Baby Reindeer

Love Addiction on Crack, or Something Else?

I avoided Netflix’s Baby Reindeer for a while because I feared that a show about the dark underbelly of love addiction — stalking, harassment, obsession to the point of ruining lives — would be too depressing a watch. Turns out, that’s not what it’s about. It’s still pretty depressing, mind. It’s just not actually about love addiction. There’s some drug addiction and some sex addiction, but not where you’d think or from whom, and I’m not doing spoilers this week. But I will say the odds of you seeing yourself reflected in it are probably low.

In case you don’t have access to Netflix or YouTube or the morning paper, Baby Reindeer is one of the most-watched series in streaming history, written by and starring Scottish comedian Richard Gadd as an aspiring stand-up whose life is derailed by a stalker called Martha, played by the brilliant Jessica Gunning. It was based on his Edinburgh Fringe one-man play, and he claims the events portrayed all happened. Only the names are changed to protect the innocent, as they used to say. “A true story,” not “based on a true story.” This is going to get him into trouble, but more on that later.

The show is compelling but annoying. Gadd’s character, Donny Dunn, is an untalented wannabe who pretty much has no one but himself to blame for most of the misery he endures. The man has no boundaries. Zero. He is awash in self-pity and will do anything for a scrap of attention. He lies to himself and everyone around him if he thinks it will only make people like him. His sexual acting out is… let’s say less than healthy. And when you want to shake him by the shoulders and explain all this to him, he tells you that already knows. There’s nothing bad you can think about Donny Dunn that he hasn't already thought about himself. The only thing he has more of than self-pity, is self-loathing.

Martha, on the other hand, thinks she’s wonderful. She doesn’t think she’s stalking Donny. She thinks 41,000 emails, 744 tweets and 106 letters is… flattering. She is convinced they have a special connection. All she needs to do is be patient. Just show up at his gigs. Maybe sit under his window for a bit — a week, maybe two — and he’ll come around. If he cheats on her by, gasp, dating someone, surely she has a right to be angry. And yes, that sounds like a really bad case of love addiction. But Martha also thinks she’s an important lawyer with famous friends and her corner-store Android is an iPhone, among other delusions. She’s not a love addict; she’s a psychotic.

I can call Martha Scott psychotic if I want, because Martha Scott is a fictional character. However, I am not qualified to make a forensic diagnosis of a real person, and here’s the getting into trouble part.

It took the internet a minute and a half to identify a woman named Fiona Harvey as the real-life Martha Scott. The accent is the same, the resemblance is real, and the paper trail of tweets and emails is public record. And Fiona Harvey is pissed off to the tune of suing everyone involved for $170 million for putting things in this “true story” that never happened in real life. Like for instance her serving jail time.

Still, it’s hard to feel too bad for Fiona Harvey. She has really hurt real people in real life. Check out this Piers Morgan interview with Laura Wray, the barrister who employed Fiona Harvey and was stalked and harassed mercilessly for her trouble. (Baby Reindeer made a half-hearted attempt to obscure her identity as well.)

But I don’t think Fiona Harvey is a love addict any more than I think Martha Scott is. I think in fiction and in reality this is a case of a serious personality disorder that Dr. Drew Pinsky (who actually is qualified to have an opinion) posits could be something called anosognosia. Anosognosia is a dissociative disorder where someone lives in their own reality and is incapable of seeing things as they really are. And I don’t mean posting photos you’ve run through FaceTune, here. Or sending a follow-up email because, hey, you might have mis-addressed the first one. We all do that. (Don’t we?)

No, this is way beyond love addiction, an order magnitude past denial. This is Primal Fear territory. You know how the AA reading says “there are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders”? There are some things you can’t fix with 90 meetings in 90 days. This is one of them.

But there’s at least one character in Baby Reindeer I would definitely send to both Narcotics Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. If you’ve seen the show, you can tell me if you agree.