Has any television programme ever had such a dramatic off-screen arc as Baby Reindeer? Dropped on to Netflix without expectation or warning a month ago, its popularity exploded as people sat gripped through Richard Gadd’s stalking horror show, boggled by the promise that all of this had actually happened.

And yet now it’s hard to think of Baby Reindeer without it leaving a distasteful smell. The show’s popularity – and the promise of veracity – led to a small army of internet sleuths effectively stalking the characters’ supposed real-world counterparts. Martha, the woman who tormented Gadd’s character with an onslaught of unwanted interaction, was outed as a Scottish woman named Fiona Harvey. With grim inevitability, Harvey was last night interviewed on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel.

What a queasy interview it was. During the course of their time together, Morgan pressed Harvey on her relationship with Gadd (she claimed to have only met him five or six times), the number of emails she sent him (Baby Reindeer claims 41,000, she claims a handful), her plans to deal with Netflix (apparently a lawsuit) and her reliability as a witness (at times she boasted of having a photographic memory, at others she forgot how many email accounts she had).

Of course, agreeing to the interview was Harvey’s choice, yet the whole thing reeked of grubby exploitation. One of two things is happening here. Assuming Harvey is indeed Martha, either Richard Gadd, Clerkenwell Films and Netflix have wildly exaggerated the story while passing it off as true, which leaves all of them wide open to all manner of legal action. Or Fiona Harvey did all the things she is being accused of, which means that a huge segment of the media are gleefully parading a mentally ill woman around for clicks. Whichever is true, it is an extremely uncomfortable thing to witness.

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Piers Morgan, for all his faults, is a sharp and tenacious interviewer. And there were moments here where he ably demonstrated the full spectrum of his talents, pouncing on throwaway asides and inconsistencies in an attempt to get Harvey to admit to the behaviour she has been accused of. But you were still left with the sensation that the world would probably be a better place if the interview never happened at all.

Because this is far from the end of the story. Not only do we all have to sit with the uncomfortable truth that Fiona Harvey is now a celebrity – and what’s the betting that reality shows are lining up at her door as we speak? – but Richard Gadd is being pushed closer and closer to giving a line-by-line explanation of which parts of Baby Reindeer actually happened and which bits were invented for entertainment.

This cannot possibly be good for anyone. It isn’t good for Gadd, whose writing talent is being overshadowed by this furore. It certainly isn’t good for Harvey, who will now have to spend the rest of her life being hounded by internet ghouls who comprehensively failed to understand the basic lesson of Baby Reindeer. And it isn’t good for Netflix, since its seeming dereliction of compliance caused all this and opened it up to scrutiny for all corners.

Then there is the identity of Gadd’s abuser. Baby Reindeer’s other story is about Gadd being groomed and sexually assaulted by a powerful figure in the world of comedy. So far, the identity of this man has been kept under wraps, but that surely won’t be the case for long. Gadd himself posted an Instagram story naming one figure and pleading with viewers to stop accusing him of wrongdoing. But on his podcast, Richard Osman added fuel to the fire by claiming that everyone in the television business knows who it is. As such, social media is brimming with wild speculation, with several household names being thrown around without proof. Reputations are being destroyed as a result.

And it isn’t good for us. By promising viewers a true story, and by doing such a shoddy job of masking Harvey’s identity, Baby Reindeer might have invited us to speculate on what really happened. But this has made us complicit. We’re following Fiona Harvey’s story just as closely as we followed the series itself. Baby Reindeer is shaping up to be a lesson in what happens if everyone – writers, producers, the media, viewers – follow their worst instincts at every turn. Whatever horrible turn this tale takes next is on us.

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• Television
• Richard Gadd
• Piers Morgan
• features