The Salt Path's author accused of stealing £64k before losing house in court battle

Telegraph

2 days ago

The bestselling author of The Salt Path has been accused of stealing £64,000 before losing her home after paying back the illicit gains.
Raynor Winn's memoir, written in 2018, traces how losing her beloved Welsh farmhouse following a 'bad investment' and battling her husband's corticobasal degeneration diagnosis spurred the penniless pair to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path.
The book gained plaudits for its ' unflinching honesty ', selling two million copies worldwide. Last year, it was adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
The author has gone on to write two sequels and secured a lucrative contract with Penguin to publish at least one more.
But an investigation by The Observer claims the reason Winn and her husband, Moth, ended up in financial difficulty was because she was caught embezzling funds.
The investigation claims the couple are believed to have been known as Sally and Tim Walker before they fled Wales after losing a court battle.
Questions have also been raised over Moth's rare neurological condition, which is a similar disease to Parkinson's.
The life expectancy of sufferers is around six to eight years, but he has been living with the condition for 18 years with no apparent visible side effects.
Winn has branded the Observer article as 'highly misleading' and emphasised that The Salt Path 'is the true story of our journey'. The author did not clarify which parts of the article she contested.
In the book, Winn explains how a childhood friend of her husband's called Cooper had persuaded the pair to invest in his business which later went bust.
Winn said Cooper took the couple to court to recoup the debt, where the judge ruled their house should be repossessed in lieu of the owed money.
Last month, Winn told Country Life magazine: 'Our lives had been suddenly turned upside down: my husband Moth had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and we became homeless, thanks to a bad investment.
'We had nothing to lose, so we decided to go for a very long walk.'
Accusations of stealing money
But a woman claiming to be the wife of the author's former boss says that is not the true story of how the couple ended up in financial difficulty. Ros Hemmings has accused Winn of pocketing money while she worked part-time as a bookkeeper for an estate agency and property surveyor in Pwllheli, north Wales, in the 2000s.
Ms Hemmings said her husband Martin, the firm's owner, had noticed Winn failed to deposit a large sum of money in 2008, prompting him to conduct an audit and find that around £9,000 was missing from the previous few months.
Winn is said to have pleaded with Mr Hemmings for a chance to pay the money back.
'She was sobbing in the yard and said: 'I've even had to sell my mother's wedding dress to do this,'' Ms Hemmings told The Observer, adding that the family had accepted her offer.
She added: 'Her claims [in the book] that it was all just a business deal that went wrong really upset me. When really she had embezzled the money from my husband. It made me feel sick.
'In the end, I think it was around £64,000 that Raynor Winn had nicked over the previous few years.'
Michael Strain, the Hemmings' solicitor, said Winn had been arrested and interviewed by police but vanished after being sent home for the night.
Money borrowed from distant relative
A life coach in her 60s, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Observer that Winn had shown up in London in 2008 asking her husband, a distant relative of Moth's, for a loan to repay the money to Mr Hemmings.
' [Raynor] 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,' the life coach said.
The Winns allegedly borrowed £100,000 from the couple, secured against their house, and repaid the money to Mr and Ms Hemmings.
When the family member's business went bust in 2010, the loan is said to have passed on to two people he owed money to. They called it in and took the Winns to court in 2012, securing possession of their house.
The family member reportedly filed a witness statement in which he told the court that 'the purpose of the loan is clear: it was required to settle a criminal allegation made against Mrs Walker'.
It is also claimed that rather than being 'homeless' after losing the property in Wales, the Winns have owned a property in south-west France since 2007.
'Article is highly misleading'
Prof Michele Hu, a consultant neurologist and professor of clinical neurosciences at Oxford University, also told the Observer that Moth's illness did not add up.
'I would be very sceptical that it is corticobasal. I've never looked after anyone that's lived that long,' she said.
Winn has acknowledged that her husband's recovery seems miraculous.
'We do know that neuroplasticity exists, although we know very little about it,' she writes, adding: 'We used to think the Earth was flat. We used to think no universe existed beyond our own.'
A statement made on behalf of Winn by her lawyers said: 'Today's Observer article is highly misleading.
'We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time. 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.'