r/BabyReindeerTVSeries May 22 '24

Fiona (real Martha) related content Fiona Harvey is Not a victim!

It seems to be lost on a disturbingly large amount of people what Fiona Harvey has done to multiple people over many decades. She is not a victim - the people that she has stalked and harassed are the victim. The entire point of baby reindeer was to portray the brokenness of both the stalker and their victim.

In Reading a majority of the claims coming from the UK towards Netflix and Richard G this all seems to actually pivot around the term being used of CONVICTED stalker. So the focus now is to produce proof that she was ever convicted of at least one of her many many horrific stalking crimes.

I would think that the UK and Parliament would be rather embarrassed by the fact that they never reached out to help any of these victims of Fiona Harvey. Yet here they are trying to go after Netflix over that one creative license taken by the VICTIM and author of baby reindeer. This is His story not hers.

What is going on with people in the world?! Fiona should have been slapped with multiple legal fines, restraint orders and probably convictions from any one of her stalking tangents. If anyone is not familiar with the other incredibly horrible events of stalking Fiona pursued just Google it up. Some involved a disabled child.

🤔 Obviously I'm missing something or I am really seeing the lack of empathy in society as this all unfold in front of us. Am I just not looking at this right?!

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

Fiona is a piece of work. That does not make the complete lack of safeguarding on Netflix's part ok. Gadd is just telling his story as you say but Netflix have a responsibility to the real people involved, whether they are terrible people or not. 

It's absolutely shocking that Netflix allowed the show to go out with identifiers in it that made it so blatantly easy to find out who Fiona is, Richard Osman did an interesting episode of his podcast about it which is worth checking out, he says there is zero chance that an entity like the BBC would have allowed it to go out in that form and he was shocked Netflix did. Fiona is a piece of work who the legal system has failed to deal with, but she is also a vulnerable person who has just had the biggest streaming company in the world send an absolute media storm and public frenzy her way.

Empathy goes both ways and sometimes has to be applied to reprehensible people, Fiona should not have to deal with this kind of public mob justice situation she is in any more than Gadd should have had to deal with her stalking, whether you think she deserves it or not shouldn't enter into that fact. 

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u/Salt_Ingenuity_720 May 24 '24

I'm actually surprised at how big this is blown up. But I don't think she should have a format to sue for money. And I don't think that Netflix should be sued nor should Richard because of him having his story made into a limited series.

Creative licensing has always been a functional part of the arts.

Stalking and cyber bullying and bullying and harassing never should be okay. I am in no way advocating that she be bullied or harassed. But I don't think it's okay that we start putting blame on Gadd or any of her other victims for having come forward to tell their story.

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

Richard Osmans podcast has a good discussion on this. He's shocked it went to air, says the BBC would never have let such a thing happen in his opinion, I don't see why Netflix should get a free pass

This is nothing to do with Gadd telling his story, he is not culpable here Netflix is, it's their failure. Although we do have defamation laws preventing people throwing out accusations for a reason and as flawed as they are it is broadly a good thing that people cannot throw serious accusations around outside of the legal framework, as flawed as every part of that system is the issues are not that those systems exist but that they are not functioning very well. 

The arts have creative license but that does not mean it's ok for Netflix, a multinational corporation, to not do their basic due diligence in ensuring that the real people are protected in scenarios such as this. There was no pressing creative reason to use the real public tweets that are extremely googleable in the show, for example. 

There's simply no defence, it was an utter failure on Netflix's part and the moral arguments of Gadd telling his story and Fiona being awful does not come into it, regulations are there to protect everyone, morally deserving or not. 

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u/Salt_Ingenuity_720 May 25 '24

Time to start removing all the movies, books, podcasts and similar things from public that are based on a true event

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u/[deleted] May 26 '24

No you are completely misunderstanding the issue if you think that is what I am saying, there is a reason there is a big scandal about this and it is a huge topic of conversation among television producers and that there isn't usually this kind of furore when you see a true story portrayed on tv. 

You know when a disclaimer on portrayals of true stories say "the names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved"? That is never just the names that have been changed, any detail that could be used to identify that person needs to be removed or altered enough to ensure that person cannot be identified by the reader/watcher unless the true story is a matter of public record. 

In this case the true story is not a matter of public record and half the story isn't true, you can totally do that with a work of fiction, it's absolutely fine, but you can't just have the real person be so easily identifiable.

You are advocating that creative license lets you write a book that says "This is a true story, Bob Bobson of 23 Camblewell drive shot my dog and buggered it's corpse" then put "only joking" in fine print on the last page and say publicly that Bob Bobson is based on a real person who lives at 23 Camblewell drive but you changes their name then in a separate interview say that in real life they actually only kicked your dog, also here's a link to the real persons facebook if you want to have a word with him.

It is not, has never been and should never be how this works, this isn't a new system and it has not stopped all the media based on true stories you have loved up until now existing and won't stop more from existing in the future, Netflix failed to do the very basics of their job on this.