The author of the bestselling memoir that was adapted for Toronto festival hit The Salt Path issued a long statement Wednesday answering allegations about her book that were raised in a UK newspaper article. Raynor Winn says the report in The Observer this week “is grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life.” See her full statement below.
The film, starring Gillian Anderson as Winn and Jason Isaacs as her ailing husband Moth Winn, the movie is an adaptation of a supposedly true-to-life book about the couple’s journey along the South of England coast after they lose their home and the husband is diagnosed with corticobasal syndrome, a rare progressive neurological disease.
The Observer published a story on Saturday headlined “The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.” Written by investigative reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou, it alleges that Ros Hemmings, a widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, “knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.”
In her statement, Winn adds: “Over the past few days, I have had vitriol poured on me from all quarters, along with threats directed at me, my family, and our children. It has been incredibly hard to remain silent, something I’ve had to do while waiting to receive legal advice. That legal advice is ongoing, but I can now speak up.”
She adds: “It’s important to say, 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, they chose not to take it, preferring to pursue their highly misleading narrative.”
Here is Winn’s full statement, followed by documents including with the statement on her website (note that the last two images are two pages of the same letter):
Over the past few days, I have had vitriol poured on me from all quarters, along with threats directed at me, my family, and our children. It has been incredibly hard to remain silent, something I’ve had to do while waiting to receive legal advice. That legal advice is ongoing, but I can now speak up.
The Observer article, written by Chloe Hadjimatheou, is grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life. But, as our walk along the Salt Path taught us, when life has ground you into the dirt, you need to stand up, turn your face to the wind, and continue, unafraid. So that is what I must do.
The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south west. It’s not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope. The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can’t allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.
Before I go any further, it’s important to say, 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, they chose not to take it, preferring to pursue their highly misleading narrative.
Moth’s health
Firstly, let me address Moth’s health. With Moth’s permission, and on the advice of his neurologist, I am releasing excerpts from two clinic letters, showing he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years. This is deeply personal information that no-one should ever be forced to share. The redacted sections are for the personal privacy of Moth and the doctors involved.
Among the Observer’s many accusations, the most heart breaking is the suggestion that Moth has made up his illness. This utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion has emotionally devasted Moth, who has fought so hard against the insidious condition of Corticobasal Syndrome.
CBS is a rare condition, about which we still know very little. But to clarify how the condition is discussed – Corticobasal Degeneration, CBD (as I’ve described this condition in my previous books) is now more commonly referred to by neurologists as Corticobasal Syndrome, CBS. CBS being the clinical diagnosis which describes the symptoms observed during life, while reserving CBD for the disease observed at post-mortem. From here on I’ll refer to the condition as CBS.
I have charted Moth’s condition with such a level of honesty, that this is the most unbearable of the allegations. My books have become a record of his health, from the mornings when I need to physically help him from the bed and into the physio routine that makes his days possible. Through the movement issues, the bowel problems, the memory slips, the stiffness, the pain, the fatigue, the obsessions, and the despair. To the times, on our very long walks, when those symptoms have improved.
I have never sought to offer medical advice in my books or suggest that walking might be some sort of miracle cure for CBS, I am simply charting Moth’s own personal journey and battle with his illness, and what has helped him.
The diagnosis doesn’t come from a simple test, but rather from a long and complex route of observation, where sufferers may have symptoms for many years before they finally reach a diagnosis. Even then, many sufferers’ symptoms present in an atypical way. They might not present with the same symptoms, occurring in the same order, or with the same severity. As I’ve explained many times in my books, we will always be grateful that Moth’s version of CBS is indolent, its slow progression (P15 The Salt Path) has allowed us time to discover how walking helps him. Others aren’t so lucky.
The effect of the suggestion that Moth has made up this condition has been absolutely traumatising for him. Suggestions made by people, who do not know him, have never met him, and have never seen his medical records. But even worse, is the effect on those sufferers who have looked to Moth as a beacon of hope. The hope that, maybe not now, maybe not for them, but at some point in the future, we might find some answers to this condition that has no treatment, and no cure.
Embezzlement allegations
Onto the allegation that I embezzled money.
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.
I worked for Martin Hemmings in the years before the economic crash of 2008. For me it was a pressured time. It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.
Mr Hemmings made an allegation against me to the police, accusing me of taking money from the company. I was questioned, I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions. I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties; Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was. A part of that settlement was that I would pay money to Mr Hemmings on a ‘non-admissions basis’. This is why we needed the money back from Cooper that we invested and I come on to that next.
How we lost our home
In The Salt Path I describe a financial dispute with a lifetime friend, who I call Cooper to protect his family.
In the early 1990s, Moth made an investment in Cooper’s property portfolio. When the investment was due to mature, Cooper claimed it had failed due to low occupancy. However, we later discovered this was not the case. When we raised this with him, he conceded and although he couldn’t at that time, he promised he would eventually pay us back.
In 2008, we asked for the money back. He said he didn’t have it but offered us a loan through his company. We agreed. Because the loan was coming from his company, he said it had to follow the company’s standard loan terms: 18% interest, which he would cover, and a charge on our home in his name. He assured us this was standard practice and only temporary as he would soon repay the loan to his company, and the charge would be removed. We were uneasy, but after so many years, it seemed like a way to finally resolve the issue. We trusted that Cooper would honour his word and repay the money to his company, as repayment of our original investment.
But he didn’t return the money to us or his company and the charge against our home wasn’t removed. Instead, he used the charge on our home to pay off his business creditors. In 2010, his company went into liquidation.
As a result, in 2011 the repossession proceedings on our home began.
We tried to argue that the debt was owed to the company, not him personally, so he had no right to hold the charge. But we couldn’t afford a lawyer and had to represent ourselves. It drained everything. We put our home up for sale to try and protect some of its value, but it didn’t sell.
Meanwhile, the pressure from the claimants to sell was relentless, with constant letters, emails, daily calls. It was almost unbearable, and Moth was shaken that his friend, who he had been so tolerant of for so long, would do this.
In desperation, we briefly tried running a book-based house raffle like others had done, but quickly realised it was a mistake as it clearly wasn’t going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants.
In 2012, we asked the liquidators to check the company’s records. A year later, they confirmed we were right: the money for the loan had come from the company, so the charge should never have been in Cooper’s name and therefore it was wrong of him to assign the charge to his creditors.
We thought the case was finally over and the liquidators had said they would accept a payment plan, so our home would be saved. But in court, because I hadn’t submitted the paperwork correctly, the judge dismissed the letter as “just a piece of paper.” He refused to allow another appeal from us. And our home of over twenty years, that we had lovingly restored with our own hands, was gone.
Property in France
What we own in France is an uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch, on the boundary of a family member’s property. Bought in 2007, by remortgaging our home, to prevent a developer buying it. It has missing walls, a collapsed roof, no running water, drainage, or electricity. It is not the property shown in the video accompanying the Observer article. We have never lived there, that would be impossible, and we haven’t been there since 2007. The insinuation that we were not homeless, the central premise of the book, is utterly unfounded. Nor, do we owe any council tax in France, there are no debts outstanding there.
We did try to sell the land after the economic crash in 2013, but the local agent said it was virtually worthless and saw no point in marketing it.
Debts
I find the accusation that we use pseudonyms to avoid debt particularly surprising. As the Observer has, so intrusively, entered every other area of my life, they could have run a simple credit check against me and Moth. Had they done so, they would have found we have no debts.
When we lost our home, contrary to the reports in some media outlets, we chose not to become bankrupt. We hoped that one day we would be able to settle the outstanding debts that had accrued during the years of the intense work on the court case, which had taken so much of our time and energy. Anyone who has struggled on a limited budget will know that as debts begin to accrue, it can be very difficult to stop them growing. But, instead of going bankrupt and having all our debts wiped off, as would have been so easy to do, we made arrangements with our creditors for minimal repayments.
When, much later, I received an advance for The Salt Path, we used this to repay what we could. Over the subsequent years I tracked down our remaining debts and now believe I have tracked down and repaid everyone.
I do not owe, as claimed in the Observer, hundreds of thousands of pounds to those who evicted us from our home. We have never been informed that the repossession did not satisfy the matter. We have never heard from the claimants since we left our home and they have made no attempt to contact us, despite my keeping all communication channels open so that they could.
And to the man in the garage, who says I owe him money – if I have missed a debt, please contact me.
Much as we loved our home and never wanted to leave, contrary to the Observer’s allegations, we have never used it as our legal address for the purpose of avoiding debt. I put a postal redirection in place for three years following the eviction, there was nothing more I could do to control the post. As anyone who has ever moved house knows, despite our best efforts, some post will always sneak through the net and end up at your old property. As anyone who has ever lost their home knows, when you are evicted, changing the address on your driving licence is the least of your concerns.
Our names
So, finally, what’s in a name? Everything it seems from some of the hate that has come my way because of what the Observer article has said about me and Moth.
Let me explain my names. Winn is my maiden name and like most women who have married I’ve used both my maiden name, Winn, and married name, Walker. In the early years after Moth and I met, I told him I disliked my name Sally Ann, it made me think of ringlets and gingham dresses, and how I wished I’d been given the family name of Raynor. From then on, he called me Ray. It is the name many people who are close to me have known me by, and the name I love and chose as my pen name. Moth is just an abbreviation of his name – Timothy.
We are accused of hiding behind pseudonyms. This is blatantly untrue. Like most, we use these nicknames alongside our legal names. The legal names we use on our bank records, our utility bills etc. Our friends and neighbours use Sal and Tim interchangeably with Ray and Moth – there is nothing hiding in our names.
I would like to thank all the readers and viewers who have shared our journey that followed these events, either by reading my book, or watching the film. And especially those who have written with their kind messages of support in the last few days. You have no idea how much that has meant to me and my family.
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