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

The Daily Mail added another article arising from the documentary. We know most of it already but, for those of us who haven't seen it, there is a welcome contribution from a Pwllheli co-worker - something I had hoped for as it shows Sally's MO:

Tonight's programme also hears from a former employee who worked alongside Winn.
The unnamed woman says: 'The one occasion I can remember was when the accountants phoned and they wanted to speak to Martin about the new engine on his van.
'And then Sally saw the message and she said, "Oh I know what that's about. I'll deal with that".
She adds that the 'new engine' was in fact 'just a made-up invoice'.

@YourWinter maybe Tim’s parents lent them a deposit? I think my mum’s parents lent her and my dad the deposit for their first house. It would have been a proportionally smaller amount back then, of course. For the mortgage, Moth must have been working as a plasterer at some point in order to acquire the status (or even some vague claim to the status) of Master Plasterer, and presumably Sally had an office type job (or was Burton where she was working as a law clerk?).

I'm intrigued now that they apparently bought a house before they were married. That raises questions. How long did they own it before they got married? Was ownership in joint names? Was any mortgage in joint names? It would have been unusual then to have a joint purchase without being married. Mortgage companies were much more searching in their enquiries back then about the affordability of payments. And there are legal implications on who the property would pass to on death.

Was the house only in the name of one of them? If so, which? As a PP pointed out, proof of reliable earnings and a deposit of several thousand pounds would be needed.

Perhaps they took a very laissez-faire attitude to all this but any solicitors involved in the purchase (and back then it would have been a high street solicitor, not a high volume conveyancing warehouse) would have asked them questions about how they wanted the legal side of things set up.

So it could have been another holidaying couple they'd met in the pub/pulled in from the builder's merchants to be witnesses.

The deposit could have been much smaller. I bought my first house in S Yorkshire in 1984, with a 5% deposit which was the princely sum of £800.

So, photo def back home with family in all the finery.

I got married both times out of " home" area. You have to give proper notice and have the right documents with you (the source of much stress first time as it was the opposite side of the country) First time was to combine it with a holiday and second to accommodate a 90+ year old family member who really wanted to be there (we wanted her to be as well)

I can believe that they did get married on Skye and had a party when home, it was less common then I think but now lots of people who eg get married on a beach in Tierra del Fuego do something for the people who couldn't get there. I very much doubt that any of it involved Salray climbing down a ladder into the arms of cream suited Timoth.

I'm convinced he has NPD, and what he saw in her was narcissistic 'supply' that he could bend to his will. How that all developed is what interests me: was everything masterminded by him and carried out by her? She never looks at ease when on camera, her body language resembles someone who's trying to sneak contraband through customs. Does she also have a personality disorder and they feed off each other? One of the relatives ('Anne'?) mentioned their 'symbiotic' relationship. Fascinating ... but sadly, we'll almost certainly never know.

It cracked me up that Warren fed Chloe H a giant lasagne (which looked considerably bigger than Chloe). I realised after a few seconds that I was thinking of the lasagne in the same way I was thinking about TW’s cream suit in photos— that they were rare instances of a tiny detail in the Walker Saga that was actually corroborated by third-party or photographic evidence.😀

Which does also make one think of all the photos that could have illustrated TSP that clearly don’t exist because they were of things that never happened — SW all buff among the shearers after six weeks of fleece-wrangling, the Walkers hunched miserably in a semi-converted meatpacking shed, or hanging out with ‘gaunt, bald’ Grant while the blonde PA gives TW a massage.

Fair point! I'm probably being influenced by my experiences of Southern property prices!

Googling suggests a Midlands terraced house in the mid 80s would cost somewhere around £20-25k. So a 5% deposit on a wreck at the lower end of that scale would be a grand. Still a substantial sum for the times though.

Fascinating. The One Show is interesting in that context. She with her ‘let me take you back to the start’ forced narrative looks very uncomfortable. Moth appears, Svengali like, beamed from on high.,,Jason Isaacs ‘OH you could have warned me HE was appearing’. ‘Oh my goodness’ ‘Speechless’. He is God & has cast a spell. The most extraordinary soul ever met, Father Christmas, unusually ‘good’.

I imagine the hotel was unusually profitably good hunting ground for an opportunistic thief. Was she Oliver Twist to his Fagin & did he grow sicker & more angry when not enough high quality pocket watches & metaphorical handkerchiefs produced?

Agreed, having known a few men like this. The common denominator is that the men are always glowing pictures of health, while the women seem small, pale and a bit wizened. They are parasitically feeding off the women's energy, but the women allow it by their worship of their 'perfect' man, which I guess is the symbiosis referred to.

I don't find him at all attractive, to me he's very ordinary looking underneath all the peacockery. But there's no confidence like the man who's full of himself. And they always, always choose a woman who thinks she doesn't deserve him and works to keep him happy. And if she's not insecure enough, he'll find ways to make her so.

Yes, Pink, that's pretty much my theory. I was married to a (diagnosed) narcissist so I've become adept in noticing the signs (even though I didn't at the time and it all ended in tears. Mine). Timothy sets all my alarm bells ringing.

But bear in mind that we only have a pathological liar’s account of what her mother was like. SW presents her as stern, old-fashioned, repressive, disappointed in her for not marrying a farmer, unaccepting of TW — but against that we have the family member in the documentary saying that in fact her mother ‘put [SW] on a pedestal’, which suggests a very different relationship. Also she and SW’s father both look happy and rather proud in the photos.

I’m not suggesting that’s evidence of anything in particular, other than that we know SW habitually rewrote relationships in order to artificially depict herself as the underdog of other people’s unfair treatment.

And of course there’s the enormously unpleasant fact that she stole a large sum of money from her mother, to the point where she was struggling to afford food and heating. Which is clearly much easier to do if you convince yourself that the victim of your theft has been unjust towards you, therefore you owe them nothing. (See also the big queue of people with annoying children buying fripperies that ‘legitimates’ SW’s fudge theft, or that it’s ok thst they didn’t pay for the campsite because the manager was a jobsworth hippy.)

I didn't quite understand that part - being unfamiliar with invoicing and fraud, honest! If Sal was making fake invoices to essentially mask the fact of taking money from the company coffers and paying herself, then why would anyone be phoning up to query an invoice for a new engine? Unless the fake invoice was accidentally sent out and the garage had no idea why Hemmings was invoicing them?

ETA - i think i confused myself needlessly as i hadn't realised it was the accountants querying it. Doh.

Totally, They’re often swanning about & unusually flirtatious IME. Unfaithful too, if they can get away with it, but there’s seemingly no evidence here?

Moth appears, Svengali like, beamed from on high.,,Jason Isaacs ‘OH you could have warned me HE was appearing’. ‘Oh my goodness’ ‘Speechless’. He is God & has cast a spell. The most extraordinary soul ever met, Father Christmas, unusually ‘good’.

Jason Isaacs must be feeling like a prize idiot now.

At least Gillian Anderson seemed to be a bit more clued up about Sally, and dare I say, not quite as taken in.

The ones I've known didn't have affairs AFAIK, but were flirty or 'just friendly' enough with other women to keep their wives nervous. I suppose they wouldn't want to jeopardise their easy supply. But yes no evidence of affairs with Tim.

If I was writing this whole saga as a fiction I'd have TSP and follow ups as Sal's 'cry for help', written desperately hoping that people would see through the mistakes and lies, put things together and rescue her from the controlling monster that is Tim, who has, Fagin-like, had her stealing and lying for him.

I don't, for one minute, think this is the case, by the way.

Someone upthread was commenting on how depressing it is that people are still defending the author’s right to present fiction as non fiction.

Just for balance, I’ve been monitoring comment threads in newspapers and social media. There seems to have been a very definite shift since the Sky doc aired and I’d say that the large majority of comments are expressing anger at the deception. People are focusing particularly on the danger of misrepresenting illness and suggesting that CBD can be cured, the various embezzlements and thefts, the effect of the couple’s actions on family and local people, and the importance of the distinction between fiction and non fiction books.
Defenders of RayMoth are shot being shot down pretty quickly.

Defenders divide roughly into these groups:

“It’s just a story, everyone knows that books are mostly made up.”

“I loved the book and don’t care if it’s true or not” (see also “who cares so long as it’s well written?”)

“The journalist has an agenda and is inventing stuff”

”This is just a witch hunt”

But the tide has turned I think.

But in her shoes, doing a possible future mea culpa interview in order to keep publishing books, after discovering TW once too often with his trousers down, it might be worth considering as an avenue worth exploring.

‘I wrote this flagrantly untrue nonsense — I didn’t even try to make it sound credible. To my horror, my agent and my editing team didn’t see it for the cry for help it was! Everyone praised it! They didn’t see the pain and confusion in every line! They didn’t see that Moth’s illness was a metaphor for his control of me! That the massage and the trio of beauties in Grant’s house were symbolic of Moth’s chronic infidelity! I’m sooo relieved to mow be able to tell you the truth in my new book. Etc etc’

Afternoon all.

About the Skye wedding:

@RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays · Today 11:05
CocteauTwin was the one who saw it. As its not public knowledge we may get scolded but if it could be confirmed that they are names currently on our radar, that would be interesting.
@CocteauTwin · Today 11:23
They are not names on our radar. Addresses were in Bromley and Croydon, so not local to the couple.
@SomethingAboutKittens @RockyPath @Mauvish1

No scolding because nobody has done anything wrong - yet! - but just a word of caution please not to post names of the Skye wedding witnesses on the threads. Although the Skye marriage certificate is a public document, from what CocteauTwin has very helpfully told us the witnesses are not people currently in the public domain.

Thanks all.

<Hmm, sits counting diminishing piles of pennies and considers crowdfunding for the charabanc diesel and the fudge and cider supplies...>

Plus, for all we know, they were random tourists pulled in off the street as witnesses, or other people getting married the same day and they acted as witnesses for one another.

My walk to work in one job took me past a popular register office in a lovely Victorian Town Hall, and I lost count of the number of times I was asked by a frantic bride or groom to be a witness.

ETA I mean, they may have zero connection to the Walkers.

She is most definitely the peahen to his peacock - but there is a massive potential for financial security hiding under her wing. She was probably already an able pilferer by the time they met.

Plus, the fact that Sal and Tim got married on Skye is one of the least contentious things in this whole sorry affair! We know they were there and they did it. It's the aftermath we're querying.