By. Wilber T
Miranda Cosgrove is reflecting on her traumatic experience with a stalker that rivals Netflix’s hit limited series, Baby Reindeer.
- In a cover interview with Bustle, Cosgrove recalls the 2016 incident in which a man who had been stalking her lit himself on fire and fatally shot himself in the front yard of her Los Angeles home. He had previously shot at a woman who looked like Cosgrove as she drove by the property.
- Cosgrove, who was 23 years old at the time, wasn’t home during either incident but still lives in the house to this day.
- “That’s another reason why I go back and forth to my parents’ house so much,” she tells Bustle. “I just don’t feel super safe in that house. For two years after it happened, I wouldn’t really stay there. Then I got into a relationship and because that person was there with me, I was less scared. But I don’t really like being there on my own that much.”
- She confesses that she’s on the hunt for a place where she can “feel really safe, to kind of start a new chapter,” but reveals that she hasn’t found it yet.
- Considering the eerie similarities between her experiences and Richard Gadd’s highly acclaimed Netflix hit, it’s no surprise that Cosgrove has seen the series. Baby Reinder chronicles the Scottish comedian’s experience with a woman, “Martha Scott,” who becomes obsessed with him after meeting at the bar where he worked. In the show, “Martha” sends Donny (Gadd) 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours worth of voicemails over six years.
- During his encounters with his stalker, Donny is forced to confront the long-buried trauma of past sexual abuse he endured.
- “I feel like if that were me, having to go back through your most terrible experiences and then try to act them [out], that’d be so hard,” Cosgrove said of Gadd.
- According to Gadd, much of the show — including his painful recollection of drug addiction and sexual abuse at the hands of a mentor in the writing space — is pulled straight from his own experience and “emotionally 100 percent true,” he told Variety. For obvious legal reasons, however, many details have been adjusted. Some who watch the show may be surprised to find out that some details — namely the scale of the stalking — have been toned down.
- Forbes reports that in the stage play — which premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival before winning an Olivier on the West End — Gadd reveals that in addition to the in-person harassment, Martha sent 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages worth of letters.
- While the show ends with Martha sentenced to nine months in prison, Gadd has been incredibly tight-lipped about how his real-life stalker was dealt with, only that he has “mixed feelings” about how the situation was resolved, he once told The Independent.
- “I can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all this,” he said. “Stalking and harassment is a form of mental illness. It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster, because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her.”
- At the time of the sold-out stage play’s release, he made similar comments to The Guardian in which he also expanded on his own role in the situation and how he does not believe he is blameless.
- “It would be unfair to say she was an awful person and I was a victim. That didn’t feel true,” the writer said in 2019. “I did loads of things wrong and made the situation worse. I wasn’t a perfect person [back then], so there’s no point saying I was.”
- In Baby Reindeer, Gadd makes a point to touch on Martha’s own traumatic experiences that shaped her into the person she became. In the weeks since the show’s release, he has asked his recent barrage of new fans and followers to avoid falling down a rabbit hole and speculating about the identities of his rapist and stalker.
- Despite those efforts, a woman named Fiona Harvey has since come forward, claiming that the character of Martha is based off of her. In an interview with Piers Morgan, Harvey denied many plot points of Baby Reindeer and said that she plans to sue both Gadd and Netflix for the character’s portrayal on the show.
- “I find it quite obscene. I find it horrifying, misogynistic,” she said, alleging that “some of the death threats have been really terrible online. People [are] phoning me up. It’s been absolutely horrendous. I wouldn’t give credence to something like that, and it’s not really my kind of drama.”
- Upon finding out about the Netflix series, Harvey said she felt “absolutely horrendous,” noting, “I couldn’t believe this had happened.”
- As for why she believes Gadd made the show, Harvey said that she thinks he has “got extreme psychiatric problems” and had monetary motives.
- “He’d failed as a comedian, he’d failed as an actor, so therefore, let’s make some money, sell this to Netflix,” she said. “… I would challenge him to leave me alone… Get a life. Get a proper job. I am horrified at what you’ve done.”
