Squiz Shortcuts - Belle Gibson

Your Shortcut to… Belle Gibson

The new Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar has brought the story of Belle Gibson back into the headlines. If you’ve heard about or been watching the show, you might be wondering about the true story of the young Aussie wellness influencer who claimed that she cured herself of brain cancer through natural therapies and a healthy diet - before being revealed as a fraud in 2015. To help bring you this Squiz Shortcut, we sat down with Squiz Kids Director Bryce Corbett who was one of the journalists involved in publishing Belle’s first admissions that she’d been lying about being sick. He takes us through: 

• why she was so influential

• how her lies were uncovered

• and why so many people are still talking about her.

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Bryce, tell us about who Belle Gibson is and what her story is about
Belle first became known in the early days of instagram, when wellness websites and bloggers were just starting to take off on social media… She was a young, single mum from Melbourne and she’d started gaining a following on an app she’d developed, along with her social media pages. That app was called The Whole Pantry, and it was about whole foods, eating well, juice cleansing and the power of food to heal. 

So she was part of the wellness movement?
Yep - it was around the time that ‘wellness’ became a noun. There were people like celebrity chef Pete Evans extolling the virtues of bone broth and paleo diets and activating your almonds. And Instagram was the perfect platform for it, with lots of lovely visuals of fresh food accompanied by health advice doled out by people who had zero medical qualifications – there was no fact checking, no one vetting the advice - it was a complete free-for-all. 

When did cancer become part of Belle’s story?
Having brain cancer had always been part of her story. She’d risen to prominence in the blogging and the Instagram-enabled wellness world for claiming to have cured her stage four brain cancer by drinking green juices. That was total bunkum, of course, but her story started to get traction in the mainstream media. She was interviewed on Sunrise about it. And each time, the lie that she had beaten this brain cancer was repeated.

Was that when she started to get noticed internationally?
Yep, it was around then that The Whole Pantry app was chosen by Apple to be included on their smartwatch when it launched. She got a big book deal with Penguin with a reported advance of $130,000. And again, neither of those big corporations did any of the proper due diligence to check that their new star had ever had the brain cancer that had propelled her to this prominence. And she also raised a lot of money through fundraising for charities - but reports say they were never paid. That’s when questions first started being asked…

How did the truth eventually come out?
The credit has to go to journalist Richard Guilliat at The Australian. He was the journalist who first smelled something fishy and made the initial inquiries, did the first interviews with Belle, and published the first stories that eventually saw the lie exposed. At the same time, 2 journalists at The Age, Nick Toscano and Beau Donelly were making their own enquiries after being tipped off by a friend of Belle’s who’d discovered the truth. And as the pressure started to mount, both Penguin and Apple started to distance themselves from her, and she hired a crisis communications agency. That agency organised for her to tell her side of things to The Australian Women’s Weekly.

And what was your involvement with the story?
I was working at the Australian Women's Weekly at the time. I sent one of our top journos, Clair Weaver to do the interview and she came back more confused than when she'd gone down because, interviewing Belle, we discovered, was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Every time you thought you'd established a fact or landed on an agreed timeline, Belle would obfuscate; she would cast doubt, backtrack, change her story, and it was utterly infuriating … I was on the phone to Belle, trying to establish facts and there were always tears and there was always hysteria and she would plead for sympathy saying that she had been duped by quack doctors and that she'd had a difficult childhood, and that she really honestly thought that she had brain cancer. 

What was the public reaction to her finally admitting the truth?
Mostly it was anger. And in, in many cases, justifiably so, many people who actually had cancer had invested in Belle and in her story. Some of them, it would later turn out, actually eschewed conventional treatment based on Belle's story of having beaten brain cancer by drinking green juice. That was an awful tragedy in and of itself. And then of course there were the charities who were promised money that never received it. But we always maintained in our reporting that she was enabled and endorsed by big companies that should have known better, and that she was a con artist or a snake oil salesman for our time in lots of respects, enabled by social media where anyone can pretty much say anything without it needing to bear any relation to the truth. 

Was she ever charged?
Eventually she was charged with misleading and deceptive conduct and breaking consumer law - not criminal law, mind you - and in 2017 she was found guilty of that and fined $410,000 - and to this day, reports say she’s never paid it. 

So, after all this time, why is she back in the headlines?
There’s a couple of TV shows around that are focusing on the story. There’s the fictionalised account of the saga on Netflix called Apple Cider Vinegar. That’s based on a book called The Woman Who Fooled the World by journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano from The Age, and there’s another one - which I was interviewed for - coming out soon called Instagram’s Worst Con-Artist which will stream on Netflix from 20 February.

We’ll definitely keep an eye out for that… One last thought - why do you think the story is still so gripping?
It’s the story that just keeps keeping on … each new generation introduced to it finds it as compelling and baffling and shocking as the first. 

It sure has a lot of people talking about it… Thanks Bryce!

Onto our Recommendations

Reading: This profile piece from the Australian Women’s Weekly, featuring the work of our very own Squiz Kids’ Bryce Corbett and his former colleague, Clair Weaver.

Reading: The Woman Who Fooled the World by journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, which the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar is based on.

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