Thread 27 : 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 26 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:
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? | Mumsnet

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are always welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from some of Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou's excellent exposé items before posting. Chloe's podcast series for The Observer 'The Walkers' covers most things:
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer
Another suggestion:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
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 nearly a year we have done amazingly well together for 26 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.

We are still here after 26,000 posts and fast approaching our one year anniversary together on 6th July 2026, 12 months on from the start of our first thread in response to Our Chloe's somewhat stunning initial exposé. Little did we know what else would come out. Our longevity comes as both a total surprise and a pleasure (mostly!). We've seen charabancers come and go, come back again, delurk and join us for the first time. All are welcome. Threads have both filled up in a day and moved at a more stately pace. Thank you everyone for sharing your time, thoughts, opinions, experience, questions, sleuthing (there's that word!), kindness (there's that other word!) and great humour with me and with each other. As ever, as we embark on our 27th thread riding the community charabanc - this time all holding our brollies and fans aloft for much-needed shade and breeze - keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider, (but not too much in the current heatwave).

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 26 IS FULL:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5506717-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?

It also seems unlikely that a university professor was unable to read & write aged eighteen or was mute until age eleven.

It sounds like a little about the claims that Einstein didn't speak until he was 9yo and did badly at school.
I believe neither are true - he may have been mildly late, but he's documented as speaking at 3yo and the stories of doing badly at school seem to have originated due to the grades being 1-6, which 6 being the best when someone assumed 6 was the worst!

Here is a thread started this afternoon in the Education topic:

Jason Arday, Cambridge Plagiarist? | Mumsnet

FYI: The film adaptation of TSP is scheduled for a limited U.S. theatrical release in select theaters (including New York City) on August 28, 2026, followed by a wider nationwide rollout on September 4, 2026.

The Jason Arday thread is very active.

Many parallels between the two stories, such as: publisher saying that they will still publish, institution seemingly battenung down the hatches and hoping to ride the situation out, asserting that concerns are "vile" without properly addressing any of them, continuing messages of support from fans, incomprehension from others at the messages of support, questions about who could come up with such extraordinary tales and why, questions about why the tales were believed.

To add to @Peladon 's post above. One of the more bizarre claims of this academic was appearing on the documentary Up - which follows children born nearly 30 years before him. Celia Walden, in The Daily Telegraph addresses the strategies:

Arday’s spokes­man has been work­ing over­time too, say­ing, in response to the latest back­lash, that “the ref­er­ence to Seven Up was used inform­ally as a short­hand illus­tra­tion” of another “concept” he was involved in.

When the best­seller, The Salt Path, turned out to be heav­ily filtered, its author, Raynor Winn, avoided address­ing the legal and fin­an­cial dis­crep­an­cies, instead lean­ing heav­ily on the “emo­tional and spir­itual truth” defence.

Not wanting to divert too much to the JA story, but irt @BrandiedAromatics post one amusing detail: it wasn't actually a spokesman but rather JA himself who spoke to the Daily Mail. Apparently JA asked that his own comments be quoted as being by "a source close to JA", but the Mail didn't oblige and revealed his request:.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.com/news/article-16023581/amp/Plagiarism-row-professor-TV-Seven-born.html

Extraordinary that the Visit Cornwall website still describes TSP as a true story. Guess they don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg!

The Salt Path

"As Raynor and Moth proved, walking this trail can be as affordable as it is transformative. Whilst they camped along the way in the film, there is no public right to do this on or near to the South West Coast Path. However, there are countless accommodations available for those seeking more comfort."

Agreed, @ThompsonTwin - very misleading for potential visitors to Cornwall and still perpetuating the lies over a year after the 'non-Walkers but Wyn-Winns' were exposed.

There is a 'Contact Us' at the bottom of the Visit Cornwall TSP page should anyone wish to raise this with them...

Finally, Jason Issacs speaks (to a very limited extent):

https://www.nationalworld.com/news/jason-isaacs-salt-path-controversy-us-release-8842269

Thanks @Peladon Jason Isaacs: "I said, 'Are you sure you want us to do publicity?' They went, 'Absolutely.'

What a shabby lot behind the film.

JI: "Obviously, some of the things have been questioned." That's one way of putting it.

I'm amazed he thinks the film is good let alone still valid or that he will willingly publicise it after being duped, especially by Tim. If i were him I'd be filing it under "not worth its weight in salt".

Even after the controversy there are still, it seems, quite a lot of people who believe Raymoth's story to be broadly true! Quite apart from her credulous 73k IG followers, I've heard that these include at least one of Moth's teachers on the Eden project, a spokesperson at the PSPA, one of the TSP scriptwriters and at least one of her neighbours at Haye Farm! Maybe JI still holds a torch up for them!

An article about the publisher of Jason Arday's forthcoming memoir (touching on fact-checking and approach to questions). Posting here because people who have commented on the publisher's approach to TSP may find it interesting: https://archive.ph/j6eep

Gosh, that's strange. Obviously, we all fell down a lengthy internet rabbit hole and are unusually well-informed, but you'd think that even a fairly cursory glance at CH's original story in the Observer would be enough to cast significant doubt on the credibility even the most twinkly, be-cravatted charmer. I'm especially surprised about the person at the PSPA, given the speed with which the charity as a whole disassociated from the Walkers.

I'm less surprised by the scriptwriter -- some people will be desperate to try to cling on to the idea that a project they worked on and believed in isn't a hollow nonsense based on a scam by two thoroughly unworthy people.

Yes, there are still some people heavily invested in 'believing' for various reasons. However, it has been gratifying when reading comments on other threads, on Mumsnet and elsewhere, that Raynor Winn/The Salt Path has become a by-word for scandal, scam, deception, lies.

Those terms are widely accepted as a measure when weighing up the case of Jason Arday, or the memoir Stalked (that appeared to be AI with the prompt : a thriller in the style of Raynor Winn!).

What happened to "Stalked"? Has the book actually been published, or has publication been put off?

Yes, put off until January but 2027, not 2028 like OWH 😉

Thanks! Have they said whether the delay is due to fact-checking?

@Peladon AFAIK they did a Penguin - just changed the date. One of my 'favourites' is the Margaret Seltzer/Margaret B Jones case - where they pulled the already published books, withdrew them.

Guardian article drawing parallels between the Jason Arday case and TSP

Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir | Academics | The Guardian

Thanks. I think what is going to be unhelpful is the same as with the Raynor Winn output - the claims of overcoming various diagnoses, health problems. For all the other headlines that is what is distressing for sufferers, and parents.

hello everyone, long time no type! Hope all the charabanc are well and thanks as ever to @DisappointedReader for keeping the threads going. I've been following along but work and life generally have both been a bit insane for a few months, hence radio silence. We're all ok at TW Towers, though, phew!

There are huge parallels with the Arday scandal and TSP, and as @BrandiedAromatics says, one of the very interesting things about the discussion is how TSP & Raynor Winn have become a byword for dishonesty and embellishment. I've even seen on X a mock-up of the front cover of TSP but with Arday's name as the author.....so I can't see how PRH would be able to do anything but sneak out OWH quietly, if they ever do, that is.

I think someone linked way back upthread to the Private Eye Paul Foot shortlist interview podcasts. If anyone hasn't listened to the OurChloe one I'd recommend it. She says in that episode that she doesn't ever expect to see OWH published, and I agree with her. The WWs are utterly discredited now and apart from a few diehards, are also figures of national and even international ridicule.

But what is great, and interesting for TSP comparisons, is that Arday’s claims are mostly much more checkable and many have already been checked and found entirely baseless and false — he’s not claiming to have been trudging, obscure and homeless, along the SWCP, he’s claiming to have have written a book that was never published (he submitted a proposal), to have a postgraduate degree in counselling from a university which has no record of him attending, to have been a visiting fellow at two universities which say he wasn’t, to have gone to install wells in Africa and South America with WaterAid, which says it never sends its volunteers abroad and does not facilitate self-funded trips, to have been sent a dead pig which set off a big police investigation that involved interviewing local butchers, when the Met (and the butchers) have confirmed no such incident was ever reported.

I mean, I don’t doubt for a second that he’s had racist abuse, and that, depressingly, some of the glee with which he’s been investigated is racially motivated, and is going to give endless material to racists, but he’s been proven to have lied over and over, and that’s not even going into his charity and football and endurance running claims (which are quite Moth!).

John Moores didn’t uphold the plagiarism claim against his PhD, claiming they ruled that similarities with a previous piece of research were ‘honest error’, but if you click through to the two corrections to academic papers linked in the Guardian, both are very damning. They’re basically saying he didn’t acknowledge huge debts to existing research, and it’s not a matter of ‘accidentally’ leaving something out of the bibliography, it’s adding huge numbers of citations to all sections, and shows JA is heavily indebted to two sources. No ‘honest error’.

The claims of mutism and illiteracy are obviously more difficult to evidence.

But crucially, what’s interesting to me is that, unlike PRH when the first Observer piece appeared, S and S are apparently too close to publication to stop it, and are going ahead. A journalist has shared screenshots suggesting edits that dial way back on his fundraising claims ( I’m not on X, so can’t see them). S and S, asked about fact checking, have said they don’t comment on their own editorial processes. There’s a credit to a fact checker by JA, but S and S didn’t say whether that person was in their employ or JA’s.

The difference seems to be that his wildest claims are not in the memoir.

But it’s going to make PRH and SW think very carefully about their next Salt Path-related step.

This post on Good Housekeeping Book Room is worth a look if you can find it via Facebook. The comments are overwhelmingly negative so far. Just a handful of "believers" or should that be "Winn-gers"?