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?

Well lads just over a week until I see our Simon. Here’s hoping I don’t get confused and ask him why he and Sal are keeping out of the public eye these days 🤣🤣

I wasn’t necessarily imagining it as with PRH, and I suppose some iteration of OWH might be a test case for sales?

The ongoing Instagram engagement with fans who think there’s a smear campaign, or who are completely unaware of the scam, or who think her statements refute all the allegations, suggests SW is keeping the brand ticking over, which suggests to me she thinks there’s a future…

Still intrigued as to what a rewritten OWH or whatever the next book is, would have to look like. Obviously, all newspaper reviews would mention the Observer investigation and its findings and how OWH deals with this, but a lot of her readers won’t arrive at her books that way. Basically, I’m not convinced her next book, if released, wouldn’t sell.

Am I right in thinking the way to test the waters now - is to write a Substack newsletter? I think Raynor has been overtaken by a wealth of other writers and particularly I have noticed Katherine May, with Wintering. She also has a podcast.

You're right, it wouldn't necessarily be PRH, but I think her reputation travels before her and she'd have the same problem with any other publisher. As @BrandiedAromatics says, time has got away from Sal now, she's no longer the guaranteed big seller that she was, when books sold on her name only, and she's simply not a good enough writer to stand up with the current crop of 'nature based fiction'. So she wouldn't get a huge advance.

I don't know how she's got away without a police prosecution being brought, to be honest. There are still people out there who are owed money, I hear.

Interesting — are the sums involved substantial?

I just think ‘disgraced bestseller’ still might have some clout in the industry, purely in terms of ‘Will it sell?’

No idea. I doubt it because if they were they would have taken her to court, I assume and nobody has, so I presume it's not worth anyone's time and money to try to get her to pay up.When she said she paid all her debts there were people coming forward to say that she still owed them money.

Maybe she's paid them all now, she can certainly afford to.

And people have come back from worse disgraces, but the writing world can be very unforgiving. There have been scandals over in the US of authors deliberately sabotaging fellow authors by leaving bad reviews and those authors have had contracts withdrawn and been dropped by agencies. Unless your name is made from writing about bad people doing bad things, most publishers like their authors to be squeaky clean.

On the other hand, though, neither PRH nor her agent have distanced themselves, far less dropped her.

I just looked at Graham Maw Christie's website, and SW is still resplendent on their front page (which has been rejigged since I last looked at it).

Interestingly, the other four writers sharing the front page, where there's a photo of each one of them with their most recent book, are represented with a photo of a book that's recently been released recently, in 2026. Only SW is depicted with the cover of OWH, a book that's apparently not coming out till 2028.

But GMC clearly still want her front and centre, even in a context where it wouldn't seem unnatural for them not to feature her, as the others on the front page all have a new book out that they're promoting.

Which is indicative, I think. They're choosing brand recognition and past sales as a metric they're more interested in than brand damage...?

@Oeufs On the other hand, though, neither PRH nor her agent have distanced themselves, far less dropped her.

Because we have revived our posts, I looked at the Penguin articles linked to RW. As we have found with everything Penguin - it is rather Random! (sorry) There are very out of date references but with this inspiring collection the couple turning to the wilderness as they face financial ruin; seem to have been cancelled:

Extraordinary stories from ordinary people

I'm assuming someone at PRH had the cop on to think 'Is this really the optics we want -- Giséle Pélicot's memoir next to 'Our sorry tale' books by a proven scam artist and grifter? Maybe not.'

@Oeufs - but she is still under contract, so I wouldn't think they would drop her just yet. They all want to maximise the earning potential - she's still the goose laying the golden eggs for them all.

I am a bit surprised that neither agent nor publisher has come out to publicly voice an opinion on the case though. While they haven't slated her, they haven't exactly ridden in in full support either, have they? Everyone seems to want to keep quiet, lie low, keep taking the money and maintain OWH's potential money-spinning status.

You’d think Penguin wouldn’t mind taking a loss over dropping her and scrapping her back catalogue in the same way that David Walliams was dropped by his publisher. They’ve made their money from her and surely wouldn't notice and it would be for the greater good anyway. You’re absolutely right about the ‘sorry tale’. It sits like an unwanted turd. Nobody wants that. What the hell has she got over them in order for them to just cowardly sit, biding their time? Potential lawsuit for ending her contract? The books are full of claims that have proved to be dangerous to follow if you have CBD or Parkinson’s. I think out of all of it, that’s the worst. Perhaps they really think they’ll make money from OWH, which makes me think they are an unethical brand. But then they might excuse themselves by saying that you shouldn’t censor books or authors, let people have the right to read whatever they want. But is that really true? I’m not so sure.
On the subject of her debts, I don’t believe she has repaid everything she owed but how can anyone chase her if they can’t get hold of her?
On the subject of her brand, I think she must pay for those sycophantic messages. If not, well she has proved herself to have a gift of deceiving people, some gift.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat They all want to maximise the earning potential - she's still the goose laying the golden eggs for them all.

@HatStickBoots They’ve made their money from her and surely wouldn't notice and it would be for the greater good anyway.

When you look at TSP on the Penguin site - it is that non-Harding cover that @MrKippling spotted in The Works. And, I have now seen it there and it is, as @Vroomfondleswaistcoat said it would be, on thin paper - and the cover is very shiny and it looks more like other books in The Works rather than distinctly by RW.

So how does that work if you order it from Penguin or other online retailers? Do you get the thin, shiny one? It is obviously cheaper than formerly buying it online from wherever it can be bought.

I assume it came down to the legal cases and threatened legal cases, and the potential for future cases from Harper Collins employees who’d been harassed by Walliams being potentially bigger than any action he could take, and/or the cost of paying him off. They’d already paid out huge sums to employees who’d had to deal with his behaviour, plus a new, female CEO came in and decided to chop him, and later his back list.

Plus it must have made a difference that he’d already been fired from Britain’s Got Talent, and that there were recordings and transcripts of him sexualising female contestants. If they’d kept publishing him, they’d have been endorsing someone who had been fired/cancelled by another high-profile organisation. His books were a goldmine, but the potential damage was huge.

Whereas, if you except the medical research charity and Arvon, no one else is cancelling SW, and no one seems to be pursuing her legally. Bluntly, no one else is making PRH look bad for continuing to be associated with SW.

I think your assessment is right. I do, however, wonder why more weight isn't given to the PSPA charity dropping them almost instantly. The imminent death of her husband was the lynchpin of the love story that many bought into. This is what the film has portrayed and I can't understand why the actors don't get that their publicising is just a noisy gong without it.

I think it's a 'keep it ticking over' and wait strategy. Some people will never have heard of the scandal, some don't believe it's true: Penguin and RW have to wait for us vocal critics to go quiet. They can afford to wait, as Penguin are throwing away their investment in OWH otherwise, and RW has money in the bank, as long as Moth hasn't spent it all on custom made jackets and the like. I doubt she's bored, as she's never wanted to work and can just stay away from people and feel superior this way. Moth seems to thrive on an audience, so not sure how he's doing, but if he goes rogue at any point that will be very interesting.
I can imagine another postponement yet of OWH, depending on whether it seems 'safe' to go ahead in 2028.

@BrandiedAromatics If you order the book from Penguin you will get the thick paper, normal paperback option. The books in The Works are a different printing, they are produced more cheaply which is why The Works can sell them more cheaply. They aren't remaindered copies of unsuccessful books, they are books that sell successfully from their publisher and The Works (who supply garden centres and other similar outlets) buy the rights to publish their own version.

@PullTheBricksDown Exactly, and this is why I think threads like this are so important. Otherwise, PRH will just wait for the fuss to die down and nobody to be bothered any more and bring out OWH, hoping that everyone will just shrug and let it go. They've paid for that book already, as part of her contract. As you say, Sal's made her money, she can sit back and live on it forever. Although it can't be cheap to rent an entire estate and her earnings must be dropping now she's not doing constant publicity.

They would still have printing and distribution costs. And whatever publicity they think would not be counterproductive.

But the books will already be printed. The cover has been advertised, and I suspect they've got a warehouse full of them ready to go. This, I think, might be part of the problem, that Sal had already written her heart-tugging lone walk while pondering the loss of Moth. It was edited, first run printed and ready to go. Then Moth was bouncing around on stages and being pally with Jason Isaacs and obviously not dying; the whole scandal broke and the release had to be delayed. There was a lot of talk of Sal having to stop writing it because she was so traumatised by all the lies being told, which was why they said release was delayed, but in reality it was all ready to go, and they held it back just to let the fuss die down.

Absolutely to all that. One wonders if there was a behind-the-scenes fight between SW/her agent and PRH over whether OWH should be released as planned, or only delayed a few weeks or months, and/or whether OWH could be released as was/ needed a self-exonerating introduction, but could otherwise go out as it stood, or required a total rewrite, and whether, if so, it could still be released under the OWH title.

It seems to me that, in delaying it so long, they’ve put paid to the possibility of the ‘original’ OWH being released at all, surely? Even if there are tens of thousands of printed copies in a warehouse somewhere, and an author who steadfastly maintains every word she’s written is true and Chloe H was conducting a smear campaign….

I wonder at what point you pulp existing print copies of something that can never be released? I confess it came to mind when there was that recent story about copies of Charles Spencer’s Diana book being stolen from a lorry.

I remain very interested in the total deletion of TW from Instagram. Not just no photos, but once she resumed writing captions, where she uses pronouns, it’s always, pointedly, ‘I’. ‘Back where I feel most at home.’ ‘A few characters I met along the way’. ‘Just me and my rucksack’.

Is it related to his deletion from OWH, or purely to sidestep questions of his continued good health? To imply he’s now far too unwell to walk? Or could they have actually split?

Because you’d think that a beloved, dying spouse would merit the occasional mention, even if not photographed, or that there would be the occasional ‘we’ attached to some banality about sunsets.

@Oeufs Because you’d think that a beloved, dying spouse would merit the occasional mention, even if not photographed, or that there would be the occasional ‘we’ attached to some banality about sunsets.

RW has always tantalised us with the promise of Moth. That tension has seen them through all of these books. Think of the interviews: she always seemed to offer a "he's fine, a lot better than he has been for months, actually". It always seemed to follow that pattern.

It reminds me of studying the Canaanite religion - Moth is the god who overcomes the Sea and Death, the dying and rising sun god, the posing up a storm god.

The main body of TSP is bookended by this superhuman. The beginning

Moth ran up the beach in the moonlight in a ripped pair of underpants that he’d been wearing for five days straight, holding a fully erected tent above his head. It was a miracle.

The end

Moth would begin a degree without any real hope of surviving to the end of it. I would look for a job and start writing.

And so it goes .....

Well, that's what I mean, really, @BrandiedAromatics -- she's no longer dropping those little mentions, or implying there's anything sad or novel about the fact that she's walking alone. TW is no longer even an offstage presence. It's like he never existed.

That she was walking the Coast to Coast Path solo, without TW, was very much the tagline for OWH, and she said several times in interviews in the run up to the TSP premiere that we would have to wait to read OWH to discover why he wasn't with her.

(I mean, if the whole thing wasn't a scam, and he was actually a dying man who was suddenly deteriorating, it would explain his absence from a challenging walk in January in poor weather. It would not, however, explain why his purportedly devoted wife decided to leave him dying at home and took off arbitrarily for a challenging walk in January in unusually poor weather, because 'I needed a walk to put in a book' looks a bit calculating in the supposed circumstances...)

But if we accept that the Instagram account is a lowstakes way of keeping the 'Raynor Winn' brand ticking over until her next book offering, the total absence of any mention of TW is a significant deviation from the brand. I notice that very few of the comments, since she reopened comments, mention him either.

Poor, tragic Moth. One minute you're a national treasure, heroically running up beaches in your underpants while confounding medical science as you drag one leg around the SWCP and are fanboyed by Jason Isaacs, the next you're forgotten.

Very good points thank you. I agree that with DW there really wasn’t any choice. I do think that the Walkers have made fools of everybody who worked with them on those books and the film and that by not cancelling them, Penguin are promoting the idea that an author’s crimes, fraud, hypocrisy and lies don’t matter. At the time of the wild camping trip along the SWCP, Moth didn’t have CBD and hadn’t just been diagnosed with it, we know this as a fact. This is not inspirational stuff. People might as well be inspired by a cartoon as a fictional account of a miracle cure for an incurable disease.
Reading the actors’ comments recently, filled me with despair. Sitting on a perch and having to be protective of their work because of the unfortunate reality that’s swilling all around and threatening to engulf their careers, seems a little cowardly to me. Their careers have never been at stake here. Both had been moved by the couple’s story and seemed to have invested into them on a personal level, admiring and applauding them. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking that as actors immerse themselves into worlds of make believe, that it’s easy for them to forget what happens on the other side of the curtains and it’s not relevant to them. Reading lines from a page and dressing up to portray the person on the page is what they were paid to do and in that respect, they got it right. Of course “RW” was ‘guarded’ and noticeably different to the person on the page and that’s because she was! But Gillian has never touched upon that aspect since. Actors/Hollywood stars undoubtedly move on very quickly and their lives must be so full that a year later they have both properly detached themselves from the people in hiding. I imagine that if they had publicly commented last summer, their emotions would have been less easy to control. The film had been eagerly anticipated and released just a short while before the news exploded! If I were to watch the film again now I would feel a range of emotions that would spoil the experience. I suppose the film will be written off as a bad loss but the Raynor Winn persona still plods on, pretending to be real. Another book waits in the wings to tell another story of loss and loneliness from a soon-to-be widow’s perspective… while back in the real world her words have no meaning and in yet another vein altogether the IG account seems to celebrate being solo and alone!

Since I wrote this (in draft) the thread has moved along! So many interesting posts from all of you. I am also intrigued by the removal of Moth.

by not cancelling them, Penguin are promoting the idea that an author’s crimes, fraud, hypocrisy and lies don’t matter

I agree, but look at Jeffrey Archer! Found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years, he also admitted to insider trading though he was never prosecuted on the grounds of lack of evidence, he admitted to the theft of several suits from a shop in Toronto decades after it happened, was investigated for the misappropriation of funds from a charity he set up, was accused of fiddling his expense claims when he worked for a different UN childbirth charity, appears to have blagged his way into Oxford via faked A-levels and a faked US degree, was suspected of funding a coup in Africa, used sex workers etc etc etc.

In many cases he actually went after the newspapers who published these stories and won damages in court which he later had to repay when evidence emerged that the initial claims had been true.

And yet he continued to publish novels, short stories, diaries, plays and children's fiction between the mid-seventies and his death.

I suppose the difference is most of his output was (bad but inexplicably popular) fiction, rather than memoir that supposedly recounted true events.

Is it economically viable for PRH to pulp all the old copies of OWH and enable SW to rewrite the book with an addendum, adding her gloss to the events of the last 15 months, in order to bring it all "up to date"?

Well, they'll have to, won't they? I think that if they were going to release OWH, as written before the Observer story broke, they would have had to do it almost immediately, certainly within a few months of its original release date, and send out to distributors/bookshops some kind of extra introduction to be physically put into each copy, or something. And almost certainly SW doing a big mea culpa press campaign. Only she was 'too upset' by the allegations and was buying time.

But after so long a delay, I imagine the expectation is now that the next book will have to actually include the release of the Observer story, and not just be the long-delayed release of a book whose subject matter (a walk and a dying spouse) has been made obsolete by Chloe H.