Thread 13: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 12 Observer reports currently available online: The real Salt Path | The Observer

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to read at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently 12 interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for twelve very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Have the sales or thefts of fudge gone up recently?
Will Simon's head ever turn up?
Has the shed of doubt yet burst at the seams?
Will the old charabanc hold up as a tour bus for our hip new band The Drive-By Scolders?
And finally, how much salt can we possibly cram into a giant pinch?

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

Their selfie definitely puts them at Lands End on 15th September 2013.

https://ugc-assets.mumsnet.com/images/202508/large-TM9NAhL0yTiSZWU6ET4zM0PV0iKB374qLagcHClX.jpeg

It entirely depends on your contract. I can only really talk about mine (which, as I've said, I'm too bone idle to go and hunt for...) and I get an increased proportion of sales money for books that sell over a certain number. SW may have a similar clause. I mean, it's not a massive increase, maybe 5%? So if a book goes wild and sells over the trigger number, every copy over that will earn proportionally more.

But I've got a shit hot agent who negotiates my contracts, it's not an inevitable thing.

Yes, but it’s a different situation to Calendar Girls as there was no original work (novel, memoir or play) on which to base a screenplay. As it understand it, six of the key women of the original WI fundraisers sold the rights to their stories, then a screenplay was written about the idea, featuring characters sort of based on some of them. SW was the he sole originator of the IP for the film. Once she’d sold the rights, I don’t think any more money would come her way, though I suppose it would have boosted sales of the memoir. I always find film still covers terribly naff, but they do help sales.

Has anyone read Finding Hildasay by Christian Lewis?

All covered under the legal disclaimer, though. They could have just showed the PRH legal team some paperwork from the actual court case which would have shown a debt owed by the Walkers to two people, neither of whom was a high-flying childhood friend of Moth’s, which they couldn’t repay, hence the house repossession.

Nothing to link that to prior criminal activity, unless you did an awful lot of sleuthing. And the purpose of the legal read isn’t ’find out the murky truth’, it’s ‘ensure there’s nothing actionable in the book’.

The estimate is £9.5m to Raymoth I believe

The man who died in 2016 was not the claimant in the court case that lost them their house, so very different from Cooper as portrayed in the book (and I really don't like CH calling him Cooper in interviews) so his death does not change anything.

At least one of the claimants in the court case is definitely still alive because he talked to CH - but crucially he is very different from Cooper in that he wasn't a friend and never lent them money, and PRH must have looked into the case enough to be sure that there is no one similar enough to Cooper that he could have a case against them.

I think that’s a wild exaggeration, based on a misinterpretation of sales figures.

Yes I know. But RW has said they started "one Thursday afternoon in August", The book is a day out with the reality of the photo that shows them there on 15th Sept 2013, that's all. (My reply to @Catwith69lives was associated with this photo)

Yes but Cooper is based on the half-uncle who died. Unless PRH asked for the court documents, they wouldn't know there was a separate claimant and could have been satisifed with RW simply providing a death cert. Who knows how far they looked beyond taking RW's word for it.

They could have just showed the PRH legal team some paperwork from the actual court case which would have shown a debt owed by the Walkers to two people, neither of whom was a high-flying childhood friend of Moth’s, which they couldn’t repay, hence the house repossession.

Bu that is exactly my point: they would have shown PRH proof that the whole TSP court case narrative is a lie because what really happened was very different, so PRH knew that what they were publishing was a lie.

Unless I’m mistaken, this then proves they at least did some of the walk when they said they did. Or is the Land’s End selfie the only current solid evidence of that?

Possibly - that is what Business Insider reported taken from Nielsen Bookscan

Yes, it proves they were at Land's End on a date that fits with the book (potentially give or take a day). My suspicion is they at least did Minehead to Land's End, but beyond that, I'm not so sure (in terms of continuous walking).

ETA - equally, I wonder if they'd already walked some sections From Minehead earlier than 2013.

The Nielsen Bookscan figure is an estimated total sales revenue from TSP/TWS/LL. As Gouache says, that's been misinterpreted by Business Insider as all going to SW. As others have said, in reality SW would only get a relatively small cut.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat i’m in a mixture of awe, jealousy, and interest- would love to know what you have written and if I’ve read any; writing a book was a childhood dream of mine that I still think I might achieve one day (you know- when I have time!!). Congratulations on your writing career, that is wonderful.

The £9.5m could well be the gross earnings from the books. But, as we've been thrashing out, the author doesn't get the full takings, the publisher takes the majority, the agent takes their cut and then the tax man gets a go. It's why everyone who writes a best selling book isn't a multi millionare (if only that were the case!).

Yes, may be wrong on chronology. Someone did a brill, detailed deep dive on phone tech failures at key times & some things felt incongruous.

Or they were at Lands End on the 15th September 2015 because the selfie crops out the upper part of the year so the last digit could be a 3 or a 5…

Don't forget, the rather garbled account of the court case in TSP isn't miles away from the real-life court case. It turned on the question of whether the collapse of 'Cooper'/'Stan''s company meant SW & TW now owed his creditors money. I doubt it would have been hard to self-select and produce enough evidence to support that.

So even if sales crazy to take all into acc Ray ends up with about 2-3 million tops? Even if film does well & in instalments. Even with successful sales of Landlines & TWS?

Why would they be satisfied with the death cert of a man who was clearly not the man they accused of conning them out of their money and taking them to court?
If they did not even ask to see court documents to compare names, she could have just shown them the death cert of any random dude and they would have accepted that at face value, which does not sound like any lawyer I have ever met.

Their initial worry must have been that the man Raymoth had the financial dispute with that ended up in court could sue them for libel if SW had misrepresented the case.

And the only answer that SW could provide is that she did indeed misrepresent the facts but so severely that there is not even a Cooper that could come forward and claim to be libeled, because the whole court case was completely different than in the book.

Therefore they must have known she lied and published regardless.

I'd say it was 2013. Attached is a crop of a 2015 sign. I could be wrong. What do others think? Although what I would say is that maybe the photo has indeed been deliberately cropped because only part of Moth's face appears. Maybe SW has deliberately cropped the sign to make it look as though it might be 2013!

The Walkers are probably there in 2013. In your 2015 cropped pic you can see the 5 is almost a complete circle at the bottom and the Walkers photo shows a bigger gap.

unless she knows how to photoshop 🙃

That's what I thought originally but if you were going to do a selfie wouldn't you include Land's End in the photo and also the whole of Moth's face?