To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The real Salt Path: how the couple behind a bestseller le...

I read Raynor Winn's book The Salt Path and her other two books. I was looking forward to seeing the film at some point and to reading her next book. I felt sorry to read about the challenges the couple had faced, especially with regard to losing their family home and with Moth's health. Now, having read the article in today's Observer, I feel a bit stunned and am not sure what to think.

I hated the film. The loss of the farm sounded deeply implausible and the characters were very irritating. It was an enormous waste of Gillian Armstrong and Jason Isaacs.

I'm not surprised Angela Harding wants to distance herself from this.

This book is on my reading list, can someone summarise what they’ve done please

I went to see the film and thought it was ok but felt like there was alot of gaps in the story the main being the financial challenges that started it all. So I decided to read the book, which gave some, but not alot more, on the financials. There was alot more detail on the journey and characters they met along the way which was lacking in the film. But with this new Observer revelation I can look back at much of what happened in the story and wonder how much was actually true and what might need to be taken with a 'pinch of salt' (path)!
The fact that the whole journey and therefore the ensuing 'Salt Path' brand/franchise actually stemmed from a person hiding behind a false identity stealing a very large amount of cash from a trusting employer does ultimately completely undermine this human story of love and resilience to one of deceit and dishonesty.

There's proof people bought the book!

Lied to make money following originally committing a criminal offence.

HTH.

Embezzled a former employer out of £64,000 to start.

Yes — I thought Gillian Anderson’s performance was a bit all over the place in the film — like she couldn’t quite work out whether to play Winn as a bit daft and useless, or as steely and manipulative. Maybe she picked up on some kind of tension there? If I met a famous actress who was meant to be playing me in a film I’d be gushy and a bit starstruck, not “guarded”! It does sound rather odd when you think about it.

Well, I agree that the legal case at the start of the book felt very handwavy, but it’s not implausible to think that this’sguardedness and vagueness was the deliberate result of an editor and a publisher’s legal team concerned about potential defamation lawsuits.

I actually quite liked The Salt Path when it came out because it didn’t do the obvious thing of making the author sound at all likeable — she sounded bitter, self-righteous, and pointed the finger of blame at everyone else, which fascinated me (which actually makes a lot more sense given the revelations, as presumably she also justified her own theft), plus I did think throughout that ‘Hmm, I’d be interested to hear the various ‘friends’’ stories’, and I googled variations on ‘Raynor Winn legal case’ quite a bit at the time, and definitely thought ‘Odd’ when there was nothing at all online.

I’m more interested than outraged, though. I’m interested in people whose public self-presentation doesn’t match other accounts. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels (with significant input from her daughter) chose what to omit from the real-life experiences they’re based on.

The fact that the whole journey and therefore the ensuing 'Salt Path' brand/franchise actually stemmed from a person hiding behind a false identity stealing a very large amount of cash from a trusting employer does ultimately completely undermine this human story of love and resilience to one of deceit and dishonesty.

I think this sums it up perfectly

The property even appeared on escape to the country!

OMG!!!

I like how the website claimed they searched the countryside for the perfect property for the prize draw.

I guess that sounded better than "we are up to our necks in debt after years of criminality"

😂😂😂

I read this morning on X (if my memory is correct) that the relevant episode of Escape to the Country is Series 12 Episode 1 but it hasn’t been shown on tv since 2012 and isn’t on iPlayer. I did see the possibility of it being available to stream in Australia but I am in UK so didn’t check that out.

To any Daily Mail, Mirror or other journalists - I am doing as much research for you as I can here. Please publish an article on this grifter.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017j3mk

Lied about how they lost their home
In the book they make a rather hard to believe case they were victims. In reality she stole over £60k from an employer and got into debt trying to pay it back

Lied about being homeless
They actually owned a property in France

Lied about his "terminal" illness" and how walking is a miracle cure
Multiple neurologists have said the story doesn't stack up and that the condition he claimed to have isn't reversible and would have killed him by now

I've never got round to reading this book, though I've been aware of the massive publicity it has received since publication.

What I find astonishing is that Penguin didn't do any basic fact checking on a book they were marketing as a "true story". Penguin Random House is a huge multi-billion company which is itself part of an even bigger corporation. Are they seriously unable to gather a few researchers together to check the facts underpinning a non-fiction book? When one lone journalist seems to have done that checking quite effectively?

If you sell something as 'true' or 'non-fiction' then - surprise surprise - the readers or viewers are going to assume it is just that: fundamentally true. If the basic story is made up, or seriously distorted, then it's a novel, a work of imagination.

But there would have been no defamation in setting out the facts of a court case - that's a matter of public record

Boasting you knew about this and so did everyone isn't the clever statement whoever this is thinks it is.

Look more closely at the website. The image of the white farmhouse (apparently their former home according to the observer) is only used on that page - if you look at the prize draw page a photo of another cottage is used.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120703185216/www.ganganipublishing.co.uk/pages/gangani-publishing-free-prize-draw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20120703185216/www.ganganipublishing.co.uk/pages/gangani-publishing-free-prize-draw

They specify which episode it appears in. The episode is available on YouTube and tbh none of the houses looked to match either of the photos exactly - also only one was in Wales.

The About Us page is interesting...photo when it loads

If she has the guts there is a mea culpa book , restitution to those she had wronged and a 6 part Netflix series in it. My life was in turmoil and spiralling , I did bad things and hurt people and felt trapped in a gilded cage of my own making that grew like topsy. Get the first heaving with tears breakdown interview out of the way first and we have a new franchise.

Every cloud has a silver lining and all that ....

I really enjoyed the books and didn't really have any idea it could be made up. I thought it was quite plausible a business deal went sour and they lost their investment.

I just assume that something would have come out sooner if it were lies, why didn't the lady in the article say something then? That's a bit wierd. Not that I disbelieve her just I would be eaten up by outrage if that were me.
I also find it hard to believe someone in the medical teams they must have seen wouldn't comment even anonymously if that was BS.
I don't think there's any coming back from it though if the whole premise was struggling against awful circumstances if it turns out that's her own fault.

I wonder who Tim Scott is meant to be? Is that another alias of Moth Winn/Tim Walker? And I wonder why Raynor Winn/Sally Walker isn’t listed on there?

I read the book not long after it came out, thinking 'Ooh I walked much of that route in my 20s, it took a few summers to do most of it, and was jolly difficult going at times when you had to take all your gear and a tent too'

Firstly, aside from the loss of the farm seeming far fetched (would the judge really rule the evidence as inadmissible if it made them homeless?) I was sceptical about Moth's illness and walking that far because I, as a then fit 24 year old person, struggled some days. Secondly it was poorly written and thirdly I didn't recognise much of the route - I was expecting to be saying things like 'oh gosh the day we did that bit was AWFUL with horizontal rain blowing in from the sea and the path went up and down hill 24 times before we hit civilisation again' - it wasn't recognisable to the extent I wondered did they ACTUALLY walk it all or just stop in a few places (free elderly person's bus pass perhaps )and hike along the path for a couple of km?

Maybeeee. But first, won’t she have to untangle all the lies and establish what she lied about and what she told the truth about? That’s going to be painful, and might also result in a court case (criminal and/or civil) to actually determine the basic stuff, like whether they did the walk and whether Moth Winn/Tim Walker is actually ill or has ever been ill with CBD.

Haven't read the book, haven't seen the film, but I did see Ray Winn interviewed on television a couple of times while promoting the film and, while I didn't think she'd made it all up, it did leave me with questions. The details of how they lost the house were just strange and vague; why were their adult children not offering their seriously ill father at least a sofa to sleep on?; why wasn't the husband being interviewed too?; how was the husband managing to live such an active life with his particular diagnosis?; why was she being so vague and cagey about their current living circumstances?

I know that famous people titivate their memoirs all the time but you'd think that a book that is commissioned purely on the basis of being a tue-life story would have some verification and due diligence behind it. It's refreshing to see some actual investigative journalism for a change.

Bet Gillian Anderson is fuming.

newspapers that specialise in investigative journalism have a team of shit-hot lawyers. They will have gone over this exhaustively with a microscope, and then gone over it again. It's watertight, or the Observer wouldn't have risked running with it.
If it had been presented as fiction it would never have got a publisher. There was a spate of misery memoirs at that time and it fitted the niche.
I hated it. There was something 'off' and inauthentic about it and my bullshit monitors were flashing radiation level.

I just read the Observer article and was shocked to read that 'Moth' has supposedly had CBD for 18 years. I don't think anyone survives that long with it. I was only commenting to someone the other day that he must be getting properly compromised by now. I'm actually walking the coast path at present (no, not inspired by the book) and so many people mention the Salt Path to us. I read it a few years ago, I thought she was a good writer although yes, vague about the loss of the house, but I know people local to where they lived after they walked (described in their next book) and how the orchard was so run down... It apparently wasn't at all run down, they misrepresented what had happened there, but it seems the misrepresentations are legion.
How disappointing.

Well I quite enjoyed the book. A lot of people did as it sold 2m copies. I'm disappointed to read the background now. You'd have thought they would have kept their heads down.