They say that life is stranger than fiction. I suppose in the case of Baby Reindeer, it’s a bit hard to tell the two apart.

The Netflix show has taken the world by storm, thrusting its creator Richard Gadd into the spotlight and dominating Netflix’s Top 10 chart for weeks. It’s sparked a lot of conversation—some of it healthy, some of it not so muc

h.

On the one hand, as I noted in my review of Baby Reindeer, the limited series is a heartbreakingly raw examination of trauma and abuse. It’s also just an incredibly well-written—if stress-inducing—series, with some extraordinary performances from Gadd (playing a version of himself named Donny), Nava Mau as his girlfriend Teri, Tom Goodman-Hill as Darrien, a writer who Donny meets and is abused by, and especially Jessica Gunning as Martha, the middle-aged woman who ends up stalking Donny, though the show is smart enough to show us how it’s never quite so simple as a one-way street.

On the other hand, a lot of the online conversation has been speculation and amateur sleuthing around the real-life identities of Martha and Darrien. The latter remains a mystery, but it didn’t take long to trace Martha to her real-life counterpart, Fiona Harvey, a Scottish lawyer who has threatened to sue Netflix and Gadd over her depiction in Baby Reindeer.