When Baby Reindeer dropped on Netflix earlier this year viewers were left horrified by the details around Richard Gadd's ordeal.
The show sparked huge amounts of discourse around Gadd's experience and the 'real' identity of his stalker 'Martha', with the online buzz catapulting it into Netflix 'Top 10' lists in nearly 100 countries.
Now, US comedian Anna Akana has come forward and revealed that Gadd's experience inspired her to share her own 'more frightening' story.
34-year-old Akana is best known for her popular YouTube videos, she's also appeared in films and TV shows such as Ant-Man and NCIS: Los Angeles.
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Akana has now opened up about her terrifying stalking ordeal in her latest show It Gets Darker - which is coming to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival next month.
The show details how Akana felt forced to quit performing live shows due to threats to her safety in 2017, previously revealing on her Instagram that the man
had allegedly threatened to shoot her at a performance.
"But armed with a restraining order & years of therapy, I finally feel good about coming back," she added.
According to Akana, the stalking would later escalate to the point where the man was showing up at her home in 2020 and leaving her 'random things' such as 'totems' and 'bloody necklaces'.
"Finally I was able to collect enough of his rantings to get a restraining order," Akana explained in an interview with The Times, adding that the ordeal 'kind of ended' her career for a while.
However, there was several times where the comedian was more than aware of the acute threat to her personal safety.
"But there was a point when I thought, 'Is he going to break into my house? Is this how I die?'" she added.
"The police said they couldn’t really do anything until he showed up to a show and actively said he was going to hurt me."
Akana went on to explain that she thought Baby Reindeer was a 'fascinating' and 'amazing' show but claimed the differences in her and Gadd's experiences were down to gender.
"It's a very different portrayal, because to some extent Gadd's character [Donny] felt a sense of vindication from his stalker, which I did not," she explained, adding that she believes a woman being stalked often carries an 'implicit physical threat'.
"I loved Baby Reindeer, but I was never really worried that he was going to be in a situation that he couldn’t get out of physically," Akana added.
Topics: Baby Reindeer, YouTube
Brenna Cooper