Thread 20 : 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?

Thread 19: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5437058-thread-19-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 and ploppers 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 five months we have done amazingly well together for 19 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.

Up and coming:

• Salt Path: A Very British Scandal, Monday 15th December 9pm Sky Documentaries and NOW
• Sunday Papers Live, The Real Salt Path with Chloe Hadjimatheou, Sunday 7th December (see image below for tickets and further details)
• Observer Newsroom: The Real Salt Path Story, Thursday 8th January 2026 6.30-7.30pm. More information and to book via this link observer.co.uk/our-events/the-real-salt-path-story

The answer of course is all of them. The only good thing that might be said for SW here is that I very much doubt that TW was entirely innocent of what was going on and appears to have done very little to stop matters.

And I was so much looking forward to reading OWH!!!! Surely Penguin now need to do something?

Maybe the Smotyn share is a metaphor for continued flimsy attempts to pull the wool over the public's eyes.

All I can say is 'Gosh!' (I'm heavily influenced by the headless SA at the moment, and 'Gosh' is very much an utterance he is in line with).

Thank you so much @Aussiebornandbred! I am still struck speechless - I hope ALL this will be thoroughly gone over in the docu (which I won't be able to see but will be glued to this thread) and I really hope that Our Chloe will raise the issue of the CB Prize now that she has established that HNTDDD WAS written by SalRay.

I've seen too many authors cheated out of prizes and awards (not me, I've been lucky enough to win a few) for various reasons and this is the thing that really grates on me - that she took the prize winning kudos and the money to which she wasn't entitled.

They're not coming out of this covered in glory at all and I wonder if this will be the point they throw her under a charabanc?

I'm staggered by how much of the deduction on these threads was on point, eg the walk was done piecemeal and in a leisurely fashion.

I asked a friend of mine to record on Sky , but she's told me she doesn't have Sky documentaries.. sigh.. It says on Now that it's minimum 6 months subscription, so if I subscribe for one month, do I have to stay for 6 months, or can I unsubscribe after watching the documentary? I don't subscribe to anything so I've no idea how it works...

NOW do hide away a one month rolling contract for £9.99 (entertainment not films), if you cancel within the 30 days, you will only get charged once. If you sign up for the 6 months, you will be charged for 6 months whether you use it or not.

Thank you @Aussiebornandbred for sharing the article here. What revelations! I suspect the documentary and CH's podcast will give even more detail.

If anyone wishes to see the article with images, this link gets around the paywall.

https://www.smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fobserver.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fnational%2Farticle%2Fdont-look-for-the-money-ive-taken-it-all-raynor-winns-confession-that-she-stole-from-her-family

Sigh. Sal is going to deny it all, isn't she? Everything. She's going to do her usual 'go to' and blame absolutely everyone else for 'setting her up'. Family members she's never mentioned before will 'have a vendetta against us'.

Which rather begs the question - if the family had a real 'vendetta' against her and Tim, why would she not drag it up in all the sob stories in the books?

That has got to be the understatement of the millennium!!!!!!!!

Wow indeed. I didn't expect anything as bad as this. It raises the question, how do some people not only get away with things but they get carried through life. SalRay hasn't just got a brazen nerve to be in the public eye with her past, she has little or no conscience. Or else she just shuts out the terrible things she's done.

When I was a young accountant many years ago and found a fraud I was told by one of my bosses that our advice to clients was always to prosecute to the full extent. The perpetrator would always come up with a convincing story justifying their action, but the fraud we had found would probably not be the first they had committed and we had no idea of the suffering that past and future victims would suffer if we did not put a stop to matters.

Maybe someone could email "Jennifer" at the address now shown on SW's website, and share her answer (or lack of it, as the case may be).

The more I think about, the more perplexed I become. SURELY a family feud of the kind that would have them accusing Sal of theft of such a nature would have made it into her books? She could have laid it on really thick about how they couldn't find shelter with any family members due to the nature of the (heavily over described and, of course justified by her) rift between them?

Had this been true I can't see Sal not laying it on with several trowels about how hard done by and sidelined she and Tim had been all their married life and how extra hard it had been for them raising their family and working without any family support. I mean, she wouldn't have missed that opportunity - would she?

Only just finished reading my print copy of The Observer and see it was all on here from the other side of the world - what a commitment to the truth @Aussiebornandbred

If any one can buy the paper do though - this was a huge story because it increased the Observer sales and so they can then release Chloe for more investigation, etc.... (I have often just read the archive linked stories, myself).

You have all said what I picked up on and think it was great the article ended:
"I just wanted to make sure nobody else ..... thinks they can walk themselves better."

Remember their nephew's post on LinkedIn when the story originally broke saying they were both pathalogical liars who had left a trail of destruction in their wake?

I never imagined this level of destruction.

I won't name him, but he seems to be one of the relations who have spoken to Chloe for this follow up.

Both of them need to be prosecuted. Her for financial fraud and theft, and him for medical fraud.

How dare they be able to continue to sit on their millions living a comfortable life.

Yes, we were right about a lot of things: that they were never really homeless, that the SWCP walk was in fact a series of hiking holidays while they were housed, not the desperate remedy of people wildcamping because they had nowhere else to go, that ‘Polly’ was probably a relative, that work was available during the ‘Polly’ period but that they chose not to do any etc etc.

What strikes me most strongly is that TW’s family (other than his now deceased parents) are pretty clear on not having believed in his illness at the time, and that the parents didn’t want to prosecute after they discovered the theft because they didn’t ’think it was in his best interests’ because of his condition, even while they couldn’t pay their own rent and ended up living in SW and TW’s barn conversion.

Setting aside for a moment the horror of pretending to your own elderly parents that you are terminally ill, is it inferrable that SW and/or TW invented his illness in the first place precisely in order to stop family members they’d stolen from going to the police? That it wasn’t invented for the memoir, it was fabricated earlier for sound ‘not getting sent to jail’ reasons?

It does raise all kinds of questions about TW’s role in all this.

You could very well be onto something here regarding feigning terminal illness to avoid repurcussions. And it appears no terminal diagnosis has ever been given, only a very vague one relating to a condition that led one consultant to surmise, by ruling out all other options, that it could be atypical CBS in 2015, long after the thefts.

Well, she’d have had to invent a different reason for the feud for a start, I suppose. And if she did, even giving a fictional cover story for the falling-out (‘My family never liked Moth!’ ‘Moth’s family never thought I was good enough!’ ‘There was a family disagreement over an inheritance and we were never close again!’) might have been more likely to bring both families out of the woodwork far sooner to dispute the story, especially if they were being portrayed as hostile or actively evil when in fact they’d put SW and TW up for free for long periods.

Easier and safer to basically delete all of both families from TSP (apart from Moth’s brother whose house they stay in while he’s on holiday and later use as a postal address), depict themselves as alone in the world, eternal plucky victims of other people’s dishonesty, financial conniving and uncaring bureaucracy.

Wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of benefit fraud as well.

I think she could have been coy about it - not mentioned any definite reasons (thereby not giving family any reason to come out of the woodwork about it; after all, it would be true by the sounds of it, and Sal isn't averse to sweeping ACTUAL reasons under the carpet). But she could have leaned into family estrangement much more as reasons for their seeming to have no support from anyone at any time. We've all been wondering how, with Tim having parents close by and them having adult children who presumably live somewhere, they seemingly had no choice but to declare they were homeless and go for a walk. Why weren't family helping them out?

Now it seems that family either WERE helping them out, or were maintaining a healthy distance for very good reasons. I'm just a bit surprised that Sal didn't make more of the 'nobody would help us because they didn't like my choice of husband/had some unspecified cause for not inviting us to stay!'

After all, the threat of all of it coming out one day would have been hanging over her from day one in any case.

For me, my main comments have always been extreme scepticism about the walk - through picking up on inaccuracies and inauthenticity whenever I dipped into TSP.

When The Observer broke this story on 6th July a friend and I were feverishly emailing each other about how reassuring it is when your instincts are proven right.

I feel now that we have erred on the side of caution in our analyses on these threads. But I simply would never have thought of them taking such huge amounts of money from both sets of ageing parents. So I don't feel so evil for being such a jaded old cynic .....

Wiki editors will go into meltdown about this. Caution won out after the July revelations, sadly.

And not just TW feigning illness to stop family prosecuting. The article says one of the Walker nieces says that SW also ‘pretended to be mad’ when TW’s mother tried to confront her about the theft from her bank account — that she would pretend to hear voices and have hallucinations!

SW is also clearly suggesting in one of her letters to her sister that she had been in the grip of a form of uncontrollable compulsion when she embezzled from the Hemmingses, that it felt as if someone else was doing it. That she was suffering from a mental illness.

So there’s a bit of a pattern.

I guess it must be absolute, extreme denial. She has lied for so long and manipulated so many people that she believes her own narrative.

im also interested to know TW’s role in all this. It sounds as though SW used his health as a ‘get out of jail free’ card as others have suggested - basically using his state of health as some sort of veiled threat to family members so that they wouldn’t pursue her crimes against them. I wonder at what point he discovered her thefts, her manipulation?

SW is morally bankrupt.

All this and yet she never even attempted to seek help from professionals? Yet she's wheeling Tim to the doctors continually for them to admire how well he is 'recovering'...