Benjamin King, Netflix’s Senior Director of Public Policy in the U.K. and Ireland, discussed the show in specifics during a hearing with the Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee. “‘Baby Reindeer’ is an extraordinary story, and it is obviously a true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist, Richard Gadd, suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker,” King said. “We did take every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story in the making of the show while also striking a balance of veracity and authenticity of Richard’s story because we didn’t want to anonymize that or make it generic to the point where it was no longer his story because that would undermine the intent behind the show.” Unfortunately, that didn’t stop online sleuths from disrespecting the boundaries Gadd very explicitly laid out in the show by trying to uncover the identity of the woman who inspired “Martha.” It appears that the internet did, in fact, find her, with Great Britain’s resident feckless broadcasting ghoul, Piers Morgan, going so far as to interview the woman on live television.

Don’t get it twisted: the decision to profile this woman instead of help her is nothing more than the exploitation of a deeply unwell person and a ghastly abuse of broadcast power. One of the major themes Gadd included in “Baby Reindeer” was that Martha was just as much of a victim of the system as he was and that a lack of support for her very clear mental illness was a contributing factor to the harm she committed against him. And yet the general public and mainstream media’s response has been to put a spotlight on her for our sick entertainment. Media literacy is dead, and shame is buried right next to it.