"Rip" Davenport is LESS than meets the eye at his new website www.ripdavenport.com.
In 2010, Ripley Davenport, working hand in glove with his wife Laura, began marketing himself as a "renowned desert explorer" HERE and HERE. They claimed he had lived with the Tuareg nomads in Niger and the Gadia Lothar nomads in India and studied their ways, trekked solo across the Kara Kum desert in Turkmenistan, traveled solo, undetected, and unassisted for 82 days with camels from Oranjemund in Namibia to the Angolan border, served 7 years in British Special Forces as a combat paramedic, climbed Mount Lenin, was a "sought after expedition leader" with two advanced academic degrees. Based on those false claims trusting clients paid him to "guide" them, journalists believed and reported their false claims as "news", donors gave them thousands of dollars in cash and materials, institutions like the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club granted membership, and the Rotary Club of Copenhagen heard his slideshow about an expedition that never happened. He got a Speakers Agency to represent him.
It is a long and well-documented list. It was all hogwash. They never provided any proof because there was none. Fifteen years later, he finally comes clean.. sort of.
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Ripley Davenport in his own words (circa September 2025):
"Back in 2010, I made some pathetic false claims. A few adventures I hadn’t completed. Places I hadn’t visited. They weren’t criminal acts. Nobody got hurt. Nobody complained. They were exaggerations, rooted in fear, insecurity, and a deep longing to belong in the competitive adventure world. I regret them. I don’t excuse them. I take full responsibility." Click for attribution
and
"Back in 2010, I exaggerated a few things, places I hadn’t been, expeditions I hadn’t done prior to 2010. Classic young‑bloke nonsense. Insecurity dressed up as adventure. I’ve owned it, apologised for it, and lived with the fallout longer than most people serve prison sentences." Ripley Davenport 2025 Click for attribution
People did get hurt. People did complain.
Davenport was a 40-year-old "young bloke" with two kids in 2010
Those tepid "mea culpas" appeared in the last three months of 2025 on Davenport's Medium page, https://medium.com/@ripdavenport. After 15 years of claiming to be a victim of cyberstalking and adamantly claiming that he had evidence that all the "claims" of expedition exploits were true, Davenport NOW believes he has taken "full responsibility" by posting brief, self-pitying admissions that dismiss the gravity of his deceptions. His admissions are hidden where no one he deceived would ever see. To the best of my knowledge, Ripley never contacted ANY of the people he deceived and apologized. The deceptions of the Davenports include failure to pay rent owed, accepting payments for services under false pretenses and failure to complete work he was paid to do. In the US, we can call this fraud.
The Davenports also lied to multiple police agencies, making factually unfounded claims that they were victims of cyberstalking. Those agencies include the Bozeman, MT police in the US, the American FBI, the Irish Garda, the Swedish Polis, and the Victoria, Australia police. In every case, the allegations were quickly discerned by the various agencies to be baseless and a waste of time and public funds.
Here is the complete Ripley and Laura Davenport story: www.ripleydavenport.net
(The entire list of archived pages of ripleydavenport.net can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/ripleydavenport.net* )