was.”
He continued, “Now it comes out now and a completely different person is identified, someone who has produced Richard Gadd before, but is definitively not the person in any way. But the person they’ve cast in that role looks like this other guy, looks like the guy who’s been falsely accused. And it’s such a weird, bizarre thing to do because this poor guy has had death threats and he’s had to issue a statement to say it’s not me. And it is not him, but definitely not because people in the industry know who it is. And it definitely not him.”
What has Richard Gadd said about his abuser?
Richard Gadd opened up about how the stalker situation helped him come to terms with his trauma. “On a fundamental level, you see sexual abuse in television – not all the time – but a lot of the time as an anonymous figure in the night,” he told The Radio Times. “But a lot of abuse happens in power dynamics, work dynamics, relationship dynamics, all those kinds of things. I hadn’t really seen the psychological complexity of it too often on television and I really wanted to show the perniciousness of the grooming cycle, just as much as the abuse cycle.”
He continued, “Abuse survivors can feel just as much shame about the idea of feeling duped or the idea of feeling manipulated. One of the feelings that was left with me after everything was, ‘God, I just feel so stupid’. I think being so honest, not just about the assault but how it got to that point, I hope will provide comfort for people who are maybe going through the same thing.”
Baby Reindeer is now streaming on Netflix.
