Thread 19: 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 ...

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

Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5422393-thread-18-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 are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer exposé items before posting.
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. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. Please do not engage with drive-by scolders 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. Over four months we have done amazingly well together for 18 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.

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

"I'll fight anyone who says I'll make it to Christmas 2021!"

Having been involved a little with forensic accounting it is very much the pattern with fraudsters that they start with something small and once they get away with it their sense of self entitlement allows them to think they can go for bigger and bigger deceptions. I'm sure the Walkers feeling they had got away with stealing from the Hemmings, and who knows possibly others before them (Isn’t taking on a bigger mortgage without the income to support repayments a form of theft) felt no problem with the dishonesty of the books.

Exactly. Yes. I believe there will be evidence that the deceit and manipulations of people started quite a way back in their past. They’re obviously very good at it. Lying in the written form is one thing, but to be able to boldly lie into a trusting person’s face without any of the usual tell tale giveaway signs, is quite another.

There are all the questions surrounding the large theft in the first place: why, what was it for etc but it was not lent to her. (If anyone can remember the source where she states that Martin lent her the money, I’d be very grateful!) In her rebuttal she does not say that it was lent, but takes no personal responsibility for its disappearance. In this rebuttal there are no admissions of passing cheques forged with his signature. The very tone of the following paragraph is completely dismissive. We are supposed to gloss over this because the only thing that matters is contained within the next part of her statement. The loss of their “home of over twenty years, lovingly restored with our own hands, was gone.” The reader is directed to focus on their suffering, not anybody else’s! The fact that Martin Hemmings lost faith and trust in people and died from very real ill health, not fabricated or exaggerated ill health, means nothing to these people.

I worked for Martin Hemmings in the years before the economic crash of 2008. For me it was a pressured time. It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.
Mr Hemmings made an allegation against me to the police, accusing me of taking money from the company. I was questioned, I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions. I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties; Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was. A part of that settlement was that I would pay money to Mr Hemmings on a ‘non-admissions basis’. This is why we needed the money back from Cooper that we invested and I come on to that next.

Does she really “deeply regret” anything? I don’t think so. How could she? She’s continued to lie henceforth. Now in hiding because it’s over.

Mr Hemmings made an allegation against me to the police, accusing me of taking money from the company. I was questioned, I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions. I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties; Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was. A part of that settlement was that I would pay money to Mr Hemmings on a ‘non-admissions basis’.

All of this is designed to make it sound as though she wasn't guilty. But we know she did steal the money and is using weasel-words to avoid having to say 'yes, I did wrong, I stole money'. It's all about how she was never charged or tried or pled guilty, there was no absolute proof and she only paid him back on a 'non admissions basis'. But if there was no admission of guilt, then why was she paying him back at all?

I mean, I guess what she's hinting at was that 'mistakes' within the business were being pinned on her and she couldn't prove it wasn't her fault. So she paid up to prevent a court case.

But if she genuinely wasn't guilty and it really was just mistakes made in the course of business - wouldn't a court case have been in her interests? She could have told the truth and, even though there might not have been 'proof', it ought to have been circumstantially possible to show that the £64,000 pound losses weren't down to her stealing the money.... Production of her own bank statements to show it have never entered any of her accounts, for example?

There are two theories about TSP success. A total fluke that took her by surprise (based on all the reasons other than it being a work of good literature) that was written quickly and on the spur of the moment or my suspicion that she had been researching the genre, learning about the readership based on reviews of other books and calculating how to write a very emotive true-life story for a number of years beforehand. The language and imagery she uses throughout gives the opposite impression to the truth. The truth is always there but very well hidden. A version of the truth.

Absolutely. Her actions are those of a guilty party, no question about it. It is highly implausible that a bookkeeper could just not notice “mistakes” of those sorts of losses! If you spot discrepancies you look through the bank statements, you take them to your employer and point it out. Why on earth would any innocent person go to such extremes to pay back a huge amount of money that they hadn’t stolen… and then to do so on one condition.. sign this and shut up. Yeah, right.

This is why I can't understand why she harps on about it in her 'refutation' (which is nothing of the kind). I mean surely she could have come up with a better excuse than this?

It's like the threadbare story of how they came to lose the house in the first place - lashings of 'handwavium' to make it look as though it wasn't their fault, that can be seen through so easily.

She would have done far far better to just admit to what really happened (after all, she was never prosecuted so has no criminal record because she 'did the right thing' and paid the money back) and go from there rather than spin increasingly tall tales.

Yes one of the reasons I was sceptical about Raynor Winn, from what I had heard without reading any of it, was that I have seen this self-entitlement 'pattern'. I know someone who continues to build on their fictitious backstory.

I have watched them online and this involves advice from their neurologist and again all the audience are held to ransom because who would question a brain injury?

I have Sir Alan Bates on the brain as he is in the news today, having settled with the Post Office over the Horizon scandal. SalRay almost obfuscates as if she were speaking as a victim of Horizon.
Not that I think she’s smart enough to do that, but “mistakes were being made in the business” and “didn’t have the evidence to support that” could be said (truthfully) by a Horizon Postmaster.

You’ve put it perfectly, “held to ransom”, that’s exactly what’s happened here. It’s being used to shut down all discussion.

I barely caught the charabanc! (I was FishwivesSalute on the last thread.)

I think part of the difficulty must be that at least some of the theft from the Hemmingses seems to have happened in cash (which is possibly difficult for us to get our heads around now -- that so much cash was actually involved in a smalltown family estate agents firm, when now many of us live largely cash-free lives).

CH quotes Ros Hemmings as saying that the first thing that alerted Martin to SW's wrongdoing was that she had failed to deposit a 'large sum of cash' in the bank. It was only this that made them find the missing £9k, which SW repaid under duress, showing up sobbing at their house with a cheque, claiming to have sold her mothers things to find they money. Only then did they go through all the books and find the fake invoices etc.

if it hadn't been for her theft of the cash, it might have gone on far longer. Maybe indefinitely.

I assume by SW saying in her statement that 'mistakes were being made in the business', she means that it was a rather casually-run family business, not something slick and streamlined where no sums could have gone missing without immediate detection, that the books may have been quite casually kept.

But rather than this being, as it clearly was, a perfect opportunity for a book-keeper to steal significant sums of money for years, for SW in her statement, it's a way of implying that the business was so chaotic that anyone could have stolen or mislaid the money, and fingered her.

The way that she links the period she worked for Martin Hemmings to the 'period before the 2008 economic crash' is also intended to mislead, I think to suggest that any economic difficulties in his business were down to the crash, not her embezzlement.

Her refutation in general is incredibly misleading in terms of the facts CH uncovered. I always note that SW stresses she was never charged, but never acknowledges that she was arrested, or that, after a day of questioning, she was sent home for the night, to return to the police station in the morning, presumably because they didn't think she was a flight risk. Only she was. She vanished. Not the behaviour of an innocent person.

The settling with Martin Hemmings because she 'did not have evidence to support what happened' makes about as much legal sense as the original Cooper fiction.

It is why we should be straightforward about these lies. She constantly tries to get most 'reasonable' people on her side. From memory, look at what she says in the statement about the driving licence and the post redirection - come on you out there you know you love me and mistakes are made, aren't they?

So pleased you leaped aboard the charabanc!
Yes, everything you’ve outlined here, I was coming back to say myself! The large cash deposits that never found their way into the bank account, yet she was responsible and everyone knew it. Her tears and the declaration of having had to sell her mother’s wedding dress is typical Sal. It’s got to be something with an emotional attachment to it that can be used to twist the victim. The Hemmings are the victims and there’s Sal on the doorstep trying to make them feel bad for their reasonable request that she pay them back by turning the emotional thumbscrews again with reference to her mother’s belongings that she has been forced to part with. A wedding dress no less. A symbol of love and purity and herself as the daughter denied this last connection to her mother. That’s before they even discover the rest of the missing money. When I first read her rebuttal I knew that she must be blaming outside interferences for these “mistakes made in the business” as though she’s talking about the stock market or some faulty software as well as your depiction of a chaotic workplace with no structure or efficiency. The “economic crash” is absolutely intended to give the impression that everything that happened was as much a surprise to her as it was the Hemmings’. It makes it sound as though she was out of her depth professionally when in fact she knew exactly what she was doing. Yes, it is important that buyers of her books do not forget that she actually skipped off instead of returning to the police station.

I can only assume that the large cash deposits were the fees they’d accumulated from sales where some people wanted to pay cash for houses and the solicitors paid cash to the estate agents from those sales.

A symbol of love and purity and herself as the daughter denied this last connection to her mother.
I wonder why she had her mother's possessions to hand? Her mother was living in a cottage in Dunstall at that time so maybe there was a lack of space there and they moved stuff across to Wales? And how much would a 'powder blue costume' from the fifties make in a quick sale? (Although in The Times article (July 12), it does just say 'having sold some of her mother's belongings'). Wonder if her mother knew?

Though I'm quite liking the image of SW climbing in her mother's window in the small hours, dressed like the Milk Tray man, and absconding with a powder blue costume, a set of botanical prints, and a lot of Lladro figurines to flog on eBay. 😀

Wailing to Ros Hemmings that she'd had to sell her mother's wedding dress to repay the money she'd stolen from them is a brilliant touch of self-righteous fantasy, from very much the same stable of Eternal Underdog as 'People eating cream teas were mean to us when we said we were homeless' and 'Imagine, a campsite manager tried to make us pay when we'd stayed overnight on his campsite!'

I mean, she sounds as if she's actually expecting Ros Hemmings to be all 'There, there' and 'Oh, it's fine, you don't need to repay us'!

I think we're supposed to imagine SW crying hysterically in some high-end vintage wedding dress shop as a hard-faced manager rips a handsewn gown, passed down through the generations, out of her hand, and tosses her a paltry sum in exchange.

A bit like it being far worse that they lost the house they'd 'lovingly restored, stone by stone, with our own hands' than any of the rest of us losing our mass-produced brick-semis in which the most we've ever done is give the hall a lick of paint.

ETA I imagine that there's absolutely no truth to her selling her mother's wedding dress to repay the £9k to the Hemmingses. She just thought that pretending she'd divested herself of a beloved item of sentimental value would make her look penitent and self-lacerating.

I was wondering the same thing. When I heard the story that daughter had sold off mother's sentimental possessions for money to pay Mr Hemmings, I was assuming that daughter had inherited those possessions and was entitled to sell them. If mum was still alive, I wonder what she thought. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is any truth to the story.

Excellent point @RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays . Was she custodian of her mother's things or had they been given to her?

The wedding-dress-that-wasn't is such manipulative nonsense. As was pointed out on an earlier thread unless it was something like vintage Dior (it wasn't) it would have little to no financial value. What did she do with it? Take it to a vintage store and probably get £20 for it at best or Ebay (ditto)? She'd have had to move a fair amount of stuff to come up with the 9K she tearfully offered the Hemmings.

I posit that however she came up with the 9K, it won't have been from the sale of lots of very inexpensive things, unless there was a big delay between being confronted and offering it and there was nothing to suggest there was, so- was there either stuff of real value (in which case, why couldn't it be sold instead of robbing her employers) or there was cash salted away (sorry) or that they could access (in which case, why couldn't they use that instead of etc, etc)

Yet more incredible murkiness, isn't it? As my late DH was fond of saying "They must think we came up the Thames on a barge yesterday"

ETA crossed with @HumoursofBandon who put similar sentiments much better!

It all must have been so draining for the Hemmings. She then disappears and this time Tim Walker turns up on their doorstep crying. Wasn't this where Sal had taken out 4 credit cards in his name?

I wonder if these could be the source of the 9K? One would think if you were supplementing your income from your employers takings you might be in financial straights where your credit rating might preclude taking out multiple credit cards, but with Raymoth, who knows?

Tim went to Cooper's place in London to try and borrow money to keep Sal out of the clink. She then turned up a few days later with the 4 credit cards she had taken out in his name. Cooper then said, I won't see any of my family go to prison, so here's a £100k loan secured on your house with an 18% IR payable on demand. He may have been family but he was still a hard nosed businessman it seems!

It's especially interesting because her Mum didn't get married in a dress, the newspaper articles describe it as a costume and the bridesmaid wore a grey two-piece suit.

I wonder why she never even seems to have pretended to borrow the money to pay for decent representation in court? If the loss of the amount that the Hemings were coming up short of was actually something to do with 'business errors' (and I'm sorry, but I can't see it on anything like the scale of the PO/Horizon scandal, but I bet that Sal would have leaned into that if she could have done), then borrowing a large amount of money to get the best possible defence would have made more sense than borrowing it just to pay back the amount lost.

@RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays : very good spot!

All such excellent points. The reality of the “wedding dress” makes it even worse than I imagined on all scores.
I love the comparison between the two types of people/two types of houses @HumoursofBandon . The recurring theme throughout all of her books is that they are somewhat special and of course the underdogs of society. That image is very carefully crafted. Their misery must trump your misery. However they don’t start on equal footing because they lost their house because of their crimes. They must be very thick skinned to think that their readership can sympathise. The fact that they demand their readership to overlook the reality is sickening. Naturally though, we’ve seen that they do have their sympathisers.

Agreed that she wouldn’t have raised anywhere near £9k for a vintage wedding outfit. I can imagine how Mrs. Hemmings must have felt when being confronted with this.