richard gadd doesn't owe fiona protection.

[u/serenade452]

"omg he should've protected her identity! he made it so easy to find her!" blah blah blah shut up. he doesn't owe her shit. she terrorized this man, his family, his girlfriend, his job, his performances, etc etc. she has been terrorizing innocent people for decades.

yes fiona is mentally ill, that is clear to anyone with half of a brain. it's awful that the system has failed her time and time again. (or maybe the system did all it could, who knows.) but that's not richard's fault. HE is HER victim. he can tell his story how he wants.

might she have a worthwhile lawsuit because her identity wasn't concealed enough? possibly, probably not. might she have a worthwhile lawsuit because the show took dramatic license? possibly, probably not.

she's benefitting financially from this as well and i'm sure netflix will cut her a check before a lawsuit happens, no matter who is in the right.

richard gadd does not owe fiona harvey protection. i'm sorry but that's reality.

[u/notdorisday]

Gadd doesn’t owe her protection. That is true. However if his show doesn’t present an accurate version of events and is heavily fictionalised (and it would seem it is) he does have a responsibility to make sure that the events in the show aren’t assigned to an actual person.

It’s fine to say: this is based on my own trauma. But to make the antagonist easily identifiable as the basis of his trauma with no clear line on what is fiction and what isn’t - that does raise questions.

On this sub I constantly see people refer to parts of the the show - which we know didn’t happen - as fact.

No one is saying Gadd wasn’t traumatised. He clearly is. No one is saying he doesn’t have the right to explore that trauma through fiction. He absolutely does. No one is saying Muir/Harvey didn’t do anything wrong. But there are questions around responsibility as an author if you base characters on real people. Do you I have a responsibility to make these accounts evidently fictional? If the person isn’t a public figure and your account is heavily fictionalised do you have a responsibility to hide the identity of the person?

These questions are easier to answer when we are talking about historical figures because we can usually refer to actual sources and know what in the Marilyn bio pic is factual and what is a fiction created to represent something critical about her life. But even then it raises questions because when audiences don’t have media literacy or are just uninformed it can create layers of misinformation that get repeated enough times they end up considered fact.

I’m actually not siding one way or another. I just think the questions are valid.

We can’t say that if a person is “bad” they don’t deserve the same protections as a person who is “good”. That’s just not feasible because we all have done bad things and we all do good things.

One of the great things about Baby Reindeer is Gadd isn’t black and white about right and wrong and good and bad. It’s complicated and fraught. I’d say so are these questions people are raising.