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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What is more satisfying than a story of triumph over adversity by wholesome people? A takedown. These two strands came together in a much-discussed investigation by The Observer newspaper last weekend into author Raynor Winn’s memoir, The Salt Path, which was adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
The Salt Path tells the story of Winn and her husband, Moth, who become homeless and embark on a 630-mile journey along the Devon and Cornwall coast, wild camping in all weathers. Nature proved not just spiritually healing but also physically, as Moth’s degenerative condition seemed to improve.
Unbelievable? Well, perhaps. The couple, whose real names are Sally and Tim Walker, said they lost their home because of a bad loan made to help a friend. But The Observer reported that Winn had embezzled money from her employer. The newspaper also questioned Moth’s health condition.
The memoirist is taking legal advice. In a statement this week, she said the investigation was “grotesquely unfair, highly misleading”.
This episode has implications for business beyond the publishing industry, which must be scrutinising its fact-checking procedures. After all, falsehoods are rife in working life. One recent survey by fraud detection service Hedd found that “67 per cent of large companies have seen an increase in job application fraud, attributing the trend to AI tools being used to enhance or fabricate experience or qualifications”.
I suspect the trend in storytelling for business, which requires entrepreneurs, leaders and brands to have a narrative, encourages embellishments, imposing a simplistic arc with a successful ending. It can lead people to exaggerate their humble origins to showcase their accomplishments through their own skill and talent. Like Kemi Badenoch, leader of Britain’s Conservative party, saying working in McDonald’s for three months made her “working class”.
Or entrepreneurs in the fake-it-till-you-make-it, start-up culture, telling a tall tale for investors about their future profits, the scale of business and even whether a product works (Elizabeth Holmes).
This is a peculiar moment in history. It has never been easier to scam — fraudulent emails can be dispatched in large numbers and deepfake experts generated quickly. It is also easier to expose falsehoods, after all, anyone can play armchair detective, piecing together personal details from social media and online databases.
At the same time, there is greater tolerance for lies as long as a story has “truthiness”, to use US comedian Jon Colbert’s phrase, by being plausible and emotionally resonant.
The same weekend The Salt Path story broke, I stumbled across an Instagram account with thousands of followers in which people told heartbreaking stories of unimaginable human tragedy, such as entire families killed in a car crash. How could you survive such grief, I thought, looking at the sad-faced but well-put-together bereaved. Except, as I looked closer, I saw the narrators were AI-generated characters. While some commenters complained about the fakery, others seemed moved, perhaps motivated not by gullibility but a desire to believe.
The truth matters less to some than the narrative. A couple of years ago, I asked the Hollywood actor Tom Hanks how he felt about an AI character taking his place in a film. “Some people are not going to dig it because it’s not really a real human being, and other people simply aren’t going to care because the story is OK,” he said. Frank Abagnale, whose own story of deception became the film Catch Me If You Can, told me this week: “People want to believe stories are true, especially if the character turns out to do something very positive with his life.”
It can sometimes seem arbitrary, who is investigated for wrongdoing and who is not. Whatever the veracity of Winn’s story, she could not have predicted such attention. Books are not an obvious choice for anyone wanting to get rich quick.
It also appears random who gets judged in the court of public opinion. Against a backdrop of global economic and political turmoil, The Salt Path investigation became a viral hit.
Yet, if you are found out, it may prove to be the only thing you are remembered for, said Abagnale. Despite decades of working with businesses and law enforcement to combat fraud, he said it was “once a criminal, always a criminal in the eyes of some”. While taking “sole responsibility for my mistakes,” he added, “notoriety is the worst curse an individual can experience.”