The series Apple Cider Vinegar, out on Netflix Feb. 6, follows a wellness guru who pretends to be very unwell in a story that is based on true events.
It’s been a decade since it was revealed that the Australian wellness entrepreneur Belle Gibson, who billed herself on Instagram as a “Gamechanger with brain cancer + food obsession” did not have a malignant brain tumor after all. In 2017, Gibson was convicted of misleading and deceptive conduct, and the Federal Court of Australia ordered her to pay a fine of about $400,000 (Australian) or $322,000 (U.S.). Her cookbook The Whole Pantry was pulled from circulation.
To create the character of Belle in Apple Cider Vinegar, played by Kaitlyn Dever, showrunner Samantha Strauss turned to The Woman Who Fooled The World: The True Story of Fake Wellness Guru Belle Gibson, a nonfiction book about the scandal by journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano. The book traces Gibson’s claims that she treated her own cancer solely through nutritious meals and alternative medicine and how she built a successful lifestyle brand around the lie.
Gibson did not participate in the series and will not profit from it. Strauss sees the show, which follows Belle’s rise and fall after her lie is discovered, as a PSA about scammers in the wellness industry at a time when anti-vax sentiments and bogus COVID treatments became rampant at the height of the pandemic. She also hopes that the show will be a conversation starter about what might lead some patients to distrust doctors and put their faith in people like Gibson and alternative therapies. “There is absolutely a place for community and yoga and meditation. Drink your juice!” she says. “But listening to scientists and doctors doesn’t do us any disservice.”
Belle Gibson’s rise to fame
The real Belle Gibson joined Instagram in 2013 with the username “Healing Belle,” just as the photo-sharing social network was getting big. She quickly went viral for her aesthetically pleasing posts about being a terminal brain cancer patient healing herself naturally, rather than through traditional chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Her feed was full of recipes for organic meals and juices.
That same year, she debuted a recipe app called The Whole Pantry that earned the top rating in the Apple app store in its first month. Gibson earned half a million dollars in less than two years from the Whole Pantry brand. She published a cookbook in 2014.
As she dished out recipes, users would write to her asking for advice on how to treat their conditions, and she’d suggest foods or treatments that could help them heal. The show’s title is a nod to wellness gurus who often tout apple cider vinegar as a cure-all, though it wasn’t necessarily Gibson’s go-to cure-all.
In Apple Cider Vinegar, Kaitlyn Dever’s Belle comes off as someone quite sure of herself with lines like “I’m not ordinary; to survive, I’m extraordinary. I had to be” and “If the story isn’t working for you anymore, change the story. Change the story, change the world!”
The relationship between Milla and Belle
Apple Cider Vinegar introduces a character named Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a cancer patient who has gained popularity for using food to fight her illness and inspires Belle to craft her lie. Milla is inspired by several wellness gurus, but based mainly on Jess Ainscough, a teen magazine editor who went viral on social media for recording how she stayed in remission from cancer without going through the traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments. Even Ainscough’s mother followed her daughter’s guidance when she was diagnosed with cancer (as depicted in Apple Cider Vinegar), but she died in 2013. Ainscough died in 2015 at the age of 29.
Gibson and Ainscough ran in the same wellness guru circles, but they were never friends, as Apple Cider Vinegar shows. Gibson is seen running up to speak to Milla at one of her lectures, but Milla doesn’t give her any time. In the show, Milla is actually seen working to expose Gibson as a fraud, but that did not happen in real life because they never knew each other well besides occasionally commenting on each other’s social media profiles.
“In reality, Jess really had very little to do with Belle Gibson,” says Donelly.
And yet, as the show depicts, Gibson did show up at Ainscough’s funeral and turned heads with her loud, hysterical sobbing. She stumbled into Ainscough’s childhood bedroom and cried on Ainscough’s financé’s shoulder. Her crying came at a time when Donelly and Toscano had just sent her 21 questions for their exposé, suggesting that it’s possible her tears were not only about the end of Jess’s career, but the impending end of her own.
How it was discovered that Belle Gibson was faking cancer
Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, investigative journalists at The Age’s newsroom in Melbourne, got a tip from someone who knew her and doubted that she actually had cancer.
Throughout Apple Cider Vinegar, journalists are investigating Belle. One of them, a journalist named Justin (Mark Coles Smith), learns about Belle from his partner Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who takes solace in Belle’s feed while she’s undergoing breast cancer treatment—and even decides to pause it altogether and try alternative remedies.
Neither Donelly nor Toscano had a partner undergoing cancer treatment during their investigation. In real life, their tipster was a friend of Gibson’s, Chanelle (Aisha Dee in the show), who had tried to stage an intervention, but failed when Gibson stuck to her story. Chanelle described how Gibson had a seizure in the middle of her son’s fourth birthday party in 2014, but she wouldn’t allow anyone to call an ambulance and she refused to go to the hospital, which aroused her suspicions that she was lying. Chanelle had also spent two days cooking meals for a family that had a son with brain cancer, but Belle never delivered them, and Chanelle discovered them stacked in her freezer.
Overall, she never looked sick, and Gibson’s jet-setting lifestyle online did not reflect her supposed diagnosis. The journalists spoke to several people in Gibson’s inner circle who wondered whether the seizure was real and who had never seen her go to a doctor. The journalists showed several oncologists Gibson’s post describing how her cancer spread, and they said that’s not how cancer works.
But since not enough sources would go on the record, they decided to figure out if they could uncover another lie. In March 2015, Donelly and Toscano broke the news that Gibson had promised to raise money for five charities, but that none of them had received the funds. Then they published the doubts about her cancer. Amid the onslaught of criticism, Gibson posted on Facebook “the work my company and its content did change hundreds of thousands of lives for the better.” Three months later after The Age’s exposé, she admitted to The Australian Women’s Weekly that she lied about having cancer.
Donelly and Toscano turned their reporting on Gibson into the 2017 book The Woman Who Fooled The World, which detailed the lengths that Gibson went to cover up her cancer lie. One of Gibson’s former assistants told them that she never had medical treatments in her schedule, despite posting on social media that she was at doctor’s appointments. An artist who almost collaborated with Gibson said she told them she developed psychic abilities after her seizures that enabled her to feel people’s auras. Once, her partner Clive Rothwell (Ashley Zukerman in the show) dropped her off at a hospital and then watched her walk into a neighboring park instead.
The reason Belle Gibson pretended to have cancer
That’s the biggest mystery to this day.
“Belle has always, since an early age, been peddling stories of miraculous medical survival,” Toscano says. For the book, the journalists spoke to many childhood friends who knew Belle and they recalled she would talk about having heart surgery and that she’d tell people she once died and had to be resuscitated. “She managed to elicit sympathy from people by telling people these both stories of bogus medical dramas.”
Strauss made a concerted effort not to portray her as having a particular mental health illness because that has never been confirmed in real life, arguing, “We didn’t think that was appropriate.”
Donelly thinks that the seizure at her son’s birthday party was attention-seeking behavior designed to garner sympathy at a time when several people in her inner circle were starting to wonder whether or not she really had terminal cancer, so “maybe she was trying to offer some evidence that she was sick.”
Certainly Gibson’s story was popular because she gave people something to believe in. “She got away with it because she was promising hope to very sick, vulnerable people,” says Donelly. “It really helped that it was wrapped in a pretty bow on Instagram with beautiful photos and nice recipes.”
The journalists hope that viewers will think again when they come across too-good-to-be-true claims of cancer survival, or seemingly miraculous therapies for any other health issues that are not supposed to be used in conjunction with conventional medical treatments.
Toscano says: “The real danger that we came across, portrayed in this show really well, is that some of the people peddling these remedies are promoting them as something that you should do instead of chemotherapy, radiotherapy or conventional treatments. That’s where the real danger lies, and that’s the real dark side of the wellness industry.”
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