As with any media so closely adapted from reality, it’s difficult to meaningfully separate Baby Reindeer from its context. Since its release earlier this month, countless opinion pieces have been written about fans’ invasive responses to the show. But putting responsibility with random internet users misses the bigger picture.

Baby Reindeer was released on Netflix and produced by Clerkenwell Films, a BBC Studios acquired production company who have produced Misfits, The End of the F**king World, and Lovesick. Adapted from Richard Gadd’s 2019 Edinburgh show of the same name, Baby Reindeer follows Donny Dunn (Gadd) through a partly fictionalised version of Gadd’s experience of being stalked by a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning). It is revealed as the show progresses that Donny has suffered abuse, having been groomed by an older, established comedy writer five years previously.

The show has enough of a straightforward narrative to be Netflix-friendly but, more unusually, is allowed to be primarily emotion-driven. It is, as many have said, incredible storytelling. And even more emotionally powerful. I sat and watched it in one go, unable to switch it off after each episode ended. It was horrifying and brilliant.

I like to think that, given its seat at the head of the table of the streaming oligopoly, Netflix has the resources to garner some insight into what may or may not resonate with its audiences. It’s probably not fair to suggest that the success of Baby Reindeer was entirely predictable. It probably is fair to suggest it was a little bit predictable, though. And so we come to Martha. 

The identity of the ‘real’ Martha has been (reportedly) unearthed by people on TikTok. A woman has been found who so closely resembles Martha in the show in multiple ways that Gunning’s incredible performance appears almost as a caricature. After several days of being harassed online, the woman in question spoke to The Daily Record this morning, saying that “I’m the victim here, not Richard Gadd. I’ve had death threats as a result of his show despite the fact that a lot of the things he claimed are just not true.”

Despite finding this information using open source intelligence techniques lauded by investigative journalists, these TikTok or Reddit users have been demoted to “armchair detectives” in many recent op-eds, the focus of which has been to chastise the naughty children who have brought Real Martha to the foreground of social media. There is an element of validity to this argument; it’s important before publishing anything found through investigative tools to recognise whether what you have found is in the public interest or not: if you are actually speaking truth to power or simply harming the safety of vulnerable people.

“A media exercise in moralising individuals is obscuring an institutional safeguarding failure”

The thing is, this hierarchy of victimhood was entirely avoidable. People on the internet piecing together clues about the identity of Gadd’s stalker and using it to harass her under the narcissistic illusion of being arbiters of public justice is not particularly surprising, and neither is Clerkenwell Films and Netflix jointly doing nothing to mitigate it. A media exercise in moralising individuals is obscuring an institutional safeguarding failure.

And then we reach the engagement bait. People watch the show, and speculate about Real Martha and this will come up at the top of all our feeds, so more people will watch the show, and then publicly speculate about Real Martha, and then more people will watch the show, and repeat to fade. Now that Real Martha has spoken out, yet more attention will be directed towards the show. A cynic could suggest that this has worked out rather well for Netflix. 

The level of agency attributed to Gadd as a singular force behind Baby Reindeer makes sense, considering that he wrote and stars in it and it is an adaptation of his stand up show. On a purely creative level this attribution is probably true. It does however miss the fundamental point that film and TV ownership just doesn’t work like that. Netflix typically owns the rights for shows released on its platform; Michaela Coel was in the news a few years back for refusing to take a $1 million Netflix deal for highly critically acclaimed I May Destroy You in order to retain control over the copyright. As the beneficial owner, Netflix ultimately bears responsibility for preserving Real Martha’s anonymity. Real Martha was an abuser, she was not sufficiently anonymised, she has been on the receiving end of a barrage of targeted harassment, and she is vulnerable.

If I have one hope from this whole situation, it’s that the bored Redditors realise the collective strength they have, and target it away from vulnerable individuals towards corporate institutions that actually deserve their investigative attentions. My best piece of advice for any armchair detectives? Follow the money.