Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd Says Don’t ‘Speculate’ on Who Inspired Story

Richard Gadd wants fans of Baby Reindeer — a series he wrote and created about his real-life experiences with grooming, sexual assault and harassment — to stop trying to identify the real-life people who inspired the show.

In a since-expired Instagram Stories post from Monday, April 22, Gadd — who also plays series lead Donny Dunn, a fictionalized version of himself — politely asked fans not to “speculate” about who his past abusers were.

“Hi Everyone, People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation,” he wrote, per TODAY.com. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”

Gadd, 34, concluded his message, writing, “Lots of love, Richard x X.”

In response to Gadd’s post, writer, director and actor Foley reshared a screenshot of the statement on X (formerly Twitter). He also spoke out about receiving defamatory messages, though he did not directly mention the Netflix limited series.

“Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me,” he tweeted on April 23.

PEOPLE has reached out to Gadd and Foley for comment.

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Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Gadd’s autobiographical one-man show of the same name, The fourth episode, specifically, explored Gadd’s Donny being groomed and sexually assaulted by a TV comedy writer named Darrien, played by Tom Goodman-Hill.

The show largely explored Donny being stalked and harassed by a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning). Gadd’s real-life stalker sent him more than dozens of emails, voicemails, social media messages and letters over three years.

“It’s all emotionally 100 percent true, if that makes sense. It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met,” Gadd recently told Variety. “But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean, there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television.”

“And obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult,” he continued. “So you have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”

Gadd also noted that “for artistic reasons, a lot of stalking is quite boring at times” and “in television, especially a thriller, you need to move certain timelines around, you need to move certain points to the end of episodes to make them pay off a little better.”

“As well as a true story, you have to make it visually interesting,” he added. “Just in percentages, I wouldn’t be able to [tell you], but it’s a very true story — it comes from an emotional truth, and I think that’s what people are resonating with most of all.”

Baby Reindeer is available to stream on Netflix.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.