A federal courtroom has superior the important thing defamation declare in a lawsuit in opposition to Netflix over its portrayal of a lady depicted as a stalker in Richard Gadd‘s Child Reindeer , whereas dismissing different allegations. U.S.
District Decide R. Gary Klausner on Friday discovered that Netflix might’ve defamed Fiona Harvey, the inspiration behind Jessica Gunning’s Martha depicted as a twice-convicted stalker sentenced to 5 years in jail for sexual assault, by stating that the collection was “primarily based on a real story.” Netflix could have “insisted on including” the disclaimer regardless of Gadd’s considerations, the courtroom mentioned.
“This implies a reckless disregard of whether or not the statements within the collection have been false,” the order acknowledged. Child Reindeer follows Gadd’s Donny Dunn, a struggling comic who encounters Martha on the bar the place he works. Martha is then revealed to be a harmful, serial stalker.
Over the course of a number of years, she’s depicted as sending him greater than 41,000 emails, 744 tweets, 100 pages of letters and 350 hours of voicemails. In June, Harvey introduced a lawsuit in California federal courtroom in opposition to Netflix searching for at the least $170 million, together with the corporate’s earnings from the collection. Netflix moved to dismiss the lawsuit beneath California’s anti-SLAPP legislation, which permits for the early dismissal of lawsuits supposed to relax .