My Baby Reindeer Story

a story about a stalker

I finished watching Richard Gadd’s miniseries Baby Reindeer on Netflix. Among other things, it tells the story of how he felt sorry for somebody one day, and they ended up stalking him for years. His story was disturbingly similar to mine.

I’ve been stalked by a person on the internet for about fifteen years. Like the woman in Gadd's story, this is clearly a person who is unwell. His own family had him arrested multiple times. Like Gadd in Baby Reindeer, I’m just one in a long list of people he’s stalked.

I got up this morning thinking I could write about fifteen hundred words comparing my experience to Gadd’s, put a lid on the whole thing, and be done with it. The little word counter in the corner of my screen started clicking off numbers: one thousand, two thousand, three, four, five, six. At seven thousand words, I decided I had to stop. I chopped off four-fifths of it, slapped on some stupid summation paragraph, and put it on Facebook. I may end up taking it down from there.

Seven thousand words, and I had just begun to scratch the surface. The whole story is easily twenty or thirty thousand words—an entire book. Gadd’s work made him a great deal of money. While my book wouldn’t do nearly as well, it would establish me as a “real writer,” and maybe people would take the next book more seriously. I’d like that, but at what cost?

There’s the rub. If I write a book that exposes somebody else’s true story about their inner and outer pain, would that exploit their misfortune? For a guy who already hates me, if I spread his story to the whole world, it will only make him feel worse. Whatever is the root of his psychosis, wouldn’t that make it worse? Everybody I know on the internet already ridicules him. I’m not unsympathetic to the torture he puts himself through, even though he does his best to put me through it as well.

I’d feel differently if he were an evil person. Even though he’s done evil things, to me and to several people I know, I think his behavior reflects some pain and brokenness inside him, and exploiting that might be wrong. I knew a woman who had a little sister in high school who was struggling with autism. When this woman told my stalker he couldn’t watch “Game of Thrones” with us because of his behavior problems, he found her sister on Facebook and started a months-long campaign of harassment against her. Anybody who will attack an already troubled teenager because her older sister wouldn’t invite them to a party is clearly broken in ways I can’t even imagine.

Writing Baby Reindeer, Gadd took steps to ensure nobody could identify his stalker. That lasted just a few weeks before the internet found her. Now, the stalker has five hundred stalkers of her own. She’s gone on Piers Morgan to defend herself, making it twenty times worse. While that might sound like poetic justice, this woman now has the modern equivalent of an army of villagers chasing her through the forest with torches and pitchforks like Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she may have done some terrible things, but, like the creature, she did them because she was poorly made, not because she was evil.

There’s a hundred books in me and a thousand stories—maybe more. I could write a book about this man’s tormented life and the ways he’s tormented others, but I don’t want to be known as that kind of writer. That smacks of revenge on my part. Knowing that, if my book was successful, people would find my stalker and begin tormenting him isn’t what I want to accomplish. That’s not telling a good story. That’s revenge.

Watch Baby Reindeer. If you want to know what it’s like to have a deranged stalker, that’s what it’s like. My version of the story is not that different, although Gadd did way more drugs than I ever have.

I’m probably not going to tell my own version of this story. I want to think that one day, my stalker might find peace. It’s been so long, though. Mental Illness doesn’t usually just go away. He’ll have to have help. I hope he gets it.