Thread 26 : To feel disappointed - and disgusted and vindicated now 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 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so.

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. The Observer's excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) covers most things.
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, 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. For over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 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.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

The original Lino cut print too, no doubt, not a copy. More brass-neckery. She thinks she’s entitled to have the originals. What a horrible person to have worked with. What an inflated sense of self.

Bollywood puts the boot in!

The Real-World Controversy Behind The Salt Path Everyone Missed — And Why It Completely Recontextualizes the Film [2026]

Thanks for this. It is quite a strange read - LLM generated perhaps - but sums up the facts a lot better than some of the reviewers here, that may be why? Like this:

Medical advocacy groups fiercely condemned the story for peddling false hope to real-world terminal patients who cannot simply walk away from cellular death.

Interesting! Where did you see that?

Not sure if this article about author contract warranties was ever shared:

The Salt Path and author contract 'warranties'

I think this mostly just reiterates what we know. SW could be reasonably sure no one would have the grounds to sue for libel, because ‘Cooper’ is imaginary and real people like Anne/‘Polly’ are disguised to the extent that they can’t claim to be recognisable, or the misrepresentation isn’t damaging (‘Grant’), and the people she stole from chose not to take legal action in their lifetimes/ settled and signed an NDA and are all dead.

The medical stuff is covered (in TSP at least) by carefully never actually saying TW has CBD for sure, and a big medical disclaimer.

The problem has always been that the publishers fell down on checking the memoir was ‘substantially true’.

I just think she and PRH have matching brass necks since they're both still peddling this shit.

Every time I go into Waterstones all the books are piled on the promotion table in the memoir/travel/etc section.

I hide them every time I'm in!

Penguin publishing did the same with Midnight in Peking which the author claimed was nonfiction but of course wasn't. Author won various non fic awards despite changing multiple verifiable facts to suit his story. Then he claimed it was "literary nonfiction " which is still bollocks from both points of view! No comeback. Penguin sold books. Author pulled a blinder.

It's getting on for a year since Sal last posted an up to date photo of herself on her IG feed (30 May 2025).

I wonder whether, despite her mealy mouthed statement that "nothing has changed", at some fundamental level she does feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed at the lies she has told, the lives she has damaged and the hopes she has extinguished.

Maybe for that reason she is now unable to show her or Moth's face in public or on her social media feed.

Or maybe the truth is more prosaic (like photos of Peter Mandelson before and after the Epstein revelations) she is a shadow of her former self.

An early interview with Sal (March 2019)

Hiking 630 miles of English coast, with nothing left to lose - Salon.com

Or she’s blown some of her ill-gotten gains on facial tweaks and is now completely unrecognisable, with a shiny brunette bob and Anna Wintour sunglasses?😀

@ThompsonTwin despite her mealy mouthed statement that "nothing has changed",

That is the perspective from their hibernation and tentative moves out into the world again. Nothing may have changed for Sal and Tim but hopefully everyone else has moved onwards and upwards - away from them.

Those who found hope in this book only to have it shaken deserve clarity and all those whose truth was cancelled by it deserve to be given their voices back. (Ruth Saberton)

I don’t understand…. In all the books she does say that ‘Moth’ was diagnosed with CBD and when she produced the medical letters it was with the purpose of doubling down on that.

BTW I'm still here, manfully attempting to keep up with the charabanc!

Reading that 2019 piece made me, admittedly with hindsight, laugh. But also to think up some alternative titles - to "The Salt Path", such as "Saved by the (Mars) Bar" or "A Mars bar & £2.50 to Sustain Us". Frankly I'm amazed that so many of us were taken in by so much utter BS.

Yes, what a load of cobblers. Except perhaps: "he’s in much better health than doctors and the brain scans say he should be."

May explain why they haven't bought a house (assumption based on them renting). Can't lose something they don't have.

Not in TSP, if you look. She holds back on depicting the consultant as giving a firm diagnosis, and has him say that the disease can only be confirmed at postmortem. All of the catastrophic forecasting of his cells closing down one by one all the way to a horrible, imminent death is all carefully placed within her own inner monologue, not the consultant's, so presumably explainable as the panic of a loving wife who knows nothing about a rare condition.

And she never definitively claims the walk cured or even ameliorated CBD, because TW doesn't definitely have it according to the consultant, although she does then subsequently behave as if it's a firm diagnosis.

Given that there's also that atypically long medical disclaimer, I imagine that's the result of the 'legal read' by PRH's legal team heading her off from possible trouble.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the legal team can have been thinking in relation to the medical stuff in TWS and LL, where she makes much more definitive claims. TW definitely has CBD. Walking definitely cures it. The very long walk in LL actually magically reverses a DAT scan of his brain.

One would have said that even the most negligent legal read ever would require actually evidence of this medical miracle, which would have been very easy to provide.

But it clearly wasn't required. Which is mad.

My point is only that CH and all other media attention has focused on TSP, in which the illness isn't definitely claimed, rather than the two sequels where it is.

I wonder whether, despite her mealy mouthed statement that "nothing has changed", at some fundamental level she does feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed at the lies she has told, the lives she has damaged and the hopes she has extinguished.

I very much doubt it!!!

She's more likely to be annoyed that people are questioning her statements! And feels hard do e by, and even more entitled than ever.

After all, why shouldn't she not have the money and life she deserves?!

I understand your point @NervesofSteel , and of course we know how carefully crafted Sally's words can be, but the doctor does describe Moth having CBD, in the way we have come to understand more about the disease. Some extracts:

‘The best thing I can do for you, Moth, is give you a diagnosis.’

‘I believe you have corticobasal degeneration, CBD. We can’t be absolutely certain about the diagnosis. There is no test, so we’ll only know at post-mortem.’

‘That must mean you’ve got it wrong then. It’s something else.’

The doctor looked at me as if I was a child; then he carried on trying to explain a rare degenerative brain disease ... and destroy his body and then his mind as he fell into confusion and dementia, and end with him unable to swallow and probably choking to death on his own saliva. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do about it.

Sal then refers to CBD intrinsically as Moth having it, at other times.

Extracts from TSP:

Scene : near beginning of walk. Cast-iron bladder. CBD was supposed to cause incontinence, but certainly didn’t seem to have affected him so far.

Scene : where Exmoor meets the sea. Moth was tiring and finding every step a struggle. I was leaden and achy. It could have been our lack of fitness, the emotional exhaustion, the CBD, or maybe it was just the chips.

Scene : looking out to Mount's Bay. We should add ‘don’t get cold’ to the already extensive list of things to do to counteract CBD. What had the consultant said just three months ago?

CBD is intrinsic to the narrative and of course, if there was any doubt to be had, Moth tells the surfers he is dying.

I agree with you regarding all the inner monologue @NervesofSteel but as Mulberry Brandy has confirmed, they both claimed that Moth had CBD in TSP and its sequels and never denied it in real life either, which of course they wouldn’t because the books were supposed to be true. The PSPA charity believed he’d been diagnosed 😞

edited to say : it’s important to remember that it is the doctor in the book who Sally writes as having diagnosed Moth with CBD. The consultant in reality didn’t.

In every single article written about them, every interview, the CBD claim is paramount to their story. It’s what everyone was most interested in, concerned about and the hook that got people invested in a way that their “homelessness” couldn’t have achieved on its own. I think they did a lot of research before they settled on that and thought they were sohhh clever and that no one would ever dare dispute it.

Worth remembering that when they did a couple of short walks while staying with Polly in 2014, Moth was receiving PIP but as this was before the visit to the consultant in June 2015, it definitely wasn't awarded for CBD at this point.