In publishing, true phenomena are rare. So, when a nature memoir called The Salt Path started to break out among readers in a major way several years ago, people took notice. Raynor Winn’s story had all the makings of a future classic, documenting the true story of her and her husband walking a 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home was repossessed. It had everything: an enduring love story, the kindness of strangers, the incredible force of nature, and Moth Wynn, Raynor’s beloved husband, finding healing, mental and physical, through the journey as he dealt with a devastating degenerative condition. Readers flocked to The Salt Path. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the Costa Book Awards, and won the 2019 RSL Christopher Bland Prize for Non-Fiction. This year, audiences can see the film adaptation, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. People were inspired. Now, it turns out that Winn’s claims in some areas may have been, to put it professionally, misleading. Or were they?
A recent investigation by The Observer cast doubt over several crucial details in The Salt Path. In the book, Wynn, whose real name is Kitty Walker, claimed that she and her husband had invested a ‘substantial sum’ into a company owned by a friend. When the company failed, leaving unpaid debts, the friend insisted they were liable for payment and took them to court. They couldn’t afford a lawyer and eventually lost their case, even though they found a key document at the last minute that could have prevented it. So, the Winns lost their beloved farm and were left penniless, right around the same time that Moth was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration. CBD is a rare neurodegenerative disease that is difficult to diagnose and has a life expectancy of about eight years.
According to The Observer, the Winns weren’t the victims of an embezzler. They were the perpetrators. The investigation says that the evidence shows Winn having defrauded her employer of £64,000. Ros Hemmings, Winn’s former boss, said that she and her late husband had noted that money was going missing at an alarming rate, and that at one point, ‘Walker had failed to deposit a large sum of cash.’ Winn/Walker eventually repaid about £9,000, but Hemmings soon realised that far more money had gone missing over the years under her watch.
They called the police and Walker was arrested and taken in for questioning. Later, Ros Hemmings said her husband, Martin, was contacted by a solicitor who ‘told them Walker would pay all the missing money and would cover legal costs on both sides if – and only if – Martin agreed not to pursue a criminal case against her. Martin also had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.’ It’s a move that Ros said left her husband devastated and affected his trust in others.
A woman named Rebecca, who said that her husband was a distant relative of Moth Winn/Tim Walker, told The Observer that Kitty ‘told him she was on the run from the police because her employer had found out she had been taking money and was going to prosecute her criminally.’ Rebecca’s husband then loaned her the money to repay the sum. It was this loan that landed them in financial trouble when they couldn’t repay it, and this is why they lost their home. It wasn’t because they were screwed out of it by a cruel friend they did business with. It’s because they reportedly stole money and scrambled to pay it back lest Kitty Walker end up in jail.
The investigation also casts doubt over Tim Walker’s diagnosis of CBD. This is a condition that causes painful and debilitating symptoms and leaves most sufferers dead within a decade. ‘In Tim Walker’s case, he has been living with the condition for 18 years, and he seems to have no visibly acute symptoms.’ The Observer spoke to nine neurologists and researchers specialising in CBD who all seemed extremely suspicious about his diagnosis, as well as his ability to walk several hundred miles and come out of it with improved health.
Raynor Winn/Kitty Walker issued a statement in which they said the claims against them were ‘highly misleading.’ The statement continued: ‘The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.’ It is a very careful statement. The investigation didn’t claim they never walked the South West Coast Path.
Penguin, the publishing house behind the book and Walker/Winn’s follow-ups, said that it ‘undertook all the necessary due diligence’ before releasing The Salt Path, including a legal read, meaning that a lawyer looked over it before publication. No decision appears to have been made on whether Winn/Walker’s next book will be published by Penguin, if at all.
Publishing has a long history of fake memoirs and non-fiction books filled with lies and misleading claims, from James Frey to Go Ask Alice to too many Holocaust books to name. With The Salt Path, this investigation has highlighted a distinct lack of fact-checking in the world of non-fiction, as well as the particular hype and marketability around so-called ‘inspirational’ stories. This story was one of peak commercial potential that broke out of a niche genre into the mainstream because readers and the industry alike love tales of optimism made good in the face of darkness and suffering. Walker/Winn had a good tale to tell, and her husband’s enduring despite a death sentence gave a lot of people hope. We should note that the Observer piece didn’t directly say he was lying about his diagnosis. They have no smoking gun evidence of such a thing, and as the journalist writing it noted, miracles do happen. But the doubt is enough to start this firestorm, along with the revelation that these kind folks were the instigators of other people’s pain.
Most non-fiction books are not fact-checked. Many writers pay for that service independent of the publisher to cover their necks. It can be costly and time-consuming, and publishing is a business driven by tight deadlines and increasingly thin margins. Non-fiction isn’t the money maker compared to fiction, a few exceptions aside. So, if you’re getting a minor advance and there are no expectations you’ll escape the mid-list of sales, you can see how corners get cut. Penguin clearly didn’t expect The Salt Path to sell as many copies as it did. It took The Observer many months of digging to find the truth, so did Penguin just not have the time or resources, or was it a lack of inclination?
It’s not unusual for a memoirist to smudge some details or condense facts. Many such books open with disclaimers about how they are recalling events as best as they can remember. Memory is a fickle thing, and frankly, a lot of people writing autobiographies don’t want the world to know every messy detail. Often, what a memoirist doesn’t reveal can be as fascinating as what they do. But that undeniably gets complicated when you, say, tell people you were the victim of a scammer but were actually the perpetrator, and you might be lying about how the magic of a good long walk healed your spouse of a devastating illness. The latter starts getting into some magical thinking bullsh*t for readers in similar situations seeking hope or solace.
While I was writing this, Walker/Winn took to Instagram to share clinic letters addressed to her husband showing that ‘he is treated for CBS/S and has been for many years.’ Some of these letters, however, include quotes that say the diagnosis might actually be something else. On her website, she claims that ‘the dispute with Martin Hemmings, referred to in the Observer by his wife, is not the court case in The Salt Path. Nor did it result in us losing our home. Mr Hemmings is not Cooper. Mrs Hemmings is not in the book, nor is she a relative of someone who is.’ She does accept that she made ‘mistakes’ while working with Hemmings, but claims that the real case mentioned in her book is a separate financial issue.
This whole case is, to put it mildly, messy as hell. If Walker/Winn’s rebuttals stand up to snuff then it could be that The Observer rushed out a half-baked investigation, perhaps to cash in on The Salt Path’s film release. It could be that the story was all fake, or at least parts of it were, and readers were duped. Winn accuses The Observer of steamrolling over her request to correct their supposed mistruths because they wouldn’t keep that discussion private (it would be journalistically questionable to allow such a conversation to remain off the record anyway). Neither option is especially favourable, although it would be pretty damn painful for a major newspaper to have so thoroughly screwed up an investigation this major. It would all make for one hell of a book.
