Already, and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
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?
Like we don't spend too much time together already. Maybe for Valentine's Day we can get a break from each other.
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
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 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.
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. Let's start with who Belle Gibson was before she rose to prominence.
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.
You'd think of birthday, I know, you'd think it's it.
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. 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 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.
So she started sharing stories on the internet. I presume this was pre Instagram. Where did she first start?
There is, well, pre Instagram.
So where was she sharing those stories?
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 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. 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 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 no record of a doctor by that name at the center. She also gave birth to her son at that time.
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.
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, the wellness movement back in twenty ten. At the time, that online movement was really being led by a young woman called jess Ainsco.
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?
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
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
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 that she was going to do the same thing.
And how did she do that? How did Belle Gibson grow an audience on Instagram.
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 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 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, 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.
And did anyone question the legitimacy of her claims about her health?
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 she had made. Is that right?
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 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.
And then I presume from there they just kept contacting her and kept asking for receipts that she could not provide.
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.
Lies and what was the fallout from there?
So Gibson then did an interview with the Australian Women's Weekly and she basically confirmed none of.
It was true, which is wild wild.
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 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.
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.
I went back and watched that interview the other day, just as a thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.
It's crazy, it's why old.
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.
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, 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. 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.
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, and like Apple.
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 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 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.
And what was that fine?
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 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 about this and she said this week that Consumer's Affair Victoria is pursuing this constantly and consistently and won't let up.
And could someone go to jail for not paying a five hundred k fine after however many years it's been eight years.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, we don't even know what she looks like nowadays.
Zara.
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 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.