“It’s a true story,” he said. “In a weird way, I first started feeling like this could be a good story during the whole ordeal itself. It was one of the most intense periods, when I was listening to these voicemails. I’d go to sleep at night and these voicemails – her words would bounce around my eyelids. I remember thinking, ‘God, if I was ever to speak about this onstage, I’d fire the words around. Put the voicemails in a big cacophony and fire it.’ That’s how the play was born.”

Neither the real Martha nor the real Darrien has been charged or convicted of any offence relating to the matters covered in Baby Reindeer though, which means they have both the right to the presumption of innocence, and the recourse to defamation proceedings if identified.

In the case of Martha, Gadd makes it very clear that he believes she lives with mental illness of some kind, and deserves both empathy and protection.

“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself,” he told GQ in a recent interview. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”

But he also admits he was aware from the beginning that there was a power imbalance between him as teller of the story and her as subject.

“I imagined picket lines outside the venue forcing me to shut down,” he said. “Telling me that what I was doing was wrong. That she didn’t have a voice. That I was the real perpetrator of harm and she the victim.”

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Gadd wasn’t alone in seeing that risk.

Reviewing the stage show upon its debut in Edinburgh in 2019, Tom Moyser wrote in theatre magazine Exeunt: “Most would probably agree that, as victim, Gadd has a right to tell his story. But what are the limits of this right? And what are the responsibilities of its execution?”

In its 2017 handbook book The De-Identification Decision-Making Framework, the CSIRO encourages people using personal information “to consider not only the data itself, but also the environment the data will be released into” when attempting to ensure it is de-identified.

“Sharing data with a wider audience – or indeed, completely openly – may necessitate significant alterations to the data itself, which may lower data utility considerably,” it adds.

If Gadd and Netflix are to be believed, sailing close to the facts has enhanced the “utility” of Baby Reindeer enormously. The raw truthfulness of the story, as Gadd puts not just his persecutors but also himself under the spotlight of interrogation, is remarkable.

It’s an approach that demands empathy for Martha as well as Donny. But increasingly, it seems, and despite Gadd’s best efforts, that commitment to the truth may also have provided just enough information for fans of the show to become stalkers themselves.

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.