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

Well, I don’t disagree with you that it’s a devastating situation from which it would be difficult, or well-nigh impossible, to extricate oneself with a shred of dignity.

I also think it’s entirely possible that the Walkers regret their response to the Observer story and now wish they’d either talked to CH and did a form of mea culpa then, and semi-killed the story, or, at the very least, came back with a statement that didn’t essentially say ‘You’re all meanies and I stand by my truth!’ with a few clunky metaphors about salt and paths.

SW could have chosen instead to say ‘We lied and obfuscated, and the success of the book meant I panicked and felt I had to keep going along with it, I’m thoroughly ashamed of my theft from the Hemmingses, I’m sorry to readers who feel hoodwinked, or who were given false hope about CBD, and I’m going to make a big donation to PSPA to attempt to make some reparation. I’m very sorry.’

But, on the other hand, SW isn’t most of us.

Most of us, if we’d been caught with our hand in the till by our employer to the tune of £64k, would have been utterly crushed then, cooperated with the police etc.

Not done a runner from police questioning, persuaded a relative to lend us £100k to pay off and silence the person we’d injured, gone on living locally for five more years, and then, when the lending relative’s business went bust, fought a deliberately time-wasting rearguard action through the courts for years, claiming that they didn’t owe ‘James’s’ creditors the money.

And then, to crown it all, wrote a self-justifying ‘pseudo-memoir’ in which the Walkers cosplay homelessness and appear as blameless, plucky victims and adorable underdogs, despite knowing that many people knew the truth about the theft and house repossession. (Leaving aside entirely the issue of TW’s illness.)

And it doesn’t end there.

The success of TSP gets them the offer of the cider farm tenancy from a fan, and, despite the fact that they became rich and famous while living there as TSP and its sequels sold, they monetised their ‘back to the land stuff’ in books, the press and on tv, explicitly claiming to be rewilding cider makers, while in fact lying to their landlord about TW’s imminent demise (possibly to excuse why they’d not made any cider despite pretending to for Rick Stein) and did another midnight flit, breaking their tenancy without telling him.

When the Observer story is published, again, TW’s possible condition is used to deflect criticism, and SW delivers another furious farrago of self-justification.

These are the repeated actions of people with brass necks and a deepseated set of assumptions about their own Teflon status.

TL;DR: I’m not sure the Walkers respond to disapproval, or to disapproval being the natural consequences of their actions, like most people. The sequence is always to do something criminal or unethical or both, run away to wriggle out of consequences, then come back fighting, self-justifying and blaming other people.

I don’t think they’ll be biting down on a cyanide tooth apiece any time soon.

And they’ve got lots of advice and protection on tap — SW’s agent and all the resources of the PR and legal teams at PRH. And they’ve got lots have money. They can pay for therapists, legal advice, reputational damage limitation, the best possible physical and mental health care, just as they’ve been able to buy privacy.

Yes @Groundsel, good point, they actually had opportunities to at least minimise damage BEFORE the story broke, on the several occasions Chloe H contacted them for comment.

They seemed to think they could face it out and it has backfired. Again, noone's fault but theirs.

I was about to say that I agree with your four points concerning Moth’s health conditions but I just don’t know what’s been exaggerated or simply false.
I thought the same as you @Vroomfondleswaistcoat that Sally would be desperately trying to sue doctors or specialists and came to the same conclusion as @NaughtyNoodler .

Couldn't agree with you more.

I think what sticks in my craw, apart from all their misdemeanours and mendicancy is the sheer scale of their hypocrisy; the way in which Sal has had the gall to appear on countless TV programmes and literary festivals lapping up the public acclaim while getting up on her soap box and pontificating on a whole range of subjects such as homelessness, serious neurological conditions and the environment, all the while portraying herself as some kind of irreproachable moral authority on these subjects.

In the light of the Observer allegations which exposed her criminality, I found that level of hypocrisy impossible to accept.

You can see why, though. They’ve managed to wriggle out of trouble before, and discovered that the one bad consequence they couldn’t prevent, the loss of their home, was supremely monetisable in the end. SW’s self-justifying near-fictional account of their recent life was hugely appealing to the general public, and TW’s supposed terminal illness was the added ‘hook’ needed to spin their walk into bestseller gold, and to continue to get them out of awkward situations, whether that’s having failed to deliver on the terms of their cider farm tenancy or a bit of investigative journalism about SW’s criminal past.

Sorry mendacity rather than mendicity!

Is anyone else getting loads of ads for Now/Sky TV and Gillian Anderson as the face of L'Oreal?!

The first I can understand because the channels have been mentiojned re watching the docu, but I don't think GA has much recently! A case for Mulder and Scully (well, the whole Scam Path is really )

I imagine the Walkers have been given the right to reply to the Sky doc? I wonder if they will make a statement before it airs?

Pretty unlikely I would have thought. They can't know exactly what is going to be in the Sky documentary so they might risk shooting themselves in the foot if they confess to stuff that isn't in the Sky documentary before it airs! I suspect they will keep their powder dry and have a long discussion with their agent and possibly PRH rather than rushing out with a poorly thought out statement that could prove counter productive.

I would have thought they'd be well advised to gauge the public reaction to the documentary before deciding what strategy to pursue ( silence/full blown rebuttal/partial admission of fault/full blown mea culpa and profound expression of heart felt contrition) and refrain from any knee jerk reaction, however tempting that may be.

I was formerly shrinkwrappedinseattle but felt like a name change. HuffingandPuffing was not available!

Way back in the early stages of this saga, I’m pretty sure someone mentioned Yellowface - which is a good novel to read if you want to ponder how an author might come back from pathological lies being exposed/public shaming. I re-read it last month, holding SalRay in mind. But I don’t think she’s clever enough to carve a path out of this mess.

PS the downside to these threads is that I keep fancying a nice bit of fudge.

One imagines they’d been offered the opportunity to comment or participate.

Thing is, CH went straight to contacting them before she even started substantial work on her Observer story, as advised by her editor. They had loads of opportunities to engage, issue statements etc before a story that SW says is ‘grotesquely unfair and highly misleading’ was published, but chose not to.

All SW has said about it is that her lawyers had offered CH the opportunity to be ‘guided on the truth’ (😀🙄) on the grounds that this discussion would not be made public, and CH didn’t agree.

Basically she tried what she’d tried with the Hemmingses, and it didn’t work.

Dear @HoppityBun please don't let our responses put you off posting again. We must never stop being honest and sensitive - as you have shown you are. We have been thrashing out every detail we've uncovered, of this deceit, for 20 threads - as you have read.

Nobody saw all the aspects of the deception although SalRay told everyone early on, when TSP was published:

The more times we repeated the lie, the less we felt the grief. If we told ourselves the lie for long enough, would the loss fade away, until eventually we could face it without pain? Maybe I was doing that with Moth’s illness too, or did I genuinely believe the doctor had made a mistake? It was hard to tell.

"To be guided on the truth". Love it. Reminds me of that classic line in Father Ted: "the money was just resting in my account before I moved it on"

@HoppityBun Apart from the very damaging non-CBD claims and the embezzlement case, I also want to see Sal held to account for winning the CB prize (a significant amount of money and the ability to put 'Award Winning' on the cover of her books) when TSP was NOT her first published work. That, in my opinion, is where she can't get out by saying she was misled about diagnosis or 'mistakes were made'. She will have had to sign somewhere to say TSP was her first work, which she did, KNOWING IT WAS A LIE. I'd have to guess that she thought she stood no chance of winning and that it might just be nice to get a listing and nobody would find out, but then she won and it was an 'oh shit, well, nobody bought or read HNTDDD, so it will be fine.' But a lie.

I don't think Sal or PRH thought there was no chance of winning the CB prize. Far from it. TSP was launched on 22 March 2018 with massive marketing and PR resources deployed. Within 2 weeks ( 8 April 2018) it entered the Sunday Times best seller list. The CB prize wasn't launched until Sept 2018 and the shortlist wasn't published until sometime in 2019. By Sept 2018 I reckon that a number of people at PRH and elsewhere must have had a sense that TSP had a very good chance of winning the inaugural CB prize. Maybe they encouraged Sal to enter the competition because they realised it would be an excellent marketing tool if she won!

Could be. Either way, whichever way it happened, she signed to say TSP was her first book. Or maybe she didn't, maybe PRH just assumed it was (although she must, at some point, have said it was, there would be no reason that PRH would be expected to know about anything self published prior to them signing her, although she would have done well to have told them in the first place).

But it was still a lie. She KNEW the CB prize was for a first book and she KNEW that TSP was not her first book. Lying by omission, by just not owning up to her publishers, got her a significant amount of money and a raised profile that she did not deserve and was not eligible for.

And I know I am coming over as a cheated CB prize lister, I promise I am not! Just the owner of a headless Simon Armitage and not nearly enough fudge.

Was there a prox.acc for the 2019 CB prize and should it be awarded to that person (if it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt that Sal wrote HNTDDD and was thus not eligible for the CB Prize)?

Yes thanks, as usual, for giving the timeframe for this. I have considered that it would be advantageous for an inaugural book award to be given to an author who was already doing well in the charts. I did not know that it was already so clear the book was selling well.

I looked at the judges previously - a S African woman with impeccable credentials, a British-Asian actor and Mr Bland's own son - and do not suggest there is some conspiracy. It is just, as with many side issues arising from this controversy, I now realise how prestigious it is for a prize to have its name splashed over a best-selling book.

News of the documentary brings me back!

Does it really look as if Chloe has managed to source Walker's first book? I do hope so.

@Uricon2 Much love and gentle hugs 💐💐💐

Same. They are a classic tale of grift overreach IMO. If you look back at the sequence of events over years as has been pieced together, it follows a pattern: tale of woe, generosity from someone soft-hearted, stiff said person, get found out, run away. Rinse and repeat. And with the books, they've got a lot further than they ever had before, to the extent that SW felt it safe(ish) to give interviews, speak at festivals and writing classes, go on tour with Gigspanner, and appear as the face of a charity. That takes some front when you know it's built on a lie, but if you can sit at Christmas lunch with someone you're stealing from, you can front out a lot of things.

@HoppityBun I think they could have a comfortable life ahead of them, tbh, given the profits they've made from TSP etc. Their reputation is gone, and there won't be any more fond interviews, advice to book fans or TV/radio showcasing, which must sting, but they're not broke & homeless. They could keep their heads down, live well, and media interest would fade over time.

PS @BegazingBrandy yes, still snorting with laughter on trains and getting weird looks 😁

I've never heard Sal go on record and try and explain why TSP was such a phenomenal success, unless by implication it was all due to the book's brilliant plot and her consummate writing skills.

Apart from the colossal resources deployed by PRH to ensure that it was a success (AH cover design/all dancing and singing displays at the check outs in Waterstones/targeted marketing campaign from the onset including Saturday Live with the Rev Richard Coles etc) I think Sal also got very lucky.

TSP went to paperback in Feb 2019 gathering momentum before Covid hit a year later, boosting sales as the public desperately sought a good news story to guide them through the crisis. Up popped Capt Tom and The Salt Path to boost flagging spirits and provide hope during a dark time.

Maybe critical analysis was temporarily suspended as readers sought the feel good factor which TSP provided. Some have claimed (below) that it was due to the books message about homelessness which readers latched on to or that it was a love story for the ages. Maybe these factors played a part, but I think at the end of the day the ground swell of positive reviews from book club groups up and down the land helped drive sales momentum and ensure that some 4 years after first publication, TSP was ranked as one of the 100 best selling books of the last 50 years.

Not bad from an author whose first novel (probably) sold less than 50 copies!

To highlight: I noticed that our 'returners' are all mentioning the Sky documentary .. but some people are able to attend in person/or online the Chloe in-person events - and one is tomorrow:

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

(thanks to @DisappointedReader )

Thanks @BegazingBrandy (and hoping the hand is mending )

It's ramping up in a quiet way, I think.

Thanks as usual ... I should have the pins out this week. I am so sorry about your hair ... you even made that interesting about The French Revolution ... although we are grateful for recovering it is all these things that can lower our spirits. I was like a bear with a sore head when they pulled out some of my hair that was enmeshed in the stitches ,,, it was only a few strands ... you are clever and funny and I appreciate you.

Thank you so much @BegazingBrandy , that has really touched me more than I can say. I hope your pin removal is straightforward. We'll get there and like Steve Austin, come back better than we were.