How Baby Reindeer nailed stalking’s insidious nature
As the Netflix show sparks a national debate, Laura Barton shares her own stalking terror
Words by Laura Barton
![Babyreindeer Jennifer Aniston](https://flatplanplus.io/grazia/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/04/Babyreindeer.jpg)
There is a scene early on in Netflix’s latest hit series, Baby Reindeer, in which lead character Donny walks into a central London police station to report the fact that he thinks maybe, possibly he is being stalked. Donny details the perpetrator’s behaviour — her pattern of showing up at his workplace, her mounting obsession, the onslaught of messages and threatening behaviour. Behind the glass, the police officer looks at him, confused. “What took you so long to report it?” he asks.
Baby Reindeer is based on real events in the life of its star and writer, the comedian Richard Gadd. It’s a complicated, nuanced programme, one that explores not just the high drama of the situation, but Gadd’s feelings of complicity and self-blame, and his lingering sense of compassion for his stalker.
Despite its rave reviews, it’s a series I initially hesitated to watch. I was nervous that it might dredge up feelings around my own still quite-recent experience of being stalked; that it would remind me of those days of feeling so hounded that I, too, had to involve the police.
My own experience began online, with a man who followed me on Twitter. I’ve been a music writer and broadcaster for over 20 years, and during that time, readers and listeners have often sought me out — via email, or on social media, or sometimes in person at gigs, with the intention of talking to me about, say, Bob Dylan bootlegs or Bruce Springsteen lyrics, or simply to thank me for introducing them to the music of some new artist.
Over the years, I had come to regard it as a peculiar facet of the job; sometimes heart-warming, and at other times mildly uncomfortable. Most of them were men. Some of them had a tendency to act a little too familiar. But by and large I felt able to navigate it all.
‘One time he travelled hundreds of miles to attend a festival where he knew I was performing.’
This man — I’m calling him Peter, though it is not his real name, had followed me for some time before he asked me to follow him back; he had a work matter he wanted to discuss via direct message. It seemed an innocuous request, and when I looked at his profile he seemed harmless enough. And so I followed.
I often think about that moment of following — just as Donny in Baby Reindeer wonders why he accepted a Facebook friend request from the woman who would stalk him. What did I unleash in that simple click of a button?
Peter’s ‘work matter’ was that he had recorded some of my radio shows and wanted to send them to me. It was unnecessary of course, but I was polite and simply thanked him. My politeness only seemed to embolden him, and from then on he wrote regularly. Mostly I did not reply, but occasionally I would thank him for complimenting my work, or for the radio recordings that continued to arrive, entirely unbidden.
Back then, I had recently moved to the Kent coast — close, it turned out, to where Peter himself lived, and after a while he started to show up at events I had mentioned on social media. One time he travelled hundreds of miles to attend a festival where he knew I was performing, and followed me about as if we were there together. He was always alone, and always awkward, and while his presence made me feel strange, I also felt sorry for him; he seemed lonely, and unaware that this was not a normal way to behave.
It was during the pandemic that Peter’s behaviour escalated. His messages became more frequent and more personal; he sent long, detailed stories from his life, and grew increasingly flirtatious, talking about me with a kind of possessive affection, telling me about gifts he had bought for me. He seemed to believe that we were in the throes of some burgeoning romance.
I asked him to stop. I told him his messages were not appropriate. I suggested he find a good therapist. “But I prefer to talk to you,” he told me. Meanwhile, I became increasingly concerned that he had worked out where I lived — he made regular references to places close to my home — where I lived alone, and where I often took long solo walks across the nearby fields. I told him I was going to stop replying to him, but still he wrote — the messages growing longer and more persistent, and when they were met by my silence, eventually becoming angry and accusatory.
There is no legal definition of stalking, but the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the charity which runs the National Stalking Helpline, defines it as ‘A pattern of fixated and obsessive behaviour which is intrusive and causes fear of violence or engenders alarm and distress in the victim.’ The majority of stalking victims are women — an estimated one in five of us will experience some form of stalking, compared to one in 10 men. The number of cases has also grown since 2019-20, partly because of the way that stalking is recorded and the introduction of Stalking Protection Orders, but also because cyber-stalking has flourished in our increasingly digital age, particularly during Covid, when calls to the National Stalking Helpline tripled. Even so, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the charity which runs the helpline, believes the crime remains underreported.
‘It took a while to consider that I had been projecting onto my stalker just as much as he was projecting onto me.’
When everything happened with Peter, I hesitated to regard it as stalking. I thought he was just a man who was projecting ideas onto me, who had grown a little too keen. But friends pointed out how much I was adapting my behaviour to accommodate his obsession — altering the routes of my daily walks, questioning how much I shared about myself in my work, trying to be nice to him so he would not turn nasty. I realised it was an augmented version of how I had often behaved towards men whose attention I did not want: making myself smaller, just to ensure they didn’t get upset.
Things came to a head with Peter when I left Kent and wrote an article about how glad I was to be back in London. He took it personally, sending a slew of angry messages, posting on his Twitter about me, messaging people I knew, and eventually alerting me to a threatening blogpost he had written about me.
It was at this point that, with considerable encouragement from others, I contacted the police. I worried they might think me silly or dramatic, but in fact they were hugely supportive, advising me on how best to ensure my own safety, and moving quickly to locate Peter. He now knows that if ever contacts me again he will be charged.
What took me so long to report it? To explain that is to unravel a strange jumble of emotions: I felt feeble, and histrionic, and on some level I felt complicit — after all, I had followed him back, I had communicated with him, I had not blocked him. Like Donny in Baby Reindeer, I was also deeply worried about Peter’s wellbeing, and to some extent perhaps I even saw something of myself in him, too.
When I wrote the article about leaving Kent I was critical of the community I had joined there; I told how for the years I spent there I had felt excluded and belittled, as if I were not cool or interesting enough to hang out with the gentrifying in-crowd. I was hurt, and my piece lashed out at all of them.
When Peter sent me angry messages and wrote his furious blogpost I recognised a similar sense of rejection, and my first reaction was a profound sense of guilt that I had made anyone feel so bad about themselves.
It took a while to consider that I had been projecting onto my stalker just as much as he was projecting onto me. I had assumed he was benign but confused, when in fact I knew very little about him. He might have a history of this behaviour, he might be violent, he might not even be the person he claimed to be. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was afraid, that this man’s obsession was scaring me, that I just wanted my life back.
There was much to praise in Baby Reindeer, but above all I admired the way it captured the complexity of most stalking cases; how obsession grows incrementally, and how peculiar it feels to be its focus. How most perpetrators are not pantomime villains, but people whose minds have become distorted. How there are conversations to be had about behaviours and boundaries and what to do when people break them. And above all, just how terrifyingly easily we can become someone’s baby reindeer.
Photo: Netflix