Thread 21 : To feel disappointed - and now disgusted too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 20 IS FULL

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?

Thread 20: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5454438-thread-20-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 5 months we have done amazingly well together for 20 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. Our Cardboard Mascot Our Simon has had his head stuck back on and is wearing a very fetching tinsel boa. The charabanc is bedecked with fairy lights and very well stocked up. May the seasonal fudge and mulled cider be with you one and all. 🎅🌲🎁❄️🎄

These threads are the gifts that keep on giving:
New:

• Salt Path: A Very British Scandal, available from Monday 15th December Sky Documentaries and NOW TV
• ‘Don’t look for the money. I’ve taken it all’: Salt Path author Raynor Winn’s ‘confession’ that she stole from her family | The Observer

Up and coming:

• 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
• Podcast series from The Observer's award-winning Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou
• BBC Documentary (NB Not involving Our Chloe)

*MNHQ correcting above 'Documentary' to 'Podcast' at request of author

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 20 IS FULL

Yes, and she repeats this over and over again in her interviews. It’s a scripted story. (The Fern Cotton interview for example makes it clear he has CBD and so do the others) She will always return to the beginning and retell the story, never deviating. I recall one interviewer travelled to Cornwall and was hoping to meet ‘Ray and Moth’ at Hay farm but ended up going to a garden centre for the interview and felt that she was just told exactly the same thing as everyone else and given no insight or original material.Listen to enough podcasts and read enough interviews and it becomes very clear that she never deviates.
My feeling is that TSP is a very cynical literary exercise. It has the perfect narrative hooks, emotional jeopardy, protagonists who are underdogs, the strength of a redemptive arc, and some zeitgeisty magic too as i feel
sure they had looked at what kind of books were selling. As a work of fiction it was too weak to sell but as a memoir it hit the sweet spot and a clever agent and editor knew it would sell. (I’m not blaming them by the way - they were doing their job and did it VERY well which has maybe been the Walkers’ undoing - although I still am staggered nobody wanted to check the miracle cure was genuine)

The earlier drafts of Lightly Salted Blackberries show how much the narrative of The Salt Path has been played with - as do the shifting timelines. The fact that there is an earlier novel which was used as a raffle prize ( which Sally acknowledges in her July statement) indicates that Sally (or perhaps Tim if that journalist mentioned earlier is right) has experience in crafting narratives for a purpose i.e. making money.

The bigger question now is when will Penguin disassociate from this pair? Will they accept that their editorial processes, which the CEO in his bookseller statement in July defended as being robust, were nothing of the kind?

I may be misremembering, but thought that there were interviews and articles reporting SW as saying that they were told that TW had two years to live, most of it in decline?

@IvyGoldenM The bigger question now is when will Penguin disassociate from this pair? Will they accept that their editorial processes, which the CEO in his bookseller statement in July defended as being robust, were nothing of the kind?

Thank you for your above post - I agree with the whole post which is put extremely well. This last paragraph is very pertinent and I would like to add this concerning SalRay's niece:

Anne says that she twice tried to get in touch with Winn’s publisher, Penguin, about the inaccuracies in the memoir but wasn’t taken seriously

Thank you @Peladon
If I were Police Chief Brody, I'd say "You're gonna need a bigger charabanc."

I am hoping that this thread will see the year out, but as that equates to roughly 1.77 posts per week, my grip on reality may be just as tenuous as the Walker-Wyn-Winns'!

Moth was given possibly only two years to live after his diagnosis; 12 years on, he is not ‘cured’, but nature keeps him strong.

We lost everything and became homeless in our 50s just as my husband was diagnosed with an incurable disease - now Gillian Anderson is playing me in Hollywood movie about how we survived | Daily Mail Online

Sal has denied everything thus far including the veracity of the ‘don’t look for the money, I have taken it all’ letter SO they’re just disgruntled relatives as far as PRH are concerned.

The charity dropped them almost instantly, however, why??

Oh...oh... I've got the Devil's Advocate feeling coming on again...ohh..... <swivels head, closes eyes, places hands on table...> It's coming through....

Perhaps she meant that if they sold the house themselves they might get a better amount than if the bank repossessed and sold it at auction? Because they would still be liable for the full amount of the mortgage they could be at a huge disadvantage if repossession took place and the bank sold the house cheaply, as opposed to THEM selling the house for nearer the value of the mortgage?

Ohhh... ohhhh.... I'm back, what did I say?

Thanks, @BemusingBrandy

Also this, from the interview which SW gave to Outdoor Swimmer (she bailed out of the swimming part of the interview, because of a medical reason):

"The Salt Path is a true life account of a couple in their 50s walking the entire South West coast path after a bad investment leaves them homeless. Raynor and Moth lose everything, their family home and business. At a complete loss, thinking things couldn’t get any worse, Moth is diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease and told he would die. “They gave him two years,” says Raynor. “And we were told most of this time he would be in decline.” "

If she'd stuck to the CBS-type symptoms diagnosis and gone with that, rather than overegging the pudding with bringing 'CBD, he's going to fade and die very soon!' into it, she might just have got away with it.

As everyone says, CBS is a syndrome, and it might be wholly possible that Tim was at the 'less severe' end of the syndrome. So she could have said that he had some symptoms of CBS, and walking helped him. That would have been fine (notwithstanding whether that was actually what the consultants had said). But it was her bringing out the CBD, reiterating that this was definitely what Tim had and that he didn't have long left - that was what had done the damage here.

ETA - that and all the other shit and lies she came up with.

@PrettyDamnCosmic @Mauvish1 @ any other medical charabancers… how easy would it be to fake a neurological condition- at least for more than a couple of years? Is it the case that if you don’t persist at the GP you may never get scans etc which might show actual changes/damage? Could they wangle a couple of letters and no further action, no discharge, or would this raise a flag or two?

(Thinking about my own experience of low back pain [I know, I know, but mine’s real, progressing, and inexplicable, and they won’t investigate further until I see a physio, and I’ve been waiting for them since August already…] I am quite sure that if I don’t go again to the GP or chase up the physios, nothing more will be said. So I could claim all sorts in a book.)

Yes, that's correct.

If you say owe £150k on a house that is being repossessed, the bank is only really interested in getting that £150k. So they might accept an offer on your £400k house for £200k. They'd take £150k (plus probably a bit extra for admin) leaving you around £50k less estate agent fees etc.

If you put it on the market, you might know your house is worth £400k, so you could put it on for £300k in the hope that it would get snapped up, you could pay £150k back to the bank and still have the £150k less expenses.

Our house we're currently living in was on the market for about 2 years at around £500k. We got it for about half that after repossession, paying slightly more than the asking price from the bank.
Ironically we'd looked round it about a year previously and asked if they'd take a cheeky offer as they'd been on for some time, and they refused.
We paid around £130k less than we offered - which was going to be a huge stretch for us, I'd add, and we might not have got the mortgage for that much, although I think we would have (just) but apparently others had offered more than we did and still been refused.

So if you can sell it yourself, even without the business of declaring yourself bankrupt, which has its own issues, then you may well be in a better situation financially.

Police Chief Brody, Matt Hooper and of course the unforgettable Quint (that soliliquy) would have been defeated by dealing with the SWCP 2 rather than a rampaging Great White possibly! I think Spielberg could make 'The Salt Path: The True Story' (sharks optional) (but fun)

Sorry, rewatched over Christmas and the documentary, amazing they did so much with so little. Robert Shaw is the spit of my late DDad, RIP. Although Dad was more Black Country and less drunk.

I can see the poster now! The SWCP2 up on a high peak looking down into the depths of the sea.... where we can see the merest hint of the shadow of a charabanc keeping pace as they walk...

And Salray swimming with dolphins (as if)

Dada..dadadadada...

That makes sense, as does @Vroomfondleswaistcoat ’s devil’s advocacy— I suppose my thought processes were being clouded by the fact that (as I understood it, though my head for figures is about as good as SW’s ability to write dialogue), the house was essentially double-mortgaged for far more than it was going to fetch in any sale, however optimistic…?

I think in the days of internet and potentially mostly phone/zoom doctors' appointments it probably is quite easy up to a point.

It can be hard to tell where deliberate deception starts and psychological influence ends though.

So one of my dc quite likes a bit of sympathy. She has self-diagnosed a few times on various things. It normally goes along the lines of she google-searches for a symptom and comes up with something extreme (because let's be fair, no one blogs "I had this ordinary symptom that leads in 99.9% of cases to nothing"; they're all "I'm in the 0.001% of people for whom this symptom meant something devastating).
Once she has found the condition she thinks she might have, she starts looking at the other symptoms, and she'll often "realise" that actually she has most of them - having not thought about them until that point.
She is not lying. She is not making it up. But her brain is panicking and producing the symptoms to order. Once I manage to prove to her (almost always) that she definitely doesn't have whatever it is often all the symptoms clear, including the initial one.

Think about it. If someone says to you that eg they smell gas, you probably start sniffing. There's that funny smell in the corner. Is that gas? I'm sure it smells like gas...

I once thought I had MS due to having odd pupil sizes. Not sure why I linked onto that, but I spent two weeks after I'd decided that, with constant pins and needles in my limbs, odd numb patches and feeling dizzy, which were all symptoms in the article I'd read that connected odd pupil sizes with MS. Eventually I went to the doctor who, bless him, ran a couple of tests, and told me he couldn't guarantee that I never would get MS but he was confident that I didn't currently have it. Days later, I was getting ready for bed and realised that I had had none of the extra symptoms since I'd walked out of the doctor's surgery.
I still have odd pupil sizes, especially first thing in the morning, but haven't had those symptoms in the now 30 years since. Power of the mind.

There was a funny book written in I think the 30s (Doctor about the House?) where he reads the medical dictionary and concludes he has everything in it except Housemaid's Knee, so the internet isn't all to blame.

And there are a number of conditions for which it is a case of connecting symptoms and ruling out anything else. So if someone wants to find something wrong, then they can use the internet to find the symptoms and tell the doctor they have those symptoms.
No doctor is going to say that they haven't got the symptoms that they say they have, although my GP did once disprove one of dd's by waving a chocolate bar in front of her and point out she couldn't have jumped that high with whatever (appendicitis, I think) she thought she had.

But, to me, the fact that these conditions are easily faked makes it doubly bad in my eyes to fake it. Because the people who genuinely have the conditions then end up being doubted by others, and people faking it makes people doubt so much more.

Thanks @MargaretThursday , yes I have some limited experience also of psychosomatic ailments (and of course, the reverse is true too, for example girls and women pushing through debilitating period pains because they’ve been told it’s “just” period pains and every other woman manages (😒)). But I wondered what sort of tests and investigations they would do back then for conditions like Parkinson’s and similar. Are there definitive tests? I suppose there must be for most things, is that why they settled on CBD? As it’s undiagnosable pre-mortem!

Having been in a neurological ward recently, I have noticed the Walkers play with memory. If you are asked a question then no one knows whether you are able to give the right answer - until you do. I picked up very quickly the sort of questions I would be asked - yes, if I had wanted to make out that I was worse than I was, I could have faked that.

The Walkers claim, simultaneously, that the doctor said that Tim was good to go on the three year degree course/was having such problems with his memory that she wrote TSP for his birthday.

I think the issue for them is a matter of weighing up negative publicity and potential loss of credibility versus the amount of money a bestseller and its bestselling sequels have brought in. It took the threat of a couple of different class action suits from litigious groups of readers and the huge negative publicity of Oprah pronouncing on it to make James Frey’s publishers act. And then only in the far more litigious environment of the US.

It was presumably worth it to them to offer refunds to unhappy US readers who were prepared to send in physical evidence they’d bought a copy of A Million Little Pieces (though apparently not many did) and settle out of court than to risk Oprah saying ‘You can’t trust these people — I’m not going to be buying any more memoirs published by them!’

The stakes are currently way lower for PRH. No one seems to be threatening legal action. They postponed OWH with a placeholder statement about the author’s distress and have said precisely nothing since. Presumably they’re waiting to see what else emerges. Stuff must be happening behind the scenes. Before too long they will have to decide whether OWH appears as scheduled next autumn, and if so in what form. And if they do, they’ll need an MS sooner than usual because they’re going to have to go through it with a finetooth comb.

It seems to me that they’re not obliged to do anything until/unless they cancel or publish OWH. That’s when they have to get off the fence.

I did wonder whether SW not including her agent and the PRH publicity person’s contact details in her second statement as she had in her first indicated that relations had become strained.

Salray floating on the sea on a yellow lilo.

Get out of the water!

Timmoth limps in to rescue his one true love, being careful not to splash his hair and checking to see if the film crew is getting his best side and brave but pained expression.

He manfully lifts Salray, still on the lilo, high above his head and roars.

But woe is them because, before they can depart the Cornwallian waves, they are savaged by a Great White the size of a double decker bus actually a friendly dolphin momentarily brushes against Timmoth, but poetic licence, innit?. Only Timmoth's head and Salray's writing hand remain, so at least his hair is saved and Salray can get another book out of it.

Penguin are interested.

The entire passenger group of a charabanc raise their eyebrows.

@FierceSilent I did wonder whether SW not including her agent and the PRH publicity person’s contact details in her second statement as she had in her first indicated that relations had become strained.
@DisappointedReader Penguin are interested.

I have just been browsing the Penguin site and they are busily flagging lots of books for 2026 - but yippee no mention of OWH:

The Best New Books Out in 2026

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

BTW, I recently learned that in France "Jaws" was called "Les Dents De La Mer". They decided against calling Jaws II "Les Dents De La Mer Deux" because that that sounded like something else.

These two very different institutions have strikingly different missions:

PSPA

• Providing information and support to enable families living with PSP & CBD to live their best possible lives

Penguin Random House, CEO:
I am a gambler and publishing is all about taking risks.

Not qualified, as a mere male, to comment on your first para nor am I medically qualified to comment on your second para, but I have read James Parkinson's life story - primarily in relation to his interest in the new science of geology. (He was amongst the founder members of the Geological Society.) But as an apothecary he was the first to list, accurately, the diagnostic symptoms of what he referred to as "the shaking sickness". It wasn't until approx. 50 yrs after his death that a French medic referred to this disease as "Le malady du Parkinson" and the name stuck.

As a non medic, one thing I am struggling to reconcile is the following:

• in July 2013, according to the narrative in TSP, Raymoth visit the Walton Centre in Liverpool for a "routine appointment" to see "the top dog in his field" and receive the devastating diagnosis that Moth has CBD

• in July 2025 Sal publishes in her rebuttal statement a letter (dated June 2015) from a neurologist (possibly Rhys Davies from Liverpool's Walton Centre) diagnosing Moth with a neurological condition that is indolent and atypical and displays symptoms that may be linked to CBS

• in May 2025 the same neurologist highlights that Moth's CBS case history is "unique" and jokingly refers to a film that Moth features in, having previously reviewed a book (TSP) about his condition which he reviewed in a medical journal (ACNR) clearly aware of the fact that he was the neurologist referred to in the novel and thus aware of the the fact that the diagnosis in TSP is clearly at odds with the one he gave in the letter dated June 2015 (tentative CBS). Yet in the book review he does not call this fact out nor be aware that his purported diagnosis of Moth with CBD in TSP has been one of the key emotional hooks that has gone on to see TSP sell over 2 mn copies!

Am I missing something here? The diagnosis of the neurologist in question (RD?) appears to have been grossly misrepresented. Why has he not called this out in his glowing book review? Why has this issue apparently not been called out in subsequent conversations with the patient (Moth) as evidenced in by the 2025 letter? How has Raynor Winn been allowed to get away with claiming that the original diagnosis ever gave a definitive diagnosis of CBD? Is the neurologist in question exceedingly naive or even qualified to have given the original diagnosis and, if not, what is the process to generate a second opinion, in view of the extraordinary claims, by an individual with an admittedly "unique case story" made about CBD in TSP?