The Truth Behind The Memoir

Looking for your next office? Discover WeWork's new real estate platform built for a smarter way to work, with forty-five million square feet of office space in 1 20 cities across 34 countries. We've got you covered. For global co-working to CustomOffice Solutions, visit WeWork.com. The future of real estate isn't one size fits all. That's why WeWork has created a new platform built for a smarter way to work. A composable stack of real estate, services, and technology you can figure for the way your business works today and tomorrow. Our team of experts are ready, building end-to-end solutions for businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500s to entrepreneurs. Whatever you need, we've got you covered. Unlock the only real estate platform built for a sm arter way to work. We work. Made for work, built for your business. Hello, and welcome to the last of this year's Paul Foot Award shortlist entries. We're interviewing six brilliant hacks who've produced fantastic investigative campaigning stories, all of which have been shortlisted for this year's award. So let's find out the final story shortlisted for an award this year. Page ninety four The Private Eye Podcast. I'm Chloe Hedgematho and I work for the Observer newspaper. Okay, and what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award? So what's brought me here is the true story of the true story of the salt path. So this is a m emoir that was sold as unflinchingly honest by Penguin, written by a woman called Raina Wynne about her and her husband, who are beset by misfortune. First they lose their home after a close friend sort of tricks them out of it and they have it repossessed, and then the very same week they find out that the husband moth is suffering from a terminal neurological disease. And instead of being sort of absolutely devastated by this news . They take the quite extraordinary decision to walk the entire southwest coastal path of Britain, 6 30 miles, and the memoir is the story of this walk. And along the way , somehow the effort of walking and of being in nature makes Moth better. The symptoms of his disease reverse, and at the same time, Rayner discovers that h her realome is with her husband and the love that they share. And so this was a hugely, hugely successful memoir. Yes, a lot of homes up and down the country contain a copy of The Salt Path. I've got a copy at home, um which uh a friend gave me and said this is a this is a really fantastic book. It's a very s moving true story. How did it come to your attention? Why are we talking about this memoir in the context of the Paul Foot Award? Because Because I got a tip off. So a member of the public contacted me and said I've met this couple and I think there's something fishy going on. I think you should look into them particularly. I don't think he is suffering from a terminal illness. I think they've over egged his illness. And so I went to my editor with this, and my editor said, I'm not sure this is a story. It's really hard to prove whether somebody's ill or dying or not. Why didn't you ask them? And so the first thing I did was write to Raynor and Moth. They weren't forthcoming. They wouldn't give me an interview and they wouldn't answer my questions. And so then I sort of begged the observer to let me go down to Wales, where they originally lived, and look into the allegations a bit a bit more. What did you find when you got to Wales? I found and I had heard rumours that she worked for an estate agent and that something had gone wrong there, the relationship had broken down. So I went round all the estate agents in this small town, Portheli in in in Wales, and eventually somebody said, I think I know who you need to talk to, a woman called Ross Hemmings. I think this woman worked for her husband. And so I managed to track this lady down and Raina Wynne, who was back then known as Sally Walker, that's her legal name, had indeed worked for this estate agent. And after working there for seven years, it seems her boss discovered a substantial amount of money had gone missing. And when they looked into it, it ended up being Mr. Hemmings had passed away by the time you got there, is that right? Yes. I found his widow. Yeah. And I found lots of other people who had also worked at the company Okay. So the story's taking on a kind of financial element as well as the the initial tip-off that you've got. Did it roll on further from there? It did. So so then I discovered she'd been arrested , she had been questioned for the day and released, but then she'd fled and come down to London where she'd apparently borrowed money from a relative of her husband's, used that money to pay back her employer, the Hemings. The Hemings. And that money had gone against her house. It was a loan, essentially a private mortgage. And when she and her husband weren't able to pay it off over the next few years, their house was repossessed, which was something that they wrote about in the book. It's just that the circumstances around that repossession were very, very different from what Sally Walker Raynor Wynn had written in her m emoir. When the story was first uh published it made a big impact. I mean y there were a lot of different elements to the story as well. How long had you been working on it by that point? So I got the tip off probably at the beginning of March and I published in July. But that wasn't the end of it. So at that point I had published these allegations that she'd been arrested and borrowed money and lost her house in this way. And also , then a lot of questions that neurologists who I'd spoken to had about his profess ed neurological illness. The neurological illness that he claims to have been suffering with has an ex life expectancy of only about six to eight years. And at that point he had claimed to have had it for eighteen years. Right. Which apparently was unheard of, and he had no visible symptoms What was the reaction from uh Raynowin and Moth when the story was printed in in regard to these uh the medical allegations in particular? Well it's it's really funny, isn't it? 'Cause you do these investigations and then you send off this email. I'd tried lots of times to engage them and I'd said, let's have an off the record conversation, can we just have a chat about this? I'd tried the same with Penguin and not got anywhere. And so eventually I sent this more formal kind of right of reply, we call it, with all the allegations. And then I sort of had a few sleepless nights, wondering what they were going to come back with. And it was a really quite toothless response, they basically said yes he's definitely ill, without providing any real initially they didn't provide any evidence at all. Then she released a couple of doctors' letters . Again, when I showed those to neurologists, they said to me there's nothing in here that says that he's been diagnosed with a neurological condition. They can't understand. And one of the things they've thought about is this neurological condition, but the fact that it's not progressing and he's been around for so long means that they've also sort of dismissed it. So he hasn't been diagnosed in these letters. But also overall essentially their response was this is our truth. You may have come back with all these facts and allegations, but our truth is that we walked the South West Coastal Path as we claimed. It's a very interesting story because it it's quite revealing about the nature of publishing. Forensic, you know, New Yorker level facts check where absolutely every detail is checked over and over . What do you m make of that? Do you think that should be a requirement for for publication? I think it's impossible with memoir and I think it would be yeah I think it would be a ridiculous thing to expect publishers you know if I say this happened in my life how on earth are they gonna go back you know thirty forty years to check what happened in my childhood? I don't think you can with memoir. There's there's got to be quite a lot that you take on trust. But I think when m big allegations are being made about things that aren't usual are sort of miracle cures, like the idea that somebody has a terminal illness and that because they've done this extraordinary walk suddenly they've got a miraculous recovery. I think these are health claims that it is for the publisher to check because you know there there could be serious harm that comes from that. In what way, in terms of other people with this condition? I mean I was contacted by an enormous number of people whose you know, family members had had all sorts of neurological conditions, some this particular one, but it's very, very rare. So other people had, you know, similar types of neurological conditions. And they felt incredibly gas-lit by this book because people would say to them, Oh, did you get your mother or your husband or you know, did you get them to try and walk? And they'd say, well, they can't walk. That's the whole that's one of the symptoms of this condition. You can't walk. The idea that you would force them to take a walk that somebody who's extremely healthy would find challenging just was crazy for them. But that's the alleg that's the claim that this book made. Is that why you think the story caught up Well I I don't think so, because it's actually a small number of people that were affected, particularly in it by the the health claims. I think it it took me by surprise. I didn't expect it, I don't think anyone at the observer expected it to be such a massive story. But my take on it is that in modern life we feel like we're being lied to all the time anyway. We feel like we're being had. You know, whether it's the beauty industry that's telling me that I could look like a 20-year-old if I bought the right cream, or whether it's our politicians lying to us. We feel like we're getting it from everywhere, but then you pick up a book, a penguin book, and you don't expect it from there. So you're guards down. And I think people felt really outraged. I think they really felt like they'd been had and there was a lot of anger. Has it changed how you read nonfiction? Definitely, I have to say. There are these investigations that I do in the past I've done investigations where I found professors and former diplomats have said crazy things that just aren't true. And before then I'd often seen professor or you know former dip you know former ambassador and I'd immediately given that some trust and that's gone because of past investigations I've done and now I think that, you know, factual books also don't I don't afford them the kind of trust that I did before I think. There's going to be at least one more book in the Salt Path series. Is there? So well that's I'm just going on what I hear from the publishers. It's been written, but I'm not convinced it will get published. The date has now been reset for 2028. Okay. I don't know. I think if they were going to publish it, they probably would have done it already. Lots of people in the publishing industry said, you know, oh, I think they will, because it will be a huge success, whatever it says. I would have bought it. If I'm being completely honest, I would have probably been the first person in the bookshop to find out what she's got to say next. Yeah. I think that Penguin is probably kicking the can down the road and they're gonna quietly make it go away. But the sales of the original do seem to have held up very steadily Well I think at some point there was a blip where I think I kind of helped them. I know at one point my dad called me and he said I've just read your article in The Observer and I've gone out and bought the salt path. And I said, Dad, you know, this is what eBay's for. But I think a lot of people who wouldn't have ordinarily chosen a book like this were fascinated by what all the sort of all the hype was all about. And so they went out Are you still working on the story? I know there were several follow-ups in the first place. No. I mean I think where I wrapped it up was when I discovered that she had she had always claimed that the salt path was a sort of accidental book and and the very first book she'd ever written. And I discovered that actually she'd written a fiction book years earlier, which they had self published, her and her husband before they lost their house in Wales. And this fiction book tells the story of a young couple who moved to Wales who buy a house. She gets a job as an estate at an estate agent. She's accused of stealing an enormous amount of money. She gets arrested, runs away down to London, borrows money against her house and then the couple lose their home. That was the fiction. At that point I sort of thought, well, that brings the investigation to a nice end. And that's where I've left it. So the the novel she wrote seems to be based on fact and the memoir was not? Was made up. Yeah. That's what it seems. Wow. I know. It just kept giving this story. Did you face any anger when the story was initially published from people who loved the story and were disappointed that you were raising questions over its truth?