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Hey, Extraordinary Stories listeners, I'm Jemma, the host of True Crime Conversations. I'm excited to bring you an episode from our podcast that I think you'll really enjoy. In this one, I interview Chanelle mccauliffe, the former best friend of convicted scammer Belle Gibson, who lied about having cancer and claimed she cured it with natural remedies. You might be familiar with Belle's story or have heard the Extraordinary Stories episodes
about it. Chanelle is the whistleblower who exposed Belle to the media, particularly to the journalists at the age. You may have also seen the series Apple Side of Vinegar, which is based on the book those journalists wrote. Chanelle shares whether she thinks the series accurately depicts what happened after convincing herself to watch it, and she takes us back to when Belle was at the peak of her influence of fame and she started to realize that it was all a lie.
Take a listen.
If you enjoy this episode, we have a whole back catalog of episodes waiting for you in the True Crime Conversations feed. And next week we're dropping an interview with the anonymous host of the Case File podcast. You can find a link to our feed in the show notes. It's early twenty fifteen and single mum and entrepreneur Bell Gibson is living a life of luxury and success.
She has a.
Widely popular recipe app called The Whole Pantry, which features nourishing, plant based recipes, and she's preparing to release a book of the same name. Last year, she was named Elle Magazine's Most Aspiring Woman You've Met this Year and was Cosmo Magazine's Fun Fearless Female Recipient. Her app claimed the Apple title of Best Food and Drink App of twenty thirteen, and a few short years later, she's already enjoying over
one million in sales. Her empire is built on an inspiring story of triumph, a harrowing and heartwarming story of survival.
She first started posting about.
Her malignant brain cancer on Instagram in twenty thirteen. Diagnosed in two thousand and nine at the age of twenty, she was given just four months to live. Instead of doing the usual chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Belle opted for alternative remedies, and, as she shared with her growing fanbase, they worked, they healed her. She spoke of a healthy diet free of gluten and sugar, of salt, vitamin and oxygen treatments, of the power of colonics, and the benefits
of aravatic medicine, an ancient Indian holistic healing system. She encouraged her hundreds of thousands of followers to empower themselves and reclaim their lives through wellness, to heal themselves like she did naturally. But it was all a lie, all of it, and it was one of her close friends who first cottoned on to the truth.
I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime.
Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. A brand new series has just dropped on Netflix.
I was diagnosed with a stage four brain shiver that was four years ago.
Human beings are capable of anything.
I was on a quest to heal myself naturally. I've flirste and honest.
Apple Side of Vinegar follows the story of Belle Gibson's success, lies, and demise and right now it's the TV show everyone's talking about. Her unraveling started because of a suspicious friend.
For Chanelle McAuliffe.
There were certain parts of her story that weren't adding up, certain incidents and symptoms that raised her eyebrow. Eventually it would be Chanell that would first confront the conwoman. She was the whistleblower that brought down her web of lies and uncovered the damage she was doing to sick, vulnerable people. In Apple Side of Vinegar, the character of Chanell looks
a little bit different to real life. In real life, Chanelle had no relationship with Jess Ainsco, another wellness influencer who was actually living with cancer whose story is best represented by the character of Miller in the show. She wasn't working for Bell, just a friend of Belle's, but she is the one who confronted her in her house and went to the meeting. As Belle's story is once again thrust before an international audience, we got the chance
to speak to Chanelle. Chanelle Bell Gibson's name is once again everywhere. It's making headlines because there's a Netflix series out about her life and her crimes.
Have you watched it?
I have seen the show. I did have to force myself to watch it. I'm overall I'm not entirely a huge fan of the show for a number of reasons that we.
Can chat about if you like. But yes, it seems to be a very big story in the media right now.
So originally you weren't going to watch it, were you?
No? I wasn't.
I'm not entirely comfortable with dramatization and sensationalization of the story. The show has distorted the truth a little bit as well, and I'm not that comfortable with the capitalization of the harm that was caused.
To people with cancer.
So yeah, there's obviously Netflix and a film studio and people profiting from that harm that was caused. I've sort of been thinking a lot about the ethics behind this kind of storytelling on that platform.
I'm not entirely comfortable with the.
Way that these two characters, bal and Miller, who Miller is based on a real life person, Jess Ainsco, who actually did have cancer and was trying to heal her cancer naturally through wellness and natural remedies.
They've pitted these two women against.
Each other in the show, which actually didn't occur in real life, and I think it's quite a cliche, unoriginal, stereotypical narrative to kind of pit women against each other competitively as rivals, bitchy, gossipy, which is kind of what was depicted in the show. I just think it was really unnecessary, and I hope that the core messages that are really important about this story, about the harm that was cause to people, about how we can easily be
misled or consume misinformation online. I just hope that those important messages aren't lost through the glamorization of this show.
What about your character in the show, because they use your name, but your character is kind of an amalgamation of you and you know other.
People in Bell's life. How did you feel about the way they portrayed you.
I actually was pleasantly surprised how my character was portrayed. I had no idea what they were going to do with it. I mean, obviously there's many things about my character and in the show that aren't accurate. For example, I wasn't Bell's manager or jess ains Co's manager Miller's character.
I did know jess ains Co, but we weren't close friends. However, the scenes where I confront Bell, which has now dubbed the intervention, where I am urging her to come forward and tell the truth, there was a lot of main parts of that scene that were really accurate, and I found that scene to be really compelling, and I think it's really important for me for the world to see that I did urge Bell to come forward and tell the truth. I never set out to expose Belle or
to have Bell canceled. I actually went to her as her friend and said, if you come forward and tell the truth, I will help you. I'll support you with the fallout, and she refused to, and had she done that, things could have played out so much differently for her.
I want to go back to the start of your story because it is quite different to the Netflix show.
Tell us about how you met Belle.
Sure So, I was actually doing a writing internship for a public location in Melbourne at the time, and they were more just interested in doing a puff piece on her. It was we were kind of interested in what she was doing with food and technology and being innovative and this kind.
Of startup space.
So I reached out to her and she invited me to the launch event of the Whole Pantry app, and that night it was quite difficult for us to connect and chat. She was hosting the event. There's so many people there and so she was talking to a lot of people.
We just briefly kind of.
Introduced ourselves, and then after that event we met up for I think coffee, and it was really difficult to kind of get any information out of her, and so I just thought I'll just build a bit of upper hole with her. It turned out we had some mutual friends. So then we went for coffee again and then lunch and dinner, and we were at similar events together and really just a friendship formed from there.
What did being friends with Belle look like? Was it constant messaging? Was it hanging out all the time? Was she a good friend?
Belle was really warm and charismatic. She actually had a way of making you feel really special, and looking back, I think this was part of kind of it was quite calculated on her behalf because she had to deflect from herself so much, and if you've seen interviews with her, especially this sixty minutes interviewer in the show, it's very difficult to get a straight answer from her. So she had a way of really making the attention about the other person. So you always felt really kind of special
and important in her presence. Our friendship looked like going out for lunch. It sentered a lot around food. And what was quite interesting is my partner at the time actually had a traumatic brain injury, and Bao really connected with him and developed a really close friendship with him because she claimed that because of her brain tumor. That also meant she had a traumatic brain injury as a result of the brain tumor.
What we've now learnt.
About Beao is that she gravitated to people, especially you know, people with cancer, to leverage them to her own advantage, to learn about their symptoms and take them on as her own. So she was actually doing that with my partner at the time. However, you know, I wasn't aware of that, and so yes, they had a close friendship and and out friendship circle kind of just grew as well from there.
What did you think of her success, about the whole pantry and everything she was doing in that space.
I was quite impressed by the business she was building. She she was quite innovative for that era. It was really early days of social media, especially Instagram, building an audience, connecting with an audience, getting on the Apple Watch.
So that that was compelling to me at the time.
This, you know, regardless if she was sick or not, this young woman, this young single mother, pioneering you know, this, this technology and this business.
So that that was that side of it was compelling at the time.
When did you start getting a weird feeling? What were the first things that kind of struck you as odd?
So behind the scenes, there would be things like we would go out drinking and one night, you know, she ordered shots and we were doing shots, and I said, oh, should you really be drinking? Like, you know, she was obviously doing this very strict wellness now natural protocol to heal herself from cancer, so drinking alcohol excessively was kind of really in conflict of that. So I said, you know, should you be drinking? And she said, well, I'm going
to die anyway, so why not have some fun? And then there was a time where she also went to the solarium, which I thought was a bit odd given the risk of skin cancer with using selarium. And then the biggest thing for me, well, apart from that, she never appeared sick ever, never saw her sick.
She was the epitome of wellness right, this.
Beautiful, long, lush hair, She was glowing, she was active, happy, and then at her son's fourth birthday party, she all of a sudden collapsed to the floor and was having
what appeared to be quite a violent seizure. She was convulsed on the ground, saliva was coming out of her mouth, and this went on for a really long time, about forty minutes, and about halfway through, I said, I'm calling an ambulance, and all of a sudden she kind of comes out of the seizure and says, no, I don't want Western medicine involved, and so I said, okay, and then she kind of went back into the seizure and
then it kind of tape it off. And there was just something about it that just seems really performative to me.
And yeah, it was.
That day I left that party that I just knew in my gut that something was really wrong.
Well, if I'm not mistaken, it was soon after that birthday that she announced that her cancer was spreading. But how did you find out about that?
Yes, so she announced on Instagram that she now had stage four cancer. It had spread from her brain to spleen, her uterus, in her blood. It was basically a death sentence, and myself and most of her close friends we all found out by seeing it on her Instagram, which you know it was. We thought was quite odd that that's such serious diagnosis, and you know, we were all so you know, caring for her and concerned about her. So, yeah, it was really strange that it wasn't something that she
shared with anyone really directly. It was just it was just kind of a press announcement.
Once you had this hunch, it's a big leap to go from like having a feeling that something's not quite right to actually like talking to someone about it. Did you kind of mention it to friends and family, try and get some other people involved in how you're feeling.
Yes, I did go to one of our mutual friends and I shared my concerns with him, what I thought, regret flags and why things didn't add up for me and he started to see that, yeah, okay.
Some of this doesn't make sense. So I asked him if he would come with me to basically.
Hold an intervention and kind of confront Bell and try and get some answers from her. So he agreed to do that, and we went over to Bell's house unannounced, and we sat her down and I just straight.
Out asked her if she had cancer.
And what did she say.
She was acting kind of very defensive. She was saying that I was interrogating her. She started to slump down in her chair and say that she felt sick and was acting kind of faint. That point I kind of knew was based on having to see this, seeing the seizure. I kind of knew that maybe this was another tactic of hers to all of a sudden, you know, act.
Sick or as a way to deflect. She said that of course she was sick.
I basically demanded her to go get any medical evidence to prove that she had cancer, any scanned, any hospital doctor reports. She said that she didn't like to keep those documents because it's negative energy in her house. And so I asked her about this stage four diagnosis that she had just announced, and I said, what hospital did you go to to get that diagnosis? You know, I'm sure that it was a major hospital in Melbourne. And she said, she didn't go to a hospital. She went
to some random doctor's house in the suburbs. He picked her up and drove her there and gave her the diagnosis. And I asked her who was that? What's his name? And she said doctor Phil. And at that point I actually thought it was so comical that the story was her story was that ridiculous and that so unplausible. So yeah, doctor Phil just had me stumped. And so I said, if you if you've not had a proper diagnosis at a hospital in some random house by this doctor, you know,
does that mean you're your diagnosis is questionable? And she said, well, possibly, because doctor Phil's gone missing. He's gone to ground, and none of his colleagues know where he is. And so obviously that all just sounded even more suspicious and unbelievable. So at this point she called Julie Gibbs, their editor publisher at Penguin Books, and she's set asking Julie or
accusing Julie of speaking to her friends. And this one of her friends is jealous and accusing her of not being sick, and did Julie put me.
Up to this?
Basically? And from what I could tell, Julia must have. I think Julie seemed really confused on the end the other end of the phone. Well, then called someone else. She phoned her acupuncturist and asked him to come over, and when he arrived, she said to him, tell them that I have cancer. And this was kind of her way to basically prove to us that she had cancer. And he said, well, of course you have cancer. And I said, well, how do you know that she has cancer?
And he said, because she told me so.
It doesn't sound like it was a short conversation. It was over a few hours or so if you had all these different phone calls and visitors.
And yes, it was quite a few hours. I mean it seemed seemed forever at the time. I also went upstairs at her house to try and find Clive, her partner, who was somewhat involved in her business and the whole pantry. And Clive was someone who was kind of really difficult to figure out. He was kind of always in the background. He was quite withdrawn, very quiet. So I went upstairs and I found Clive and I said, Clive, you need
to tell me the truth. And he said she would destroy anyone that tries to expose her and that he.
Needs to protect her little boy.
So it was kind of a very cryptic, confronting answer I got from him. He then came downstairs with me and he sat down with us and we were trying to make sense of it all, and it kind of the penny didn't drop for me until a little bit later on.
But he made a comment that night.
Because I did did say to Bell which you can see in the show. I said to her, this is your inner circle knocking at your door.
This is where it starts.
And this is where it can end, and urging her to come forward on her own terms and tell the truth. And at that point when I was saying that, Clive said to beow Belle, you need to get the books in order. And I think what that sort of meant later on was in regards to the charity fraud that Belle was conducting. So the books for her business, you know, weren't in order. She needed to kind of start covering
her tracks or start paying the charities. So he was kind of hinting to Bowl and basically just just putting it out there that she needed to.
Tie up loose ends.
So I left that night just being absolutely gob smacked that it just had confirmed everything for me that it was all a lie. There was at times for me where there was one percent of me that felt, what if I've got this all wrong? What if I'm accusing this poor young woman of not having cancel when she really does. But that night it just solidified everything for me. And so I left there urging Bell again to come forward and tell the truth.
And then a.
Few days later I called her and I asked her if she was ready to come forward, and again I was met with defensiveness, some aggression.
And then it was maybe a week or a.
Couple of weeks after that it was her book launch, and we actually weren't really obviously kind of friends anymore at this point on talking terms. There was a lot of ten she knew.
That I knew.
But I still rocked up to her book launch and i'd just seen the show. I stood there in the crowd and and and just really stared at her and just made a point of you know that there's someone here that knows and is going to hold you accountable and the book launch. Yeah, she just acted like nothing was going on.
Were you angry through all of this?
Once you'd had that kind of confrontation as they call it, and you were kind.
Of waiting for her to admit what were the emotions? Was it anger?
I was very angry. My mother has has battled cancer twice. I mean, I mean we all, we all have a connection to someone who's had cancer, or we know of someone that have someone close to them who's who's been touched by cancer.
So yeah, it made.
Me very angry at What was so alarming is that the message she was putting out was so dangerous because really vulnerable people, people with cancer, were making really serious decisions about their life and about their health.
So yeah, it made my blood.
Boil, especially because now I knew that I made her aware of.
How serious the situation was.
There's been speculation and kind of this narrative about it was just this young woman who was very naive, this lie got away with her and it snowballed. However, that's not what I experienced when I went to her and you know, made her really aware of how serious this wasn't and urged her to come forward.
She just doubled down.
I think the part of it that gets to me as well is, and I'd love your insight on this is how she would gravitate to towards people that were sick and then kind of be a bit of a chameleon and emulate the things that she was seeing. That's a very calculated thing to do.
Yeah, I mean that's what's also very tragic about this story is there were very sick, vulnerable people that she got very close to. One was a little boy who had who did have brain cancer, and she was fund raising on behalf of him and his family to pay for him to potentially have life saving surgery, and that money was never handed over, and unfortunately that little boys passed away.
I'm not saying he passed away.
Because of his association with bal but also he was at the birthday party that day that she faked the seizure, so that little boy Bell's son, they had to witness this lie sort of first hand and as well, so the impact it had on you know, really vulnerable people is actually it is so shocking.
After the break, she Nolle tells us about how she approached the journalists who would help her expose Belle Gibson's lies to the world.
What did you do next?
Obviously you could see it that book launch. She wasn't admitting anything. Do you go to the police, do you go straight to the journalists? What are your next steps?
Yeah, so the first step I took was going to the police, and the police said that I didn't have any evidence, which I didn't, and it's obviously very difficult to get access to someone's medical records. So yeah, the police basically turned me away. I went to a very high profile lawyer and and he accused me of basically defamation and slander. He happened to have a very close friend who had cancer, and he was telling me that he can't even fathom the thought of someone going around accusing,
you know, someone of cancer, of lying and faking. So yeah, for some reason that the lawyer, he kind of took it quite personally, and yeah, it made me feel very uncomfortable and didn't help me. I then went to Australia's top investigative journalist at the time hadn't heard of Bell before. He said he might look into it, he might not, and I never heard back from him again. This ended up being over a period of sort of kind of weeks two months, and yeah, I was.
I was talking to people I knew was I was.
Trying to leverage my network to see even one could put me in touch with someone credible who would believe me, who could vouch for me that I was telling the truth. And yeah, so it took quite a long time to get to that point. And during that period I started to feel very powerless and realized how challenging and difficult it is to essentially kind of be a whistleblower and come forward with the truth and have people look into it and fact check it and stop people from causing harm.
So that was really disheartening. So then eventually my former boss spoke to the editor or someone high up at the AGE and they got one of their journalists to get in touch with me, and that journalist was Bo Donnelly, who with Nick Tuscano, they have published the book The Woman Who Fooled the World, which the Netflix show has been adapted from.
So, as Bo.
Tells the story, he just thought that this was just some random tip off that he had to check off his list, that maybe it was a jealous friend with an ax to grind or you know, they get tip offs come into the newsroom all the time, and most of them don't really go anywhere. So he actually just called me on his lunch break.
He was at a cafe. He was very noisy. I just started to.
Tell him what I knew, what I experienced, and what my motivation was for coming forward, which was just Forblle to stop causing harm to vulnerable people and spreading this misinformation.
Sorry.
Bo very quickly from that call felt that I was very credible and started to look into the case straight away.
In the Netflix show, the first article that they relate is that money fraud angle, you know, the charities that weren't getting the donations that Belle promised.
Is that what happened in real life?
Is that the only angle they could put out to start with.
Yes, that's right. The Age also couldn't run.
A story that they were just suspecting that this woman didn't have cancer. The lawyers that the Age shut it down very quickly because again the AGE couldn't get access to her medical records. There was no way to verify the status of her health, and so the journalists Boe and Nick, they thought, well, if she's lying about something as big as this, as big as having cancer and broadcasting that to the world.
Then what else is she lying about?
And I shared with them that comment that Clive had made the night that I had confronted Belle about the.
State of the business book books.
And so they started looking into whether she had actually made any donations to the charities that she had been fundraising on behalf of and they all said they never received a cent from her.
So once that angle is out there, that's obviously a huge hit to Bell and that's the start. That's how it starts to kind of unravel more publicly. Were they then able to verify the cancer claims? How did they manage to get that part of the investigation out sure?
So coincidentally, around this time that I had gone to the journalists at that age and they had reported on her charity fraud, there was actually a journalist at The Australian, Richard Gilliot, who had started to look into Bell and he'd think he'd written some stories about Jessain's co who in the Netflix show is the character Miller. His wife actually had cancer, and I think she had looked into natural remedies and she'd kind of come across jess and
then as a result of that, Richard. It was actually from Richard's own personal experience with his wife that he started then sort of looking into these people and then he actually at the same time was starting to unravel at all.
And then it was.
Very shortly after the Age had broken the charity fraud story. I think it was within a few days that Richard Gilliot the Australian broke the story that Belle didn't have cancer. He met with her and she said the same thing to him, that her diagnosis was questionable and she herself actually didn't know for certain if she had cancer or not.
Once these stories and investigations started to get published, did any of it shock you? Was there any kind of revelations that came out that you didn't realize?
Nothing was really shocking to me at that point anymore. When it came to beall, I feel like I kind of seen the worst of it, especially with that seizure. It's just it's something I'll never i don't know, be able to get out of my mind. And the way the children reacted that day. So yeah, nothing nothing really
surprised me or shocked me about bell anymore. There were things that came out people from her past, her childhood, things like she had gone to acting school and things like that, which I mean kind of made sense to me. I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah, I mean it was it. Yeah, I mean, it didn't surprise me that it came out that she had she had
been doing this for a long time. She had been in this skating forum, in this skating community where she was telling all these people that she'd had heart surgeries and she died on the operating table and had been brought back to life and had all these life threatening diseases, and as a result of that, people in that community
were sending her flowers and giving her lots of attention. So, I mean, it was interesting to see kind of some of the origin of where this all began for her and why, and that this was obviously a pattern.
Did you have any contact with her during that time as it was all unraveling.
The day the first story broke, I did send her a text message that that's the final communication I've had with her, and I haven't heard from her since then.
What did you say in the text message?
I said that so Belle always had this saying that she would say and for example, she posted it on this stage four cancer diagnosis on her Instagram when she announced that, and she should always say, you know, I've now got stage four cancer, but don't worry. I've got this, or I'm fundraising all this money to help this boy, you know, get life saving surgery.
I've got this, and.
So yeah, I sent her a text message that day as soon as the first article broke and I said, you should check the news, but you've got this right.
It was a bit of a job.
A fair enough job.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I've done a lot of soul searching in the last ten years and have tried to forgive Bao, which I can't and I'm not sure I ever can. But at that point, you know, I was really relieved that she couldn't keep spreading the lies that she was and I was doing it. And I was so frustrated and really angry that it took so long for the truth to come out, and that she was, you know, so combative to come out and tell the truth herself.
So yeah, that's why I sent the text message. I was kind of kind of just at my wits end with it all.
Well at all, obviously really unraveled quickly once you know the charity stuff had been exposed, the cancer was fake. There's this sixty minutes interview that's really famous. She's in a pink turtle neck and she's kind of been forced to, I guess, kind of admit, but she doesn't really. She kind of does this evasive kind of around the questions, even though all the truth is already out there by then.
You had three heart operations, you suffered two cardiac arrests, you died twice on the operating table, you had a stroke, and you were diagnosed with inoprople branch himmer and given four months.
To live correct and I just haven't.
I still have the heart condition and I was supposed to have surgery for that. You were supposed to have surgery and I didn't.
How did you feel watching that interview?
That interview was really difficult to watch, but it was validating in a way for the world to finally see what I was up against in terms of trying to get the truth from Baal, trying to get a straight answer from her, which obviously in that interview, Tara Brown
could not get one straight answer from her. And yeah, it was kind of validating in a way, But at the same time, it was really sad to see that her community and the people she took advantage of were getting no accountability, no apology, no real genuine apology, and no closure. So that was the hardest part about watching it.
Do you have any idea where this kind of compulsive lying and scamming comes from in bell Do you.
Think it's malice trauma? Like, do you have a theory?
I mean, obviously Belle is a very deeply troubled person, and there seems to be, you know, maybe a number of reasons for that. She looked she did have I think a difficult childhood, But you know a lot of people experience difficult childhoods trauma in their childhoods, and they don't go on to, you know, become a con artist and take advantage of society's most vulnerable people. So I do sometimes think that that's kind of maybe an easy way to explain.
Maybe why she did what she did.
I think it's important to look at and she had been doing this for quite a long time as well.
She had her other people, other people had.
Kind of caught her out on other lies, and so she had already experienced the impact that that causes on people and obviously has not really experienced much remorse. Maybe from that, I'm not going to comment on her state of mind or her mental health, but from what I witnessed and experienced with Ball, what I saw was that she was using it basically as a business strategy to make money and to be in the limelight, to be adored, to you know, to build a business, and to change
her life. She was, you know, just I guess, quite an ordinary person, and when she started bringing in this money, her lifestyle changed a lot. She transitioned to more of kind of a lavish lifestyle. She started renting a multimillion dollar beach house, renting a BMW, flying first class on holidays overseas, buying designer things. So, in my opinion, that's what I witnessed and experienced, is that she saw that her lie.
Was benefiting her financially, and she ran with that.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Jemma Bath.
I'm speaking with.
The woman who exposed Belle Gibson's lies, Chanelle mccauliffe. Up next, we hear more about the court proceedings and where Bell Gibson is now nearly ten years on how do you feel about the court proceedings that happened after everything came out because she went to court, she was fined four hundred and ten thousand dollars. There's no jail time or anything like that. Do you think that was a fitting punishment.
It was good to see that there was some justice brought, but it has come out recently that it's maybe not possible for the court to enforce that penalty, and she hasn't paid any of that penalty, and actually one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of that penalty was to go to the family of the little boy that had brain cancer that she took advantage of as compensation for their suffering. So it's really it's really upsetting that potentially that family
won't see that money. And you know, it's been quite a long time. There's been many years since she was fined and Belle. I know that Belle has earned some type of income over the last few years, and Belle could take it upon herself to start contributing to that fine, to start making amends, to take accountability and make things right. So that's disappointing that she's not coming to the table and doing that.
Overall, the.
Justice system I guess is quite broken in that sense that there hasn't really been real justice.
She has managed to lay pretty low since everything happened. We do know there was a story about five years ago that came out that she was trying to integrate herself into the Ethiopian community in Melbourne and trying to raise funds for them, almost kind of going down the same kind of route of fundraising, and they found out cut her out. It all kind of ended. But what did you make of that? Of her kind of trying to reinvent herself in that way.
I knew she would.
Again, nothing that Beale does anymore is shocking or surprising to me. This has been a pattern she's been repeating basically her whole life, and I'm yeah, it was really sad to see, especially for that community that she was infiltrating. And I think there's also been this narrative that Bell really wants to kind of be accepted by a community, she wants to fit in. But like she could go join a book club, you know, like there are spaces,
you know, she could go join a sporting team. There are spaces that you can go to to be a part of a community and feel accepted and feel like you're part of something without having to take advantage of people.
Do you know much about what she's doing nowadays?
I don't know what she's up to.
Sometimes I hear little rumors, but I don't really pay much intention to it. But I'm sure she's looking at what her next hustle is.
You were the original whistleblower in this story, and the reality is if you have tried to do what you did in any other kind of environment, corporate, government, political, you could have been prosecuted.
Is that something that you thought about at the time.
There wasn't any kind of scenario where I wasn't going to follow through with what I did if and this actually hasn't been the first time I've been a whistleblower. If I see something that's wrong, I can't turn a blind eye to it. It's very discouraging for a lot of I know a lot of people have struggled to come forward and tell the truth on different things because people have been reprimanded and prosecuted for speaking up and
telling the truth. It is a very challenging thing to do, and it can be a scary thing to do, especially you know, when there's other interests at play, if companies are profiting, so yeah, whistle blowers can easily be silenced and be scared away from trying to come forward and tell the truth.
Yeah, it just wasn't in my nature to.
Not do that, to not align with my values, to just stand by and let something bad happen.
Are there any protections in place for whistle blowers in Australia. I know it's an area that you feel quite passionately about.
Yeah, there have been legislation come into effect in the last few years to protect whistle blows, especially in the workplace, from retaliation. But it's only legislation and regulation and law only can go so far when people are or the law or governments or what places are willing to enforce it and make sure there's people really are protected.
For me, it feels like whistle blowing should be something that we support because if there's wrongdoing going on in certain institutions, surely we should know about it. The fact that it's something that people might be scared about doing because they could potentially face criminal.
Charges is insane.
Yeah, it is.
I think I think a lot more work can be done in this space to protect people coming forward and telling the truth, and it is a very Yeah, it is a very scary thing to take on. Like I said earlier, there was one percent of me that was still questioning myself, God, what if she doesn't have cancer?
And I've got this all wrong? And that's part of it.
Right that you see in the media and you see in cases that people haven't been protected, and then so that makes you question yourself in many ways. It makes you question do I really know the truth? Or am I going to be safe to come forward?
What are you doing with your life now?
Has been involved in this, in whistle blowing, in uncovering kind of the scam that was Bell Gibson, Has that changed your life and your kind of goals in life in terms of what you want to give back?
Yeah, it definitely led me down a path that I may not have gone down if I hadn't gone through
what I did with Belle. I ended up moving and working in the outback with remote indigenous communities, working on policy and as a financial counselor preventing economic abuse against Indigenous people in the outback, because unfortunately those communities are actually targeted a lot by scams, So while I was out there doing that work, I was doing financial literacy education, working with regulators to tighten regulation and laws around predatory
payday lenders that we're targeting indigenous people. Since then, I've gone on to work for basically one of own Australia's only social impact finance fund that provides capital to Indigenous people wanting to start a business or grow their business because they have a lot of challenges accessing capital, especially from mainstream banks. They can be yes discouraged from accessing
capital from those avenues. So yeah, it's something that's very important to me to do work that's that's very meaningful and impactful and that can help people. And I especially, Yeah, I especially love to do work where I can give people a voice that aren't able to necessarily use their own voice, and especially prevent or stop people being taken advantage of, because that's just it's something I really I really can't stand.
I know there's a lot of buzz right now, everyone's talking about Bell, but it was nearly a decade ago that all this happened.
Do you think about it often anymore?
No, I haven't. Over the years, I don't really think about it too much. I've already given so much energy and mental capacity to all of this. I did film for a documentary that's coming out in Netflix in a few weeks, so I was involved with that. I mean, I mean I have reflected on it at times, I especially right now with how big the story has gotten again, well,
it's actually gotten even bigger than ever before. And as much as I can't forgive Belle, I can't help but think that this would maybe be quite difficult for her. And given you know she is a troubled person, I do wonder about her mental health at this time and the whole time, actually, and.
I do hope that she is okay at the end of the day.
So you do still have empathy for her in amongst all of the younger I.
Mean, yeah, like Belle is still human at the end of the day, a very complex, complicated, troubled human. And I actually just hope that she can eventually learn from all this and evolve from it and make amends. So yeah, I mean, that is what I hope for.
Do you think she can, though, do you think she can actually redeem herself?
I think it will be difficult in the public eye. I think the public will probably have a difficult time for giving her, and that's understandable. But I hope she can redeem herself, just for herself, even in her personal life. I hope she can evolve and learn from this and not do something like this again in any capacity. So yeah, it's very wishful thinking to think that there could be some redemption.
Thanks to Chanelle for telling us her story.
True Crime Conversations is a Muma Meer podcast hosted produced by me Jimmy Bath and Tarlie Blackman, with audio design by Jacob Brown.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with a very.
Interesting true crime conversation with the anonymous host of case File.
The next episode of Extraordinary Stories will be released next week. If you don't want to wait, you can listen right now by following the link in the episode description or by heading to mammamea dot com dot au forward slash m.
Plus Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded this podcast on the Gadigul people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Rait Islander cultures,