Blogger faked cancer to promote her 'cure' and healthy lifestyle programme

A new Netflix miniseries tells the story of an Australian influencer who lied about having a fatal disease to promote alternative health practices. A decade later, the story remains a cautionary tale for alternative health enthusiasts, writes Air force.

Photo: Waingro | Dreamstime.com

In 2013, an incredible story of what seemed like a miracle of survival made headlines. A young woman launched a best-selling app sharing tips on how she beat cancer.

Just four years earlier, in 2009, Australian blogger Bella Gibson, then 20, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour, by her own account, and given “six weeks, four months max” to live. However, she claimed to have refused chemotherapy and radiotherapy, instead embarking on “a journey of natural healing… through nutrition, patience, determination and love.”

Having amassed 200 followers on Instagram, which was just starting to gain popularity at the time, she launched an app about healthy living and nutrition, and then published a book, The Whole Pantry, in which she said that thanks to nutrition she had cured herself of a fatal disease.

She urged readers to follow her example: "I have found the strength to save my life."

Elle Australia named her "the most inspiring woman of the year," and in 2014 Cosmopolitan magazine awarded the blogger the Fun, Fearless Female award.

However, it all turned out to be a lie. Gibson was never diagnosed with brain cancer or “cancer of the blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver,” which she also announced on Instagram in 2014, when the first hints about the influencer being a fraud began to appear in the Australian media.

In April 2015, she finally admitted in an interview with Women's Weekly: "No, none of that is true." However, rather than fully admitting guilt, she offered a cryptic conclusion: "I'm still oscillating between what I think I know and what is reality. I've gotten over it, but I'm not quite there yet."

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How her story is presented in the series

This confusion between reality and lies, and the mental tricks Gibson used to explain her actions, became the basis for a vivid Netflix miniseries about the scandal called Apple Cider Vinegar. Showrunner Samantha Strauss crafted an unconventional narrative. A chaotic timeline that jumps between characters and events from 2009 to 2015, mixing real facts with fictional scenes (like a bizarre montage of characters singing along Toxic Britney Spears, or the appearance of a fictional doctor whom Gibson called her attending physician) - all this makes the series deliberately confusing, not allowing to fully understand what is really going on.

But could one expect that a series about a pathological liar would be filmed in a strictly documentary style?

Last year, after the release of the series "The Deer" (Baby Reindeer) Netflix has been sued by a woman who claims she was recognized on the show despite the "Based on a true story" note at the beginning of each episode.

In Apple Cider Vinegar, each episode comes with disclaimers such as "This is a mostly true story based on a lie" or "Based on a true story. Some characters and events have been fictitious or changed."

Apple Cider Vinegar is comparable to the miniseries Inventing Anna, which follows Russian-born fraudster Anna Delvey (real name Sorokina) who posed as a wealthy heiress and was convicted of fraud in 2019.

Another similar story is told in the TV series Dropout. The heroine Elizabeth Holmes attracted huge investments for her company Theranos by developing promising equipment that supposedly allows for complex research based on a tiny amount of blood. It turned out that her inventions do not work. In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Gibson, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is presented as the embodiment of the extreme of so-called hustle culture, where the "fake it 'til you make it" principle turns into a dangerous ideology rather than a positive motivational statement.

Gibson was among the first of a new breed of scammers who used social media and apps to defraud people. They included Simon Leviev, known as the “Tinder scammer,” who tricked women out of money on dating sites, and “Hollywood scam queen” Hargobind Tahilramani, who impersonated famous actresses. But even amid these scandals, Gibson’s case remains a strikingly cruel scam: faking a terminal illness to exploit vulnerable people for commercial gain and fame.

"You have to understand that Belle doesn't have friends, she has people she parasitizes on. If - and only if - she thinks you're valuable to her, she'll find a way to latch on," says Chanel, Gibson's manager (played by Aisha Dee), about the character. She's based on Belle's former friend Chanel McAuliffe.

The devastating effects of the "natural therapy" that Gibson advocated are shown in the series through the stories of two other women.

Myla Blake (played by Alycia Debnam-Carey), a 22-year-old journalist, discovers she has epithelioid sarcoma and begins blogging about her condition. She is based on real-life Jessica Ainscough, who rose to fame around the same time as Gibson. On her website, Wellness Warrior, she promoted dubious “alternative” treatments, such as an organic plant-based diet, freshly squeezed juices, coffee enemas, and natural supplements. However, Jessica did have epithelioid sarcoma, and died of it at age 30.

In the series, Gibson becomes obsessed with Mila Blake, joining her online community and then adopting not only her experience with cancer but also her way of speaking and interacting with her audience.

Gibson and Blake are vying for the title of favorite cancer influencer. They both promote alternative medicine. The title of the show, Apple Cider Vinegar, is a reference to a story Gibson told about drinking vinegar to get rid of tapeworms.

The third character, Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), is fictional but important to the plot. She represents the segment of Gibson’s followers who have been diagnosed with cancer and, under her influence, have decided to abandon conventional treatments in favour of “alternative medicine”: Ayurveda, oxygen and craniosacral therapy, and an organic diet. This picture-perfect world created on social media can seem like a tempting consolation for cancer patients, and the show shows the dangers of this approach.

It details the story of Gibson's exposure by two investigative journalists from Melbourne's The Age, Beau Donnelly and Nick Toscano, who published a book in 2017 called The Woman Who Fooled the World, which formed the basis of the series.

Back in 2015, journalists discovered that Gibson's numbers didn't add up: she claimed to have donated $300 to charities, but in reality, she had donated only about seven thousand.

Once that hoax was exposed, they had other suspicions - the stories about her health were contradictory. After admitting her deception to Women's Weekly, Gibson gave another convoluted 60 Minutes Australia interview, where she tried to paint herself as the victim of a scam - that she had been duped and taken advantage of by a quack doctor.

What happened next

Apple Cider Vinegar breaks with the tradition of true-life movies: when the screen reads, “In 2017, the Federal Court of Australia found Belle Gibson guilty of misrepresentation and…” Gibson appears and tells the audience, “You know what? You can Google it.”

Those who want to can indeed Google that Gibson was found guilty of five counts of breaching consumer protection laws in 2017, and in September of that year, the Federal Court in Melbourne ordered her to pay AUD410 (about $260) in compensation for unfulfilled charity promises. In 2021, Gibson's home was raided for unpaid fines: with penalties, the amount exceeded AUD500 (about $315).

Criminals or sick people?

Neither the series nor the interviews provide an answer to the question of why Bell Gibson did all this. A troubled childhood (as the fraudster claimed, she ran away from home at the age of 12)? A thirst for money and fame? Or is it Munchausen syndrome - a disorder in which people feign illness for attention, sympathy or care?

Neurologist Jules Montague wrote that factitious disorder (which does not imply any benefit to the person simulating any illness) does not preclude simulating for the sake of gain, and external incentives that were not there initially may appear later: "Gibson may have enjoyed playing the sick person at first. But she did not refuse the money that came her way after that."

In 2000, Dr. Mark Feldman coined the more specific term Munchausen by Internet (MBI). It describes a situation in which a person joins an online support community for people with serious illnesses and then claims to have the illness themselves.

Asked whether such people, such as Belle Gibson, are patients or criminals, Feldman replied that sometimes they are both: "But in Gibson's case, the brazenness of her ploys and the alleged embezzlement of money make the word 'criminal' more appropriate."

"There have always been miracle cure salesmen," noted journalist Nick Toscano. "There have always been people like Gibson. But what's special about this story is that it's been made possible by technology and its incredible reach."

Netflix stresses that Gibson has not received any money for her story, and it is not yet known what she thinks about it all. She has rarely appeared in public since the scandal broke. In 2020, the influencer was discovered in a video filmed in Melbourne. In it, Bell identifies herself as part of the Oromo community, an Ethiopian ethnic group; she says she now goes by the name Sabontu and is raising money for the community.

In February 2024, a reporter for Channel 9's A Current Affair confronted Gibson at a gas station and asked why she hadn't paid her fine. "Be human," she replied. "I haven't paid it because I can't afford it."

Belle Gibson remains one of the most famous health scammers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new scammers emerging in the global wellness industry, valued at $2023 billion in 6,3. Most recently, in December 2024, “healer” Hongchi Xiao was convicted of manslaughter after a 71-year-old diabetic woman died at his retreat after she stopped taking her insulin. That same year, wellness influencer Kat Torres was convicted of enslaving her followers.

The appeal of all sorts of wellness, health and spirituality "gurus" is explained in the series by a line from crisis manager Gibson Heck: "Isn't it a small miracle? Drink a little of this and you're clean again. How reassuring! I'd give anything for this balm that would relieve the tension, soften this... tragedy of being human."

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Apple Cider Vinegar should give pause to those who blindly follow medical advice from influencers who have no connection to medicine but have a large online following. The series once again reminds us that the only truly healthy approach is to critically evaluate information from the Internet.

While Gibson remains one of the most famous wellness scammers, she certainly won’t be the last. Shows like Apple Cider Vinegar are an important reminder that the internet is full of people with carefully constructed identities, both real and false. And the only surefire way to stay healthy is to approach everything with a grain of salt.

Apple Cider Vinegar is available to watch on Netflix from February 6.

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