Author Raynor Winn has issued a statement denying that she lied about some of the events chronicled in her bestselling memoir The Salt Path.
Winn’s book, published in the U.S. in 2019 by Penguin, tells the story of a 630-mile hike that she and her husband, Moth Winn, took after they lost their home and he was diagnosed with the rare neurological condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD).
In an article published on July 5 in the U.K. newspaper the Observer, reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou cast doubt on Winn’s claims that she and her husband lost their home as the result of a bad investment. Their house, Hadjimatheou writes, was repossessed after they failed to repay a loan that they had taken out to pay back money that Winn had allegedly stolen from her employer. Hadjimatheou also called into question Moth Winn’s diagnosis.
In a statement on her website, Winn called Hadjimatheou’s article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading.”
Reacting to the claim that she had embezzled money from her employer, Martin Hemmings, Winn wrote, “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.”
She denied that Moth Winn was lying about his diagnosis. “This utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion has emotionally [devastated] Moth, who has fought so hard against the insidious condition of Corticobasal Syndrome,” she wrote. She included images of three letters from clinics that showed her husband was being treated for CBD.
The Observer, she wrote, was “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.”
The controversy comes just weeks after the release of a film adaptation of The Salt Path, directed by Marianne Elliott and starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as Raynor and Moth Winn.
