The stalker from Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer harassed my family for five ... trends now

Something about the woman on her television screen made Laura Wray feel uneasy. The lawyer, and widow of a Labour MP, was relaxing at home, captivated by the opening minutes of the Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer, particularly by the character Martha who stalks a struggling comedian.

What was it about Martha that seemed so familiar? Maybe the raucous laugh that seemed to last just a bit too long, or the way she clutched her handbag to her side when timidly entering a pub. Whatever it was about this curly-haired Scot, she reminded Laura of someone from her past. The realisation came like an electric jolt, and Laura slumped back on her sofa, open-mouthed.

For she knew Martha only too well, or rather the real Martha, who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, upended Laura's happy life with a relentless five-year harassment campaign. It was so fierce at one stage that Laura was forced to issue staff at her Glasgow law firm with panic alarms.

In one scene from the drama Martha flips from exuberance to screaming rage in an instant. 'That put it beyond doubt – I've seen her do that,' says Laura.

Baby Reindeer, which has been watched by 13 million viewers in just two weeks, topping the Netflix charts in 30 countries, is based on the real-life experience of its creator, Richard Gadd, who plays a version of himself, an aspiring comic.

One day, Martha walks into the pub where he works and boasts of being a hotshot lawyer though, inexplicably, a broke one. Taking pity, he makes her a cup of tea. So begins the start of a terrifying obsession.

Soon she is emailing Gadd hundreds of times a day, turning up outside his house and harassing his family and friends.

Over a period of four-and-a-half years, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages.

The series also hints at Martha's previous history of stalking. Gadd's character Donny is seen googling her and finding a newspaper article – fictionalised for the show – with the headline: 'Sick stalker targets barrister's deaf child.'

Gadd has insisted the character of Martha was so well disguised in his script that the real-life person she was based on 'would not recognise herself'. But for Laura – the 'barrister' referred to in those fake headlines – the shocking recognition of the woman who had terrorised her family, including her severely disabled son Frankie, was almost instant.

Nor did it take long for internet sleuths to uncover the real Martha and target her with abuse online.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday yesterday, the woman – whose identity we have chosen not to disclose – claimed the Netflix show amounted to 'bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune' and that she had received 'death threats' from Gadd's supporters. The comedian, she said, was 'using Baby Reindeer to stalk me now'.

But while 'Martha' may be keen to paint herself as a victim, for Laura that is a tad ironic.

If anything, Laura's nightmare eclipsed that of Gadd. At one stage 'Martha' made a death threat against her husband, Jimmy Wray, then MP for Glasgow Baillieston.

But the final straw came in 2002 when the woman falsely accused the couple of assaulting Frankie, then nearly four years old, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. 'I know Martha by her real name, but my jaw dropped watching the series,' said Laura, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday for the first time about her ordeal

'It brought so many things back to me that I'd forgotten. She did the same to me, made my life a nightmare. He [Gadd] has got her spot-on. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. I felt sorry for her. Everybody she's come across and pestered the life out of has felt the same, it seems.'

The real 'Martha', now 58, is from a middle-class family who lived in a village near Stirling.

She was a law graduate and first came into Laura's orbit in October 1997, when Laura was persuaded to give her a two-week trial at her company. 'She told me a real hard-luck story about how she had no family support and how she got her law degree and was looking for a traineeship, but nobody would give her one,' says Laura.

'I had my reservations. She was terribly upfront, telling me all this very personal stuff. Before we even met, she sent me a postcard congratulating me on my engagement to Jimmy. But basically, I felt

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