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booknook2025-07-12 05:06 pm
spiralsheep) wrote in booknook2025-07-12 05:06 pm
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The pinch of Salt Path by Sally "Raynor Winn" Walker
If you read a "Raynor Winn" book and enjoyed it or it helped you in any way then I'm extremely glad for you (especially because any positive result came 100% from you yourself) - but you might want to stop reading here because the remainder of this post is not positive about the author or her books.
The real Salt Path (link to The Observer): how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.
So, Sally "Raynor Winn"/Lose Walker the author of books such as The Salt Path, and The Wild Silence, and Landlines, and the forthcoming (possibly if it's not cancelled) On Winter Hill, was written up in The Observer newspaper, a widely respected UK media outlet, in an article accusing Mrs Walker of:
- being arrested for fraudulently embezzling £64,000 (if you don't also include the later 2,000,000+ grifted book sales),
- absconding from the criminal justice system,
- forcing a non-disclosure agreement on the couple she defrauded (in exchange for repayment),
- running an illegal gambling scam (link to forum) using a self-published novel as a front,
- failing to pay many times for goods and services received (multiple court judgements against the Walkers),
- owning a property they had previously lived on in France while claiming to be homeless, and
- misleading readers of her books about Timothy "Moth Winn" Walker's supposed diagnosis of a rapidly degenerative terminal illness (note: I'm not questioning that he had symptoms as noted in the letter dated 2015 but the evidence offered by Sally Walker doesn't show a diagnosis of CBS/CBD at any time, and they supposedly did the walk in 2013 after the tests from 2011 were negative).
Mrs Walker has issued a very odd statement, after careful vetting by lawyers, including arrant nonsense about secret truths:
"the Observer were offered the opportunity, by my lawyers, to discuss in detail the allegations made against me to correct their inaccurate account and to be guided on the truth, on the basis that the discussion would not be made public."
However Mrs Walker repeatedly admitted in the The Salt Path to being a thief stealing from small businesses so she does tell partial truths sometimes....
ETA 13 July 2025: Observer article about a further Walker scam. I've archived salient extracts in a comment on this post.
The real Salt Path (link to The Observer): how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.
So, Sally "Raynor Winn"/Lose Walker the author of books such as The Salt Path, and The Wild Silence, and Landlines, and the forthcoming (possibly if it's not cancelled) On Winter Hill, was written up in The Observer newspaper, a widely respected UK media outlet, in an article accusing Mrs Walker of:
- being arrested for fraudulently embezzling £64,000 (if you don't also include the later 2,000,000+ grifted book sales),
- absconding from the criminal justice system,
- forcing a non-disclosure agreement on the couple she defrauded (in exchange for repayment),
- running an illegal gambling scam (link to forum) using a self-published novel as a front,
- failing to pay many times for goods and services received (multiple court judgements against the Walkers),
- owning a property they had previously lived on in France while claiming to be homeless, and
- misleading readers of her books about Timothy "Moth Winn" Walker's supposed diagnosis of a rapidly degenerative terminal illness (note: I'm not questioning that he had symptoms as noted in the letter dated 2015 but the evidence offered by Sally Walker doesn't show a diagnosis of CBS/CBD at any time, and they supposedly did the walk in 2013 after the tests from 2011 were negative).
Mrs Walker has issued a very odd statement, after careful vetting by lawyers, including arrant nonsense about secret truths:
"the Observer were offered the opportunity, by my lawyers, to discuss in detail the allegations made against me to correct their inaccurate account and to be guided on the truth, on the basis that the discussion would not be made public."
However Mrs Walker repeatedly admitted in the The Salt Path to being a thief stealing from small businesses so she does tell partial truths sometimes....
ETA 13 July 2025: Observer article about a further Walker scam. I've archived salient extracts in a comment on this post.
Sigh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#:~:text=In%20April%202011%2C%20critiques%20and,although%20no%20criminality%20was%20found.
Read at your own risk; it certainly raised my blood pressure!
Re: Sigh.
The Salt Path reminded me of Apple, Cider, Vinegar the diet book that swindler Belle Gibson claimed had cured her non-existent brain tumour. She was also caught out by an MRI scan. Gibson was fined $410,000 in Australia but she never paid, falsely claiming poverty, while she continued spending significant amounts of money on herself.
And I can think of other examples too, sadly.
I don't get it. The only thing fraudsters need to do to cover themselves is to describe their writing as fictionalised or whatever.
Re: Sigh.
Re: Sigh.
Sometimes, what I want isn't "inspirational". It's "Long tumble down a rocky hill in life, and long scrapes that slowly scab over and itch as they heal," kind of reality. You know, something that feels like commiseration when I'm dealing with an entirely different kind of crisis that has the same deep emotional impact.
Re: Sigh.
My frustration is with the inherent misleading nature of any author publishing something as truth when it's not - whether I'm reading for the inspirational side or for the 'this is the struggle and what reality of x is' the underlying fact is that I'm reading for the facts and to learn about real events. If someone wants to fictionalise something taking real events and writing something using those events as their inspiration for a 'story' that's fine but tell me that's what is happening so I can make my choice to read/not read based on what the book really is and don't mislead me if I choose to read it into believing something that is inherently not the truth. We all know that anyone writing may be being subjective in their interpretation of events and that's why we might read differing opinions but what we're talking about in these two instances is not subjectivity of telling from one perspective but selective story telling by manipulating new 'truths'.
Re: Sigh.
So it wouldn't be "real" disability inspiration to many people, but that's their opinion. If I've relayed the facts honestly and to the best of my knowledge, my emotional and intellectual reactions to events add dimension to the reality that I lived through.
Writing that story as "I learned to tie my shoes when my mom was rushing me out to school so she could come home to get a few hours of sleep before her next job," it would be a total lie. That's small in the scale of things, but the implication, in this case, less parental support than I actually had, and skewed to make the situation seem worse, would ALSO undermine every other aspect of the story.
Saying that I learned to tie my shoes by watching Sesame Street implies many other things about my life at the time. It would also be a total lie, but skew the situation to make me seem more self-reliant and determined as a preschooler.
Authorial or editorial bias explains skewing the story in either direction.
For me, the questions I have about books like "Three Cups of Tea" and "The Salt Path" lie more in HOW they were allowed to falsify such key details, e.g., the "homeless" couple in their fifties who at the time owned property in France. That's what publishing houses pay fact-checkers FOR. That's not bias; it's straight up FRAUD.
Not even touching the gambling, illegal actions, or manipulation of friends and acquaintances, that ONE fraudulent element of the story was significant enough that the publishers should have pulled the project and demanded their advance back, OR shifted gears and turned it into inspirational fiction.
Every time another "true" story turns out to be more boondoggle than fact, I lose respect for publishing as a process and focus my reading entirely away from that particular genre, whatever it is, for years at a time.
Re: Sigh.
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13 July 2025 a further Walker scam uncovered by The Observer
Moth told me he was dying ... when a doctor had said his brain scan was normal
Moved by the plight of the Winns, Bill Cole rented his cider farm in Cornwall to them at a knockdown rent. But they left him feeling confused and betrayed
In 2018, the illustrated cover of The Salt Path caught Bill Cole’s eye, and he found himself profoundly moved by the story. His wife had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, so Raynor Winn’s struggle to come to terms with her partner’s condition resonated with him. As did the idea that the couple had been conned by a close friend. Bill had also been betrayed by someone, costing him both professionally and personally, so he felt sympathy with Winn and her husband, Moth.
[...]
Bill made the couple an offer to live on the farm for a very low rent with a small fee for helping out.
By this point, Raynor Winn was a bestselling author after the 2018 publication of her book The Salt Path, an account of her and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path – a “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by the sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness.
[...]
Bill, who lived in Sussex but visited Cornwall often, says the couple told him they wanted to be involved in tending the orchards, producing cider and rewilding the farm. “They seemed happy there,” says Bill, who recalls that they often suggested that the farm was having a beneficial effect on Moth’s health.
But in October 2021, Bill says, Moth surprised him with an announcement. “He put his head in his hands and he said: ‘We went to the hospital this week and I’ve been told not to plan beyond Christmas.’” Bill was horrified. “I just went: ‘Oh my God!’ and gave him a big hug.”
Bill’s friend Richard, who asked us not to use his surname, was present for the conversation. “It was extraordinarily emotional,” he recalls. “Bill was close to tears. Moth also told him he thought he would already be dead if he hadn’t been living on Haye farm.”
Richard remembers that Bill had become close to Raynor and Moth, messaging them most days. Richard says he was concerned for his friend, however, because the farm was losing money. Cider was not being produced and the orchards were not being attended to.
“But he didn’t care,” says Richard. “He felt kind of responsible for them, and for Moth’s wellbeing.”
[...]
Medical letters disclosed by Winn last week in response to The Observer’s reporting confirm that Moth – also known by his legal name, Tim Walker – was diagnosed with a neurological condition, [...] [my note: The Observer gives a very generous interpretation of the published letters, which acknowledge symptoms but don't diagnose CBD]. But according to these letters, in 2015, 2019 and 2025 doctors said his specific presentation of the disease was “very mild”, “stable” and “indolent”, which means slowly progressing.
When Winn’s third book, Landlines, was published in September 2022, Bill read how, in the winter of 2021, soon after Moth had finished another long walk, a neurologist told him his brain scan was “normal”, implying that the walk had drastically improved the symptoms of his condition.
The timing in the book seemed to indicate that this was happening at around the same time as Bill recalls being told that Moth was dying.
“I was reading it on a train,” Bill recalls, “and I just went: ‘What the hell?’ It just makes no sense whatsoever.”
Bill couldn’t understand why, if Moth had had such a positive result from the doctor, the couple wouldn’t have shared the good news with him. Bill texted Raynor expressing his confusion. After a few days she responded to him but didn’t address his question about Moth’s illness.
A few weeks later, the chef Rick Stein was due to film an episode of his BBC series with the couple at Haye farm. Bill says he watched as they demonstrated the cider-making process, implying that they were involved in the farm’s production – something Bill says they had never done. “I felt I was being gaslit,” he recalls.
Not long after, Raynor and Moth terminated their tenancy at Haye farm, a year earlier than agreed. When Bill went to the farm to see them off, they were already gone.
“The key was under a plant pot and a message was left on the kitchen table,” he says. He has had almost no contact with them since.
Re: 13 July 2025 a further Walker scam uncovered by The Observer
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no subject
The whole thing also feeds into destructive beliefs about disability, as I said on my journal, "Most importantly, to me, disabled people suffer collateral damage from both aspects of her fraud: firstly by being told they could do x or y if only they had as much willpower as Walker's fictional character with CBS/CBD, then secondly from the assumption that many disabled people are frauds like Walker. I'm betting she'll continue to profit from her crimes while her victims, intended and indirect, suffer for her choices." I'm especially angry about this aspect.
I feel sympathy for the Walker's children and hope they manage to avoid having their lives seriously damaged by their gaslighting parents.