Belle Gibson will always remember the moment her doctor told her she was dying.
At least, that’s what the former wellness influencer wrote in her 2014 book, “The Whole Pantry,” which was later pulled from publication for containing fabricated claims.
“He called me in and said, ‘You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops,’” Gibson wrote. “I remember a suffocating, choking feeling and then not much else.”
A heartbreaking diagnosis, to be sure, and also a complete lie — because Gibson, 33, was in fact never diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, despite what she told her fans for years about her illness.
A new six-part Netflix miniseries, “Apple Cider Vinegar,” takes a deep dive into Gibson’s journey from wellness guru to disgraced fraudster.
The is billed as a “true-ish story based on a lie” and is inspired by a 2017 book, “The Woman Who Fooled the World,” by two investigative journalists, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who explored Gibson’s deception.
Speaking to TODAY.com, Kaitlyn Dever, who plays a character named Belle Gibson in the show, says she wouldn’t want to ask the real Gibson any questions if she had the chance.
“I don’t have any questions for her. I appreciate the approach to the show it was really to create our own versions of the character. During shooting we’d refer to her as ‘our’ Belle. That was all I was really focusing on — creating who our Belle was with (series creator) Sam Strauss,” she says.
“I learned about the wellness world going into this. I studied the text so that I knew it like the back of my hand. Tried to get the Australian accent down. Those were my priorities, and then also adding the human emotions to her. Why she lied and why she did this horrible thing,” Dever continues.
In the years since her lies were revealed, Gibson’s story has taken some unexpected twists. Keep reading to learn more about the real Belle Gibson and what she has said about her actions.
Who is Belle Gibson?
Gibson is a former Australian social media influencer who pretended to have brain cancer, and said she had cured her cancer using a variety of natural methods.
She amassed an Instagram following beginning in 2013 when she opened up about supposed terminal illness and her “quest to heal myself naturally.”
“I wanted to share what I had learnt about health and nutrition on my journey with cancer,” she wrote in her 2014 book, according to a passage shared in “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”
Gibson said she was “totally overwhelmed” by the positive response to her posts, which inspired her to launch The Whole Pantry app, a collection of healthy recipes and lifestyle guides.
She leveraged the success of the app to build a wider Whole Pantry wellness brand, which included cookbook deals in Australia, the U.K and the U.S. The young influencer earned “half a million dollars in less than two years” from the brand, according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”
She also got glowing press coverage, as a News.com.au article from 2014 exemplifies: “IF anyone bragged they were a game changer, odds are you’d call them up themselves. But coming from Belle Gibson, it’s pure truth. Gibson is a 26-year-old with many more labels — young mum, cancer survivor, wellness warrior and social media sensation having created a global online community with her app The Whole Pantry.”
As her profile grew, Gibson continued to share updates about her health, including one 2014 Instagram post claiming that her brain cancer had spread to her blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver, according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.” Her post drew thousands of sympathetic comments from fans.
Gibson’s popularity seemed unstoppable until 2015, when she was contacted by Donelly and Toscano, journalists from the Australian newspaper The Age who had some questions about her cancer claims.
They had received a tip that Gibson was lying about her disease. Donelly and Toscano were unable to access Gibson’s medical records to verify this claim, but they continued to investigate.
“We asked ourselves, If she’s lying about this, what else would she lie about?” they wrote in their book.
So they looked into Gibson’s finances, and began to question whether Gibson had lied about her philanthropy. They wondered if the influencer was really donating large portions of her profits to various charities, as she publicly said.
It turned out she was not, and the uncovering of these financial lies marked the beginning of the end for the influencer. After Donelly and Toscano published their reporting on Gibson’s lack of charitable donations, supporters began turning against her and questioning other statements she had made about her health.
The professional fallout for Gibson was swift. Penguin Australia canceled her new “The Whole Pantry” cookbook and acknowledged it had not fact-checked Gibson’s claims about her illness and fundraising activities.
By March 2015, The Whole Pantry app had also been dropped from all Apple platforms, Donelly and Toscano reported for The Sydney Morning Herald in 2017.
After Gibson was exposed, many of her former supporters shared their anger about her deception on social media. Some accused Gibson of causing real harm to people with cancer by encouraging them to pursue alternative treatment in lieu of traditional medical interventions.
“Your story creates a false hope which causes patients to abandon therapies with demonstrated efficacy in favour of ridiculous and dangerous placebo treatments,” Lester Pepingco, a doctor based in Sydney, Australia, wrote in an open letter to Gibson, according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”
Does she have a partner and a son, like in the show?
In the show, Belle is in a long-term relationship with Clive Rothwell and she has a young son from a previous relationship.
Clive Rothwell is a real person and he and Gibson were previously together, according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.” It is unclear whether they are still a couple, as Gibson has not spoken publicly about her personal life in recent years.
In a 2019 court hearing, Gibson described Rothwell as her housemate and friend, per The Guardian.
The real Gibson does have a son, according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”
What has Belle Gibson said about her actions?
Gibson admitted to lying about having cancer in an interview with Australia’s The Weekly in 2015.
“None of it’s true,” she told the publication.
She also said it was “very scary” to confront the reality that she is not terminally ill.
“Because you start to doubt the crux of things that make up who you are. You know, I’m blonde and I’m tall, and I’ve got hazel eyes and I’ve got cancer,” she said. “And all of a sudden, you take away some of those high-level things and it’s really daunting.”
She added that she didn’t want forgiveness, and said she felt speaking out “was the responsible thing to do.”
“Above anything, I would like people to say, ‘OK, she’s human. She’s obviously had a big life. She’s respectfully come to the table and said what she’s needed to say, and now it’s time for her to grow and heal,’” she said.
In an interview a few months later with 60 Minutes Australia, Gibson claimed she had once genuinely believed she had brain cancer.
She told interviewer Tara Brown that in 2015, she met a man called Mark Johns who told her he was an immunologist and neurologist. 60 Minutes Australia said they could not find evidence of a man named Mark Johns existing.
“He had come to my home and went through a series of tests and this was dubbed ‘integrative medicine,’” she said.
She said John tested her with “a machine with lights on the front and that machine was apparently German technology” and diagnosed her with cancer.
“He said to me that I had a Stage 4 brain tumor and that I had approximately four months to live,” she told Brown.
Brown asked Gibson why she had claimed in her 2014 book that she had been diagnosed with cancer in a doctor’s office, which is a different story.
“I think that being open in telling people the way that it happened would not be understood, and that people would be disappointed or angry for me not following what is the right way to go about this,” Gibson replied.
Gibson also said she “believed (Johns) was a real doctor” and believed she had been treated for cancer.
“At the time, I believed I was having radiotherapy,” she said. “When he gave me medication, I was told that it was oral chemotherapy, and I believed it.”
She said that when she learned she had never had cancer, she was devastated.
“(Once) I received the definitive, ‘No, you do not have cancer,’ then that was something I had to come to terms with,” Gibson said. “That takes a lot, and it was really traumatizing and I was feeling a huge amount of grief.”
“Grief for not having cancer?” Brown asked her.
“No, that I had been lied to, that I felt like I had been taken for a ride,” Gibson said. “It took me a lot to unpack that. And once I was strong enough, I was ready to come out to speak with my community about it.”
What legal consequences has she faced?
In April 2017, the Federal Court of Australia issued a court order to Gibson and her company.
The order declared that Gibson had engaged in “misleading or deceptive” business conduct in violation of Australian Consumer Law when she stated she had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009, claimed she had four months to live, and claimed she “had taken and then rejected conventional cancer treatments in favor of embarking on a quest to heal herself naturally.”
The court document also stated that Gibson’s company had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct by claiming that a “large part” of earnings from the Whole Pantry app would be given to charities or good causes.
In reality, less than $10,000 was donated from earnings of about $420,000, the court said.
The court accused Gibson of not honoring her pledge to donate proceeds related to the Whole Pantry app to multiple non-profit organizations, including the Birthing Kit Foundation, One Girl and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.
Only one of these charities, One Girl, received $1,000 from Gibson and her company, and the others “received no donation,” the court said.
The court order also states Gibson did not donate as promised to the family of Joshua Schwarz, a young boy with terminal brain cancer. His family had hoped “to fly him to Mexico as a last resort for treatment,” according to “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”
Gibson met the Schwarz family through social media and promised to help them financially. However, the Schwarz family did not receive any of the promised funds from Gibson, according to the court order.
In September 2017, the Federal Court of Australia ordered Gibson to pay $410,000 in relation to her “unconscionable conduct.”
As of early 2020, Gibson had still not paid the fine, which had grown to more than half a million Australian dollars due to interest and other expenses, according to the Australian Associated Press, via The Guardian.
Authorities raided Gibson’s home in Melbourne in January 2020 in an attempt to seize items to sell to partially recoup her unpaid fine, the AAP reported at the time.
Gibson’s home was raided once again in 2021 after the fine remained unpaid.
In late 2023, Donelly and Toscano received another update from Consumer Affairs Victoria, which they shared in their book.
A spokesperson told them the agency was “continuing to pursue” Gibson and said the “entire amount” of her debt is “still outstanding.”
Where is Belle Gibson now?
A few years after her scandal, Gibson resurfaced in an unexpected way. In an interview shared on social media in 2020, she said she had been “adopted” by the Oromo community, an Ethiopian ethnic group in Melbourne.
Wearing a traditional headscarf and using the name Sabontu, Gibson referenced “our diaspora” and discussed the current political situation “back home” in Ethiopia.
When the interviewer asked Gibson what had inspired her to join the Oromo community, she called it a “blessing that was given to me.”
“I feel completely adopted by your nation and your people, and I feel like my heart is as invested as yours and your family’s,” she said.
“Your struggle is my struggle,” she added.
By 2021, Gibson had been disowned by the Oromo community after they learned of her history, according to an investigation by Daily Mail Australia.
“She was told not to come,” Tarekegn Chimdi, president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, told the publication.
“It was concerning when someone is using the community’s name who is not a member of that community,” Chimdi said. “She was coming across as more Oromo than Oromo people.”