*trigger warning: discussion of sexual violence and sexual trauma*

I first heard of Baby Reindeer, the latest mega-hit show from Netflix, on Facebook. Someone from my hometown posted a status about it— it wasn’t a favorable take on the show. The status questioned why the show was such a hit, and wondered at the ‘sickness’ of viewers who craved stories about violence, trauma, and general bad behavior. From there I Googled around, learning that Baby Reindeer was first a theatre production created by the star of the Netflix show Richard Gadd; the show was quite a hit in the UK, and was mostly a one-man show. Martha, the character pictured above with Gadd, was played in the theatre by a bar stool. In interviews Gadd hinted at the reason for the bar stool Martha: he really didn’t want people sleuthing to uncover Martha’s real identity. The point of telling this story was never about revealing identities or demonizing anyone. But it’s true that demonization is probably what is driving the high viewer numbers. It’s the spectacle of it all, but does that mean the content, the story, wasn’t worth writing about? Does that mean Gadd is monetizing his pain or is somehow ‘lesser than’ as a creator?

For those who haven’t watched or read about the show, let me summarize: Gadd, a failing comedian in London, met Martha (not her real name) at the bar he worked at. Martha claimed to be a high-status lawyer in British parliament; she also claimed she could not afford even a cup of tea at the bar. Gadd gave Martha tea on the house, and that simple act of kindness changed his life forever. Martha began quickly to visit the bar every shift Gadd worked; she got his email from his website and began sending him thousands of emails a day, all of them signed ‘sent from iPhone’ that she TYPED from her flip phone (ROFL). The spelling was atrocious, the content strange, but Gadd did not take action against Martha, mostly because it was clear that she was mentally unwell. Martha’s lies were obvious, her life a house of cards that could be blown away after one minute of questioning. Gadd viewed her presence as annoying but mostly harmless; then Martha began following him home, waiting outside of his house, faking a different identity to be let into a cooking class taking place in his home. At one point she even assaults Gadd on his walk home, reaching her hand down his pants as Gadd freezes. Eventually Gadd went to the police, six months after Martha’s stalking began, and his claims were laughed off. What danger did a mentally unwell woman pose a young man in the prime of his life? Gadd’s partner at the time, a trans woman named Terri in the show, was physically and verbally attacked by Martha at one point, Martha digging into Terri’s face with her nails and shouting trans hate until she was dragged away. Eventually Martha targets Gadd’s parents; it isn’t until a second visit to the police station that the authorities take Gadd’s claims seriously. A quick search of Martha’s name shows a more-than-concerning history of stalking at the hands of Martha; in one instance she stalked a bannister and his deaf child so severely they had to move out of London.

There’s another aspect of the show inside of the Martha storyline: Gadd, when he first moved to London, was the victim of a violent rape at the hands of a successful British showrunner/producer. There’s a darkness inside of Gadd that the first three episodes of Baby Reindeer hint at. The show uses Gadd’s voice as a narrator throughout, and his vulnerable tenor swirls his shame into each scene. Martha asks Gadd almost instantly after meeting him: what happened that has hurt you so badly? Gadd is shocked that Martha can recognize this wounded part of him, and that human connection maybe allows Gadd to overlook some of the more concerning aspects of Martha’s behavior. Episode 4 of Baby Reindeer explains fully what happened to Gadd. It’s a story we’re sadly all-too-familiar with, a Me Too story where a wealthy man grooms a young up-and-coming struggling artist. He takes his time prodding Gadd with A+ drugs and light assaults (Gadd comes to multiple times with the man sucking him off or otherwise assaulting him) before ultimately drugging and raping Gadd. The instance is hard to watch but for me what comes next is even more difficult to see and reckon with: Gadd keeps returning to the perpetrator or engages in other sexual relationships that might result in violence. After he is victimized, brutally, he puts himself in positions where he may be victimized again.

And, an even darker truth that Gadd can’t make sense of: the rape opened him up sexually, permitted him, in a way, to explore his sexual interest in men and trans women. Gadd explains that he spent years shaming himself for this; it’s why in the show we see him unable to truly embrace his love for Terri. How is it possible that something good could have come from the worst night of Gadd’s life?

In 2021 I published an essay called Bloody Mary. I started writing pieces of the essay in undergrad, where a beloved writing mentor told me I was permitted one essay to write about bad men. This mentor, I should mention, was also a man, and looking back I do disagree with this advice, but I also understand what he was saying: he wanted me to investigate all of the other parts of my identity the way I investigated my relationships with men. But his words have stuck like resin in the corners of my writing brain. Indeed I haven’t written about the ex-boyfriend I wrote about in Bloody Mary since that essay was published.

And that’s fucking stupid because honestly? I have a lot more to say about that relationship. I have a lot more to say about being witness to a man repeatedly concussing himself via punches to the face; about being chased by him wielding a kitchen knife; about him dunking a signed copy of my favorite book into a rain puddle while staring at me with hate.

I have been so afraid to be labelled a victim in my writing. Always when I come to the page I say ‘today we will not write about the bad things mostly men have done to me.’ When those things come up I push them away. I so desperately want my writing to be worthy of… something?… that I am censoring myself to achieve that worthiness. Our culture hates ‘victim narratives’ and constantly questions people who ‘victimize’ themselves. I dare not write too much more about Taylor Swift but I know you’ve heard those complaints: she only writes about guys and breakups, she’s always the victim. First of all the woman has 495675496754976 songs in her discography, I assure you they are not all about men. Second of all, what if she was a victim? What if she was hurt? Is there some kind of measurement of trauma and pain where if the pain is high enough on the trauma scale the victim can write about it? Some kind of threshold where the artist and the art can be taken seriously if it crosses?

But that doesn’t shake out either. Gadd’s trauma, for example, is one of the worst a human being can suffer and still people take to Facebook to complain about him. Gadd’s storytelling is smart; he spends quite a lot of time in self reflection, agonizing over why he didn’t push the police, why he went back to his abuser, why why why. The pacing and narration reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of media ever: I May Destroy You, written by and starring Michaela Coel.

I May Destroy You is a limited series that deals with the aftermath of a date rape situation Michaela herself suffered. Like me, Michaela works to deny the presence of that specific trauma in her waking life and in her writing life. She grinds herself to the bone trying to write about other things and hates herself for not being able to. Her attempt at repressing the pain of the attack leads her to risky and bad behaviors: binge drinking, picking fights with friends, going on dates with obviously dangerous dudes. It’s similar to how Gadd treats his life after being raped.

On Reddit people decry I May Destroy You for being about ‘her messy behavior’ rather than a ‘good plot.’ If I read between the lines I can hear what they’re saying. Logically it doesn’t make sense for a hurt person to continue hurting themselves; we want a clean narrative, one that shows pain and then a direct resolution to that pain. We want an evolution of our characters— a black and white cocoon to a butterfly arc. I’ll get my Scorcese on here and blame Marvel and other shitty movies/shows/media for this (including Colleen Hoover sorry).

Increasingly it seems to me that you have to be a perfect victim in order for the general zeitgeist to accept your work about your trauma. The abuser is a monster and therefore labeled as such but you, you are a human, and you must evolve properly. You must relitigate what happened perfectly or your art is a lie; you must gift the abuser uber-anonymity or your art is a hit job; you must contain your pain to ONE book/essay/show/whatever or your art is just one victim narrative after another.

In the aftermath of Baby Reindeer madness, viewers scoped out who they thought Martha might be. It wasn’t very difficult since the woman in question had a very specific way of spelling/misspelling and typing; viewers found what they thought was her Twitter. Gadd posted multiple times on his own Instagram asking viewers not to do this— the show isn’t really about Martha, after all. And then the real Martha outed herself on PIERS FUCKING MORGAN of all things! I loathe to admit this but I did watch most of the interview and find it hilarious actually (yes this woman is clearly unwell but at some point my empathy runs dry for abusers) that the thing Fiona (her real name) really hates most of all is that the actor playing her in the show is not Scottish enough. I have to laugh. Here’s *the face of an idiot realizing Gadd was correct about this woman lmao

Here’s the thing: this is what abusers do. They deny, deny, deny absolutely every claim you make. They gaslight you into believing what happened didn’t actually happen the way you believe it did.

A few years ago I watched a friend go through a defamation legal case because she told her friends she was raped at the hands of a guy she was dating who happened to be a rising Hollywood star. The rapist was so aggressive in his denial of the rape that he had the gall to serve his victim papers at her place of employment. And don’t think that wasn’t intentional— abusers want to discredit victims in places where they have power (work, friendships, online communities) because it plays on the power the abuser has already stripped from the victim. That friend went through months of hell after already suffering a year of PTSD post rape, all because the abuser couldn’t admit to his own abuse. She won that case, BTW. But you’ll still see him on the big screen. Loser.

Also a few years ago I noticed on Instagram that someone I sometimes interacted with via meme-sharing was following the man who raped me in 2015. I knew my meme friend was in the city he had moved to after we parted ways and I feared she might fall victim to the guy’s charms the way I did. I chose to talk to the woman, woman-to-woman, and disclosed what happened. I told her I doubt he’d call the event rape or even assault; after all, we were in a situationship at the time, sex an obvious part of our relationship. He was drunk and probably thought I was too (I am never that drunk). But underneath all of that there’s the truth: I said no multiple times and he did not listen. As it happened I held my earring, used the back of it to press into my open palm; I was so afraid I’d dissolve into what was happening as a protective measure to remove the pain. But I didn’t want that to happen. I knew I had to remember the pain of it, the betrayal.

This was happening. This happened.

I sat outside of his house after. It was winter in Kent Ohio and I didn’t have a jacket. My friends picked me up and I couldn’t distill what had just happened to me into words. I couldn’t for years. Didn’t use the word rape for three years. The next morning he texted me angry that I’d left him, yelling at me for not turning his heater on before I left. I woke up naked and so cold, he said. I am confident that he would call me a liar and probably has. I am confident he does not see himself as a rapist.

But he is what he did.

When you’re an artist and you are raped what feels the worst is that the rapist seems to still have power over you. They still have space in your subconscious, no matter how much you deny them the space. I have dreams, at age 32, that are not one-to-one recreations of that night in Kent; rather the dreams take place in safe spaces, avenues for me to process what happened. I’m not being raped in the dream but I am being confronted with the feelings the rape gave me: embarrassment, shame, self-hatred, fear. I wake up sweaty still and sometimes I hate myself for that. I can and have spent days blaming myself for what happened and the dreams because of what happened. I run through my list of grievances I have with myself for how I handled that situation: I didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t even confront him, I eventually slept with him again, I still remained desperate for him to like me. Maybe it’s safer to blame yourself, to run through reasons of why you maybe ‘deserve it’ because what’s the alternative? The alternative is: This happened, It Fucking Hurt, What Do I Do Now?

Here’s the truth: between the years of 2015-2017 a lot of bad shit happened to me. The above-mentioned rape happened; I was roofied in my hometown bar by my brother’s childhood friend and then was not believed; I became friends with an alcoholic and was forced into a car with her as she drove drunk across a Jacksonville freeway; I was cyber-stalked by an anonymous commenter to the point I was afraid of being alone in my apartment; I was love-bombed and left heartbroken by a guy; I met and fell in love with Hans and then he left me for Los Angeles. Some of these traumas are bigger than others. And even admitting that all of that happened/was happening fucked me up. I didn’t want these things to happen; in fact, even as they were happening I was denying them. Not only would I refuse to look at these events, I refused to write about them. I used to believe I needed to hide all this bad shit that happened to me because giving it room on the page means giving the villain who traumatized you power. I don’t believe that anymore. In fact I think repression has given the act more power than confronting it on the page ever has.

You can run yourself ragged with self blame: why was I there? Why did I trust someone so untrustworthy? Why did I suffer in silence? Why did I think I could let loose, get too drunk or too high? . A writer I admire recently wrote a substack that included a paragraph about the Baby Reindeer phenomenon and even she called into question why Richard Gadd would make this show at the risk to himself after everything Martha put him through. That line of thinking is so, so toxic because you’re asking the victim to be flexible; it’s allegedly ‘for their own safety’ but who does it actually protect? The abuser.

And even more blame: why am I writing about this? Do I have anything to write about aside from these traumas? Those thoughts have kept me awake more nights than I want to admit.

I’ve done enough contortions for the shitty people who have hurt me. I haven’t written a word about being stalked and the surely lifetime-long work I’ll have to do to recover from that. Maybe I’d feel more ‘protected’ if I went private on socials, if I stopped writing personal nonfiction; in other words, if I changed fundamentally who I am.

Right now I’m working on a new series of essays I’m calling The Victim Narratives. It was born out of some of these feelings and realizations I’ve been having, both in therapy and in my writing practice. I wanted to write about why I’ve had such resistance come up toward these subjects and whether or not I actually believe that ‘victim narratives’ are bad. I’m allowing myself the space on the page to write in depth about each of these events, and I’m gifting myself a structure that I can write into. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish these essays; right now I don’t want to. Not because I’m afraid of what people will think, which indeed I have been before (I’ve been so scared of people not believing me, of people wondering why I attract so much badness), but because they feel good existing right now in my Google Drive.

It feels good to be in the creative space with these. I’m not writing about the (mostly) men and the bad things they did to me; instead, I’m writing about my own survival. The creation process has liberated me, enabled me to reclaim what happened, and maybe most importantly of all, allowed me to clearly and without a doubt say: This fucking happened and this fucking sucked.

Baby Reindeer and I May Destroy You are stories about the imperfect and ongoing process of human survival. That’s what I write toward as well: imperfect survival.

Writing about these subjects has not only freed me from that fear, but from the subjects themselves, and from the bondage of believing I might be alone in them. What I have also observed is that avoiding a secret subject can be its own kind of bondage -- Melissa Febos