Straight to the point

The teeth were the detail that stuck with me. A friend had gone to the sentencing of the woman who stalked me — I can’t really call her “my stalker”, because she turned out to have many victims and I was only a minor interest of hers. Her main targets were two gay male writers: in just six months, she sent them thousands of emails and hundreds of tweets, many of them homophobic.

In late 2013, she was found guilty of harassment and given a suspended custodial sentence. “Stalking” borrows its name from the language of hunting. When it happens to you, you know that you’re the prey, even if it’s hard to say exactly what you imagine will happen to you at the end of the chase. So I was eager to know something, anything, about this person who had caused me so much angst and misery from behind her screen name.

The stalker was gaunt and scruffy, said my friend. So overwhelmed by the courtroom she could barely look up, never mind speak. Terrible teeth. I felt both good and bad about this. Good, because it’s nice to believe that the people who torment you are ultimately tormented by being themselves. Bad, because it was embarrassing to have been psychologically scarred by someone so obviously pathetic. Bad, because the only reason she’d been able to get to me was that I’d welcomed her in.

I had posted a tweet about an outrageous piece in a lad mag and it went viral. In reponse to it, there had been firings, apologies and a donation to a women’s charity. It was 2010, and though I’d written a few bylined pieces, this was one of my first experiences of being a somebody. I liked it. A day later, the stalker arrived in my mentions: who do we go after next, she asked. Did it feel a little off? Yes. Did I follow her? Also yes.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for about 10 years, and then, when I was watching Baby Reindeer, it all came rushing back. In the show, main character Donny (played by, and based on, the show’s writer and star Richard Gadd) is working in a bar when Martha walks in. She’s crying. Something, obviously, is not quite right about her: she claims to be a high-powered lawyer, but says she doesn’t have enough money for a cup of tea.

Donny feels sorry for her. He gives her a cup of tea on the house, and this becomes the inciting incident for a nightmarish harassment campaign spanning years. In real life, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemail from his stalker — making the woman who pursued me look like a rank amateur. If that was all Baby Reindeer was about, though, it wouldn’t be a very interesting show.

What makes Baby Reindeer particularly interesting is that it examines, in mortifying detail, Donny’s complicity with his stalker (which, by implication, is Gadd’s own complicity). Pity explains the cup of tea, but it doesn’t explain why he would continue to indulge her on repeat visits; why he would give her his email; why he would agree to take her for coffee. But Martha gives Donny something. Through her obsessive eyes, he can appear to himself to be as funny and fascinating as he dreams of being. “I went along with it,” he says eventually, “to satisfy my own stupid need for attention.”

For Donny, and Gadd, this is compounded by the fact that he’s living in the aftermath of being groomed and raped by an older man; feeling worthless and questioning his accustomed straightness, the heterosexual adoration of his stalker is irresistible. But even this disclosure doesn’t turn Donny into a perfect victim. He was an aspiring comic and his rapist was someone senior in the industry. As harrowing as the abuse was, Donny kept going back “for a little peep at fame”.

There has been a lot of praise for Gadd’s bravery in admitting to being a victim of sexual violence as a man. There should be more, I think, for his bravery in admitting that he helped to create the conditions for his abuse. Not every victim will recognise themselves in this, but there’s an important truth to it. “Victim blaming” is taboo, but sometimes, the most important way to protect yourself from future harm is to take responsibility for the ways you put yourself in harm’s way.

The impulse behind the bar on victim blaming is a well-intentioned one. Victims, especially female victims of male violence, often find themselves put on trial for what was done to them: what were you wearing, why didn’t you leave? The implication is always this: what did you do to deserve this? When Donny first tries to report Martha to the police, the officer on duty asks him why he didn’t do anything earlier.

The twist is that the officer’s question is actually a good one. Donny downplayed the danger of Martha, partly because he was getting some gratification from her, partly because he was in desperate denial about his rape: how can you complain about some weird emails when you didn’t complain about being physically violated? It’s only when he recognises that he’s trapped in a terrible cycle of shame and attention that Donny begins to crawl his way out of it.

In the book The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker argues that most violent situations are recognisable before they turn violent. There will be a shiver of discomfort that you choose to ignore — maybe because acknowledging it would cause social awkwardness, maybe because there’s something else in the encounter that you want enough to overlook your qualms. The next time you feel that shiver, you listen to it: that’s what “the gift of fear” means.

Telling victims that there’s nothing they could have done is a false consolation, because it tells them that they have no power to avoid such situations in the future. The question isn’t: “What did you do to deserve this?” It is: “How can you protect yourself from this ever happening again?” I could have refused to change my social media behaviour on a point of principle, but I think I would have been very stupid to do so.

It’s worth pointing out that Gadd’s experience isn’t typical. Most stalkers are male. Most victims are female. This doesn’t make his stalking (or my own, much lesser one) any less distressing, but it probably does help to explain how he walked himself (and I walked myself) into that position. A woman doesn’t seem like a physical threat. Though the interest is asymmetrical, it can appear — at least initially — manageable when the source is female.

To the stalker, though, the relationship is real and reciprocal. Every response from the subject, whatever the content, however hostile, is treasured as confirmation. In Baby Reindeer, a throwaway comment Donny makes about curtains is elaborated by Martha into proof of his intense sexual desire for her. This is why the number one piece of advice anyone experiencing this kind of unwanted contact will receive is: say nothing. Don’t even tell your harasser to leave you alone — or, rather, do it once, unambiguously, and then record all further communications to forward to the police.

This is hard advice to take, because to the stalked, the stalker can become the dominant presence in their life. When Martha falls quiet, Donny is anxious. If he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, how can he know what to expect? But there’s more to it, of course. When he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, he’s overtaken with the fear that she’s not thinking about him. Martha is the proof that he matters. He masturbates over her. Eventually, he goads her.

I wasn’t that insane. But I did feel bereft, as well as relieved, when mine seemed to drop off the internet sometime in 2015. I had to make the painful admission to myself that I had got something from being her victim. It had made me feel frightened, cornered — and important. I still googled her sometimes.

Sometimes it struck me that I might be the only person left who cared what happened to her: the relationship she’d forced me into persisted after all. Over the past few years, she has been reported missing several times. In the posters, she looks haunted and ill. There’s no mention of her being found after the last time, which is the only reason I feel OK writing about this now.

Baby Reindeer’s stalker, though, is alive at the end of the show. Inevitably, internet detectives — fresh from cracking the case of the missing princess Kate — turned to identifying her. If they have correctly identified her, they have probably given her the most thrilling weeks of her life so far. For a stalker, being told to get lost can be interpreted as a coded message of interest. Imagine what being the subject of a limited Netflix series must feel like.

Part of me thinks Baby Reindeer should never have been made. Not to protect the real-life Martha from public interest, but to protect Gadd from the now-provoked real-life Martha. Maybe he isn’t, after all, completely over the weaknesses that dragged him into Martha’s orbit. It doesn’t seem incidental that, in the drama, Donny has his revelation about his complicity on-stage, during a standup set. It’s only with a roomful of people transfixed by him that he can separate himself from his need for Martha’s gaze.

This makes sense. Maybe it’s impossible for someone who’s truly recovered from attention addiction to honestly explain what attention addiction feels like. Maybe, if you recognise yourself in Donny’s story, it will save you some pain in the future. To use a worn-out term from the worst kind of criticism, Baby Reindeer is “problematic”. If you judge it by how well it serves Gadd’s own self-preservation, it might be indefensible. But it wouldn’t be worth watching if it were anything else.

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