February 13, 2025 • 18 mins
An Aussie Netflix series has become one of the most watched shows on the platform. Since 'Apple Cider Vinegar' was released just over a week ago, it’s been streamed nearly four million times and made it into the top five of the streaming service’s global charts. The miniseries follows the rise of Australian wellness blogger Belle Gibson, who claimed she’d been diagnosed with a malignant brain cancer. Gibson told her followers she was treating her cancer with a strict health routine of organic foods, coffee enemas and juices. She amassed hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, secured a lucrative book deal and landed an Apple partnership. But… she never actually had cancer. Today, we’re exploring the true story behind Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar and the rise and fall of Belle Gibson.
Hosts: Zara Seidler and Billi FitzSimons
Producers: Orla Maher and Emma Gillespie
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already, and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh,
now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
the fourteenth of February. Have you Valentine's Day? What are
you going to say to you? Have we gone my
Valentine's Day with not?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Like we don't spend too much time together already. Maybe
for Valentine's Day we can get a break from each other.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
It does sound like quite the gift. We should definitely
work towards it. Next here now on today's podcast, we're
talking about the story behind the biggest Netflix show at
the moment. Since Apple Cider Vinegar was released just over
a week ago, it's been streamed nearly four million times
and it's made it into the top five of the
Streaming Services global charts. Now, this series follows the rise
(00:52):
of Australian wellness blogger Belle Gibson. If you're not familiar
with Belle Gibson, she claims she had been diagnosed with
a malignant brain camp and then said that she was
treating her cancer with a strict health routine. In twenty thirteen,
she began documenting her treatment journey online and a mass
hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Everyone's talking about Belle
(01:17):
Gibson at the moment, and I think yesterday you and
I realized that there are two camps of people, people
like us who have followed and been obsessed with the
story of bell Gibson for a very long time, and
people that are learning about her now for the very
first time.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah, it's interesting that people who are learning about the
story of Belle Gibson for the first time. It's kind
of this new wave of shock that this story exists. Yeah,
because it is so surprising and shocking. That's not a
word that I like to use often, but it really
is a shocking story. So we're going to talk about
Belle Gibson's lies that came to like a decade ago.
(01:52):
Let's start with who Belle Gibson was before she rose
to prominence.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So Annabelle Natalie Gibson was born in October of nineteen
ninety one, and hold onto that because that becomes a
contentious fact down the road.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You'd think of birthday, I know, you'd think it's it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Was not going to be contentious, but it really is.
So Belle Gibson was raised in suburban Brisbane by her mother,
and she also had one brother. In interviews, Gibson described
her childhood as being difficult. She said she was burdened
by responsibilities like caring for her brother. Her high school
teachers described her as a great student and a high achiever.
(02:31):
Now during that time, she also took acting classes outside
of school, and her drama teacher reports that from the
time that she was quite good at acting. Her friends
from her childhood have told journalists in the years since
this whole story began to unravel that Gibson became known
for compulsively lying and that people made fun of her
(02:51):
in her childhood because of it. They claimed the Gibson
would make up things about her life, things like being
in witness protection or surviving major health ish shoes. Then,
at eighteen, Bell Gibson moved to Perth and that is
when her storytelling moved from in real life to the Internet.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So she started sharing stories on the internet. I presume
this was pre Instagram. Where did she first start?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
There is, well, pre Instagram.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
So where was she sharing those stories?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, you're right, it was pre Instagram. So she started
blogging in an online chat room. So we're talking about
two thousand and nine. Here she'd write about being in
a hospital. She'd write about undergoing tests for a heart
tumor and preparing for chemo. She said she'd had major
heart surgery and then eventually claimed she was diagnosed with
(03:40):
terminal brain cancer and only had a few months left
to live. And this is really the crux of the story,
and it really was the center of her story and
what she told her followers at the time. Gibson said
a cervical cancer vaccination had caused her to have a
stroke and then somehow that stroke led to brain cancer.
(04:01):
I do just want to, you know, for full clarity
here say, the HPV vaccine, which is the vaccine that
can prevent cervical cancer, has not been linked to brain
cancer or strokes. But Gibson's anti vaccine narrative is really
critical to this story because it's why she claims she
didn't want to undergo conventional cancer treatment, things like chemotherapy
(04:25):
or radiotherapy that are traditionally used to respond to a cancer,
and so she says that set her down an alternative
therapy path. In twenty ten, Gibson moved to Melbourne, so
started in Perth move to Melbourne to undergo treatment with
a neurologist and an immunologist. She claimed his name was
doctor Mark Johns from Melbourne's Peter Mack, but there is
(04:47):
no record of a doctor by that name at the center.
She also gave birth to her son at that time.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Okay, so she starts posting on social media about her diagnoses,
alleged diagnoses. What kind of conversations were people having online
in twenty ten when she started posting this.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it's interesting, and I guess it's strange for us
to consider now. But back then, when Bell Gibson first
started posting about these diagnoses and then her alternative treatment methods,
we hadn't really had these big national conversations about wellness.
So she was really part of this growing online movement,
(05:26):
the wellness movement back in twenty ten. At the time,
that online movement was really being led by a young
woman called jess Ainsco.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And for those listening who have been watching the Netflix show,
you might know that there is a character on there
that is called Miller Blake in Appleside of Vinegar. So
is that person, jess Ainsco? Is that who the character
Miller Blake is based on?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, it is, And so she's really considered this like
original wellness warrior. So I'll just give a bit of
context as to who she is. I think at orients
us in how big this movement became. So at twenty three,
Jests was diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive cancer
in her left arm and hand, and she was told
her best chance of survival was amputation, but she rejected
(06:13):
that recommended treatment in favor of an alternative therapy. It's
called Gerson therapy, which was a food based protocol that
basically claims to cure illness, including cancer, with an all
vegetarian diet and these juices. If you've watched the show,
you can see those juices in it. Now, there's no
scientific evidence that Gerson therapy cures cancer, and tragically Jess
(06:37):
died in twenty fifteen. But before that point she believed
this treatment was her medicine, and she built up an
online profile by promoting this belief and promoting these juices
and how she believed she was treating herself. Now, Belle
Gibson bringing it back to her, saw Jess sharing her
treatment journey online, saw her gaining a following, and decided
(07:00):
that she was going to do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And how did she do that? How did Belle Gibson
grow an audience on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It's interesting because today on TikTok, this very unpolished like
day in the life content goes viral. It's very normal
for us to see. But back then, Instagram was still
this kind of highlights reel of the best of someone's life.
And so what Gibson did, and I suppose did differently,
is that she spoke really candidly on Instagram about the
(07:29):
highs and lows of her life. So she was documenting
things about, you know, what she was cooking, but then
she was also talking about her cancer, and she was
also talking about how she was treating herself. Her follow
up base grew pretty quickly, and within a year her
ideas were turned into an app called The Whole Pantry.
Now it was full of lifestyle and wellness tips and
(07:51):
all the food that Belle said she was eating and
the recipes behind them. It became really big, this app.
It won a bunch of awards, and then Apple got
behind it and announced that it would be introduced on
the first Apple Watch, and so people when they bought
the Apple Watch, yeah, the Whole Pantry was there and
This all also then led to a book deal. Now,
(08:11):
the whole pantry book was filled with recipes and words
about Gibson's cancer battle, and that book became a bestseller,
and I was reading yesterday, I'm pretty sure her advance
was well over one hundred thousand dollars for that book, which,
in author speak, shows that this was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And did anyone question the legitimacy of her claims about
her health?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Honestly, no nobody did. At that time. Bell's followers were
constantly commenting messages of support and of sympathy for her.
She had signed a deal with a major publishing house.
She had, as I just said, signed this deal with Apple.
People loved her recipes. With all of these legitimate companies
backing her, I guess it was very normal for people
(08:55):
not to doubt her. Why would there be this huge
endorsement of someone and their story by these massive companies
if it was all a fake, If it was all
a fraud, and so there was no reason back then
for people to doubt what she was saying.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, even today, if you saw online that someone was
saying that they had been diagnosed with cancer, it would
be very odd to question that yeah, to ask for
medical certificates to question that, okay, But obviously the tide
did start to turn against Belle Gibson. At what point
did the cracks start to show.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It was twenty fifteen and the whole pantry had become
this hugely successful app, blog, and book. Gibson had also
claimed that she was donating large chunks of money to
charity throughout this success, But things shifted when publications and
journals right across the country received an anonymous email at
(09:46):
the same time basically detailing Belle's fake diagnosis. Two reporters
with The Age in Melbourne started looking into the allegations
raised by that email.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And what I know about how this worked is that
the journalists started to look into it and they found
it very difficult to prove one way or another whether
this diagnosis was real. And so their belief, their working belief,
was that if she's lying potentially about this, then what
else is she lying about? And so that's when they
started looking at potential charity donations that she had claimed
(10:20):
she had made. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, that is right. So the Age journals who were
working on this, Nick Toscano and Bo Donnelle initially contacted
Gibson for clarification, as you said, around those donations. She
was actually at the funeral of Jess who I mentioned
earlier when they first tried to contact her. But after
a few days when she couldn't explain how much of
(10:41):
the money she was making was going to charity, that's
when they started investigating further and they found out that
most of the charities that Gibson had claimed to be
supporting had never received any money from her. Others had
received small donations, but only in the days after those
journals had actually contacted her, So after she knew that
there was potentially a story coming.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And then I presume from there they just kept contacting
her and kept asking for receipts that she could not provide.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, they put a list of extensive questions to Gibson,
and when she failed to provide answers or satisfactory answers
to any of their queries, the Age then ran a
story exposing Belle Gibson's.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Lies and what was the fallout from there?
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So Gibson then did an interview with the Australian Women's
Weekly and she basically confirmed none of.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It was true, which is wild wild.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Even then though, she claimed she'd been tricked into believing
that she had cancer, rather than admitting she was perfectly healthy. Now.
There was a really, really strong reaction from her followers,
including people who had donated money to support her and
to support her ventures, but also from vulnerable cancer sufferers
who had heard continued messages about alternative therapies working for
(12:00):
Gibson but her not actually, you know, ever having a
diagnosis in the first place. The outrage led to an
iconic sixty minutes interview which some listeners might remember.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
You prepared to sign a statutory declaration to say that
everything you tell me today is the truth absolutely because
you don't have a good record on telling the truth.
Do There's nothing left to lose, and if that requires
a stat deck, then I'm comfortable with that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I went back and watched that interview the other day,
just as a thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It's crazy, it's why old.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
The fact that she kind of ever thought that it
was I mean, clearly her judgment is extremely flawed, but
the fact that after she was caught out on all
of these lies, that she thought it was a good
idea to do this interview with sixty minutes. It's hard
to understand her mindset.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
It is, and I think you know, words are narcissism
and things like that get thrown around when talking about
someone like Belle Gibson. But think when you watch that
interview and you think about this story, this isn't just
a story of someone lying and perhaps profiting off that lie.
I think what I mentioned before is really what makes
this story so unbelievable, which is that so many vulnerable women,
(13:20):
usually who were sick themselves, followed this plan or this
alternative therapy that was rooted in nothing in lies. And
so you know, there was so much public outcry, as
you said, and then especially after that sixty minutes interview
where she had said that she wanted to do the
interview to be transparent and to apologize and to explain.
(13:43):
But then as the interview at Tara Brown discovered it
was just a lot of excuses from someone who essentially
just didn't want to tell the truth.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay, so it was clear that she had lied. There
weren't really any satisfactory answers that came to light. She
kept giving excuses. She still maintained that she had been
given these diagnoses, but that the doctors were the ones
that lied, not her. That obviously led to a public fallout.
I'm interested in what happened to her corporate relationships, like
her for Bolstered, Yeah, like the book publisher that you mentioned,
(14:15):
and like Apple.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah. So she lost the support of Apple and her
publishers pretty quickly after the truth came to light. But
then there was also the question of criminal ramifications, because
you know, the corporate deals are one thing, but had
she broken the law here. Victoria's Consumer affairs Minister Jane
Garrett told the ABC at the time that the watchdog
would take civil action in the federal court against Gibson
(14:40):
and her now defunct company for misleading and deceptive conduct.
At the time, Garrett said, all of those claims made
by her around when she suffered the illness, her therapies
in respect of that illness, and what she did with
her own alternative remedies are false and misleading and deceptive.
We will be seeking penalties to ensure that conduct is
(15:00):
not undertaken again. In March twenty seventeen, the federal court
upheld most but not all, of the allegations against Gibson
and her company, finding that she had engaged in misleading
and deceptive conduct.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
And what was that fine?
Speaker 2 (15:15):
So she was fine more than four hundred k's four
hundred thousand dollars for several breaches. Additional legal action was
launched in twenty eighteen because those fines were still unpaid.
That in twenty nineteen, Gibson appeared in court and claimed
she couldn't afford to pay the fine. There have been
multiple raids of her Melbourne homes in an effort to
(15:36):
recoup some of that debt, which has since increased to
more than five hundred thousand dollars. So we're talking about
half a million dollars here. But all those years later,
authorities are still chasing her for the money and she
still hasn't paid it. Now, bringing this story into today
and today's news cycle, Victorian Premier Justinto Allen was asked
(15:56):
about this and she said this week that Consumer's Affair
Victoria is pursuing this constantly and consistently and won't let up.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And could someone go to jail for not paying a
five hundred k fine after however many years it's been
eight years.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Look, breaching consumer law isn't the same as being convicted
of a crime, and to this day, Gibson hasn't actually
been prosecuted or found guilty in a criminal.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Court, and Belle Gibson, from my understanding, has largely retreated
from public life as one would after something like this
comes out. Do we have any information about where she
is now?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
So in twenty twenty, Belle Gibson appeared essentially to have
completely reinvented herself. We understand that she converted to Islam,
and she immersed herself in a Victorian Ethiopian migrant community
video circulated on social media, in which Belle claimed that
her heart was deeply embedded with this community. She said
(16:53):
that she felt blessed to have been adopted. Photographs from
the time also show Belle volunteering at an Ethiopian food
truck and wearing a traditional beaded head dress. But community
leaders have since distanced themselves from Gibson, and that brings
us to twenty twenty one, because from that point, there's
essentially not a whole lot that we know about bell Gibson.
(17:15):
In the age of you know, at twenty four hour
news cycle and everyone having a phone in their hands,
it's quite remarkable how unseen she is despite being so
well known, but the renewed interest in Bell Gibson from
the Netflix show has brought her story to new audiences,
as we mentioned at the top, so it'll be super
interesting to see if anything changes from this point.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I find it astonishing that we literally know nothing nothing
about her in the past four years, Like it's like
she has completely disappeared.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, we don't even know what she looks like nowadays.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Zara.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Thank you so much for explaining that, and thank you
so much for listening to this episode of The Daily os.
We'll be back this afternoon with your afternoon headlines, but
until then, have a great day. My name is Lily
Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Kalkudin woman from
Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is
(18:12):
recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays
respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations.
We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
Already, and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh,
now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
the fourteenth of February. Have you Valentine's Day? What are
you going to say to you? Have we gone my
Valentine's Day with not?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Like we don't spend too much time together already. Maybe
for Valentine's Day we can get a break from each other.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
It does sound like quite the gift. We should definitely
work towards it. Next here now on today's podcast, we're
talking about the story behind the biggest Netflix show at
the moment. Since Apple Cider Vinegar was released just over
a week ago, it's been streamed nearly four million times
and it's made it into the top five of the
Streaming Services global charts. Now, this series follows the rise
(00:52):
of Australian wellness blogger Belle Gibson. If you're not familiar
with Belle Gibson, she claims she had been diagnosed with
a malignant brain camp and then said that she was
treating her cancer with a strict health routine. In twenty thirteen,
she began documenting her treatment journey online and a mass
hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Everyone's talking about Belle
(01:17):
Gibson at the moment, and I think yesterday you and
I realized that there are two camps of people, people
like us who have followed and been obsessed with the
story of bell Gibson for a very long time, and
people that are learning about her now for the very
first time.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah, it's interesting that people who are learning about the
story of Belle Gibson for the first time. It's kind
of this new wave of shock that this story exists. Yeah,
because it is so surprising and shocking. That's not a
word that I like to use often, but it really
is a shocking story. So we're going to talk about
Belle Gibson's lies that came to like a decade ago.
(01:52):
Let's start with who Belle Gibson was before she rose
to prominence.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So Annabelle Natalie Gibson was born in October of nineteen
ninety one, and hold onto that because that becomes a
contentious fact down the road.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You'd think of birthday, I know, you'd think it's it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Was not going to be contentious, but it really is.
So Belle Gibson was raised in suburban Brisbane by her mother,
and she also had one brother. In interviews, Gibson described
her childhood as being difficult. She said she was burdened
by responsibilities like caring for her brother. Her high school
teachers described her as a great student and a high achiever.
(02:31):
Now during that time, she also took acting classes outside
of school, and her drama teacher reports that from the
time that she was quite good at acting. Her friends
from her childhood have told journalists in the years since
this whole story began to unravel that Gibson became known
for compulsively lying and that people made fun of her
(02:51):
in her childhood because of it. They claimed the Gibson
would make up things about her life, things like being
in witness protection or surviving major health ish shoes. Then,
at eighteen, Bell Gibson moved to Perth and that is
when her storytelling moved from in real life to the Internet.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So she started sharing stories on the internet. I presume
this was pre Instagram. Where did she first start?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
There is, well, pre Instagram.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
So where was she sharing those stories?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, you're right, it was pre Instagram. So she started
blogging in an online chat room. So we're talking about
two thousand and nine. Here she'd write about being in
a hospital. She'd write about undergoing tests for a heart
tumor and preparing for chemo. She said she'd had major
heart surgery and then eventually claimed she was diagnosed with
(03:40):
terminal brain cancer and only had a few months left
to live. And this is really the crux of the story,
and it really was the center of her story and
what she told her followers at the time. Gibson said
a cervical cancer vaccination had caused her to have a
stroke and then somehow that stroke led to brain cancer.
(04:01):
I do just want to, you know, for full clarity
here say, the HPV vaccine, which is the vaccine that
can prevent cervical cancer, has not been linked to brain
cancer or strokes. But Gibson's anti vaccine narrative is really
critical to this story because it's why she claims she
didn't want to undergo conventional cancer treatment, things like chemotherapy
(04:25):
or radiotherapy that are traditionally used to respond to a cancer,
and so she says that set her down an alternative
therapy path. In twenty ten, Gibson moved to Melbourne, so
started in Perth move to Melbourne to undergo treatment with
a neurologist and an immunologist. She claimed his name was
doctor Mark Johns from Melbourne's Peter Mack, but there is
(04:47):
no record of a doctor by that name at the center.
She also gave birth to her son at that time.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Okay, so she starts posting on social media about her diagnoses,
alleged diagnoses. What kind of conversations were people having online
in twenty ten when she started posting this.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it's interesting, and I guess it's strange for us
to consider now. But back then, when Bell Gibson first
started posting about these diagnoses and then her alternative treatment methods,
we hadn't really had these big national conversations about wellness.
So she was really part of this growing online movement,
(05:26):
the wellness movement back in twenty ten. At the time,
that online movement was really being led by a young
woman called jess Ainsco.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And for those listening who have been watching the Netflix show,
you might know that there is a character on there
that is called Miller Blake in Appleside of Vinegar. So
is that person, jess Ainsco? Is that who the character
Miller Blake is based on?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, it is, And so she's really considered this like
original wellness warrior. So I'll just give a bit of
context as to who she is. I think at orients
us in how big this movement became. So at twenty three,
Jests was diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive cancer
in her left arm and hand, and she was told
her best chance of survival was amputation, but she rejected
(06:13):
that recommended treatment in favor of an alternative therapy. It's
called Gerson therapy, which was a food based protocol that
basically claims to cure illness, including cancer, with an all
vegetarian diet and these juices. If you've watched the show,
you can see those juices in it. Now, there's no
scientific evidence that Gerson therapy cures cancer, and tragically Jess
(06:37):
died in twenty fifteen. But before that point she believed
this treatment was her medicine, and she built up an
online profile by promoting this belief and promoting these juices
and how she believed she was treating herself. Now, Belle
Gibson bringing it back to her, saw Jess sharing her
treatment journey online, saw her gaining a following, and decided
(07:00):
that she was going to do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And how did she do that? How did Belle Gibson
grow an audience on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It's interesting because today on TikTok, this very unpolished like
day in the life content goes viral. It's very normal
for us to see. But back then, Instagram was still
this kind of highlights reel of the best of someone's life.
And so what Gibson did, and I suppose did differently,
is that she spoke really candidly on Instagram about the
(07:29):
highs and lows of her life. So she was documenting
things about, you know, what she was cooking, but then
she was also talking about her cancer, and she was
also talking about how she was treating herself. Her follow
up base grew pretty quickly, and within a year her
ideas were turned into an app called The Whole Pantry.
Now it was full of lifestyle and wellness tips and
(07:51):
all the food that Belle said she was eating and
the recipes behind them. It became really big, this app.
It won a bunch of awards, and then Apple got
behind it and announced that it would be introduced on
the first Apple Watch, and so people when they bought
the Apple Watch, yeah, the Whole Pantry was there and
This all also then led to a book deal. Now,
(08:11):
the whole pantry book was filled with recipes and words
about Gibson's cancer battle, and that book became a bestseller,
and I was reading yesterday, I'm pretty sure her advance
was well over one hundred thousand dollars for that book, which,
in author speak, shows that this was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And did anyone question the legitimacy of her claims about
her health?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Honestly, no nobody did. At that time. Bell's followers were
constantly commenting messages of support and of sympathy for her.
She had signed a deal with a major publishing house.
She had, as I just said, signed this deal with Apple.
People loved her recipes. With all of these legitimate companies
backing her, I guess it was very normal for people
(08:55):
not to doubt her. Why would there be this huge
endorsement of someone and their story by these massive companies
if it was all a fake, If it was all
a fraud, and so there was no reason back then
for people to doubt what she was saying.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, even today, if you saw online that someone was
saying that they had been diagnosed with cancer, it would
be very odd to question that yeah, to ask for
medical certificates to question that, okay, But obviously the tide
did start to turn against Belle Gibson. At what point
did the cracks start to show.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It was twenty fifteen and the whole pantry had become
this hugely successful app, blog, and book. Gibson had also
claimed that she was donating large chunks of money to
charity throughout this success, But things shifted when publications and
journals right across the country received an anonymous email at
(09:46):
the same time basically detailing Belle's fake diagnosis. Two reporters
with The Age in Melbourne started looking into the allegations
raised by that email.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And what I know about how this worked is that
the journalists started to look into it and they found
it very difficult to prove one way or another whether
this diagnosis was real. And so their belief, their working belief,
was that if she's lying potentially about this, then what
else is she lying about? And so that's when they
started looking at potential charity donations that she had claimed
(10:20):
she had made. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, that is right. So the Age journals who were
working on this, Nick Toscano and Bo Donnelle initially contacted
Gibson for clarification, as you said, around those donations. She
was actually at the funeral of Jess who I mentioned
earlier when they first tried to contact her. But after
a few days when she couldn't explain how much of
(10:41):
the money she was making was going to charity, that's
when they started investigating further and they found out that
most of the charities that Gibson had claimed to be
supporting had never received any money from her. Others had
received small donations, but only in the days after those
journals had actually contacted her, So after she knew that
there was potentially a story coming.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And then I presume from there they just kept contacting
her and kept asking for receipts that she could not provide.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, they put a list of extensive questions to Gibson,
and when she failed to provide answers or satisfactory answers
to any of their queries, the Age then ran a
story exposing Belle Gibson's.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Lies and what was the fallout from there?
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So Gibson then did an interview with the Australian Women's
Weekly and she basically confirmed none of.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It was true, which is wild wild.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Even then though, she claimed she'd been tricked into believing
that she had cancer, rather than admitting she was perfectly healthy. Now.
There was a really, really strong reaction from her followers,
including people who had donated money to support her and
to support her ventures, but also from vulnerable cancer sufferers
who had heard continued messages about alternative therapies working for
(12:00):
Gibson but her not actually, you know, ever having a
diagnosis in the first place. The outrage led to an
iconic sixty minutes interview which some listeners might remember.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
You prepared to sign a statutory declaration to say that
everything you tell me today is the truth absolutely because
you don't have a good record on telling the truth.
Do There's nothing left to lose, and if that requires
a stat deck, then I'm comfortable with that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I went back and watched that interview the other day,
just as a thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It's crazy, it's why old.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
The fact that she kind of ever thought that it
was I mean, clearly her judgment is extremely flawed, but
the fact that after she was caught out on all
of these lies, that she thought it was a good
idea to do this interview with sixty minutes. It's hard
to understand her mindset.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
It is, and I think you know, words are narcissism
and things like that get thrown around when talking about
someone like Belle Gibson. But think when you watch that
interview and you think about this story, this isn't just
a story of someone lying and perhaps profiting off that lie.
I think what I mentioned before is really what makes
this story so unbelievable, which is that so many vulnerable women,
(13:20):
usually who were sick themselves, followed this plan or this
alternative therapy that was rooted in nothing in lies. And
so you know, there was so much public outcry, as
you said, and then especially after that sixty minutes interview
where she had said that she wanted to do the
interview to be transparent and to apologize and to explain.
(13:43):
But then as the interview at Tara Brown discovered it
was just a lot of excuses from someone who essentially
just didn't want to tell the truth.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay, so it was clear that she had lied. There
weren't really any satisfactory answers that came to light. She
kept giving excuses. She still maintained that she had been
given these diagnoses, but that the doctors were the ones
that lied, not her. That obviously led to a public fallout.
I'm interested in what happened to her corporate relationships, like
her for Bolstered, Yeah, like the book publisher that you mentioned,
(14:15):
and like Apple.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah. So she lost the support of Apple and her
publishers pretty quickly after the truth came to light. But
then there was also the question of criminal ramifications, because
you know, the corporate deals are one thing, but had
she broken the law here. Victoria's Consumer affairs Minister Jane
Garrett told the ABC at the time that the watchdog
would take civil action in the federal court against Gibson
(14:40):
and her now defunct company for misleading and deceptive conduct.
At the time, Garrett said, all of those claims made
by her around when she suffered the illness, her therapies
in respect of that illness, and what she did with
her own alternative remedies are false and misleading and deceptive.
We will be seeking penalties to ensure that conduct is
(15:00):
not undertaken again. In March twenty seventeen, the federal court
upheld most but not all, of the allegations against Gibson
and her company, finding that she had engaged in misleading
and deceptive conduct.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
And what was that fine?
Speaker 2 (15:15):
So she was fine more than four hundred k's four
hundred thousand dollars for several breaches. Additional legal action was
launched in twenty eighteen because those fines were still unpaid.
That in twenty nineteen, Gibson appeared in court and claimed
she couldn't afford to pay the fine. There have been
multiple raids of her Melbourne homes in an effort to
(15:36):
recoup some of that debt, which has since increased to
more than five hundred thousand dollars. So we're talking about
half a million dollars here. But all those years later,
authorities are still chasing her for the money and she
still hasn't paid it. Now, bringing this story into today
and today's news cycle, Victorian Premier Justinto Allen was asked
(15:56):
about this and she said this week that Consumer's Affair
Victoria is pursuing this constantly and consistently and won't let up.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And could someone go to jail for not paying a
five hundred k fine after however many years it's been
eight years.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Look, breaching consumer law isn't the same as being convicted
of a crime, and to this day, Gibson hasn't actually
been prosecuted or found guilty in a criminal.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Court, and Belle Gibson, from my understanding, has largely retreated
from public life as one would after something like this
comes out. Do we have any information about where she
is now?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
So in twenty twenty, Belle Gibson appeared essentially to have
completely reinvented herself. We understand that she converted to Islam,
and she immersed herself in a Victorian Ethiopian migrant community
video circulated on social media, in which Belle claimed that
her heart was deeply embedded with this community. She said
(16:53):
that she felt blessed to have been adopted. Photographs from
the time also show Belle volunteering at an Ethiopian food
truck and wearing a traditional beaded head dress. But community
leaders have since distanced themselves from Gibson, and that brings
us to twenty twenty one, because from that point, there's
essentially not a whole lot that we know about bell Gibson.
(17:15):
In the age of you know, at twenty four hour
news cycle and everyone having a phone in their hands,
it's quite remarkable how unseen she is despite being so
well known, but the renewed interest in Bell Gibson from
the Netflix show has brought her story to new audiences,
as we mentioned at the top, so it'll be super
interesting to see if anything changes from this point.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I find it astonishing that we literally know nothing nothing
about her in the past four years, Like it's like
she has completely disappeared.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, we don't even know what she looks like nowadays.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Zara.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Thank you so much for explaining that, and thank you
so much for listening to this episode of The Daily os.
We'll be back this afternoon with your afternoon headlines, but
until then, have a great day. My name is Lily
Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Kalkudin woman from
Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is
(18:12):
recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays
respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations.
We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
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