From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, February fourteen. John Winfield, the husband of missing woman Bromwin. Winfield, was the beneficiary of several hundreds of thousands of dollars left to him by a neighbor, but the bequest is shrouded in mystery. That's the big revelation in a new episode of our investigative podcast series Bromwyin
and it's live now at Bromwin podcast dot com. Netflix's new show Apple Cider Vinegar is all about the lies of cancer fraudster Bell Gibson, but the show itself contains material that's not entirely true. Today, The Australian's journalist Richard Gilliot, who exposed Gibson as a fraud, on why he's not happy that the show has given credit to other journalists. This episode contains swearing.
You say, this woman's stalking, Yeah, like six months moving.
Why did it take you so long to report it? I think she needs help.
She comes to make work.
Last year, the world was obsessed with Baby Reindeer. If you're one of the few people who didn't watch the show, here's a quick summary. Baby Reindeer was a hugely popular Netflix series that followed the life of a struggling comedian and bartender and his terrifying brush with a stalker. The opening sequence included on screen text which said, this is a true story, not based on a true story. A true story. Well, the woman who had supposedly inspired the
stalker character was furious and sued Netflix for defamation. Netflix tried to get the case thrown out, but the judge said Baby Reindeer was wrongly billed as a true story and that there was a reasonable gap between her purported real life behavior and that of her on screen character. That defamation troll should take place a bit later this year. Maybe Reindeer is just one of many series which sit
in a gray area of fictionalized reality. It's a popular genre of show that isn't a documentary, but isn't a complete work of fiction either. Some call it a docudrama. And Netflix is once again wading into these murky waters, this time with an Australian story. I'd like to welcome on the stage Shelle Gibson yep, Belle Gibson, the notorious fraudster and cancer faker. Her story really is stranger than fiction.
Gibson claimed to have used alternative cancer therapies to survive a malignant brain tumor and to be suffering a range of other cancers riddled throughout her body. In twenty fifteen, Richard Gilliot and The Australian revealed she was making it all up. She didn't have a brain tumor, she hadn't died on an operating table and been revived. Her blood, uterus,
spleen and liver were stubbornly cancer free. After Richard Gilliot exposed her lies, Gibson later confessed everything to a women's magazine and gave one of history's most awkward TV interviews to the Nine Networks sixty Minutes program Here's Belle with reporter Tara Brown on sixty Minutes in twenty eighteen, three years after Richard revealed in The Australian she was making it all up.
It is and if any you didn't have brain cancer. No I didn't. But when I was writing that, I thought that I did, and I was feeling well, I'm really sorry. There is no reason for me to lie, and it's not something I want to be doing either.
Gibson said she thought she did have cancer because she'd been misled by a Charlatan medical who wrongly diagnosed her.
I wasn't living in a space where I didn't know that this wasn't my reality.
This is the opening line of Apple Side of Vinegar. It's spoken by actress Caitlin Deaver, who's playing Gibson. This is a true story based on a lie. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Belle Gibson has not been paid for the recreation of her story. Fuckers, Richard, have you watched Apple Side of Vinegar and what did you think?
I'm afraid I have watched it. I just really disliked the show quite a lot. Actually, I thought it was a really terrible misrepresentation of the story and a misrepresentation of sort of Belle Gibson and her personality. And I thought that some of the fictitious plot elements in there were sort of really thickly questionable as well.
In Apple Side of Vinegar we see a couple of crusading journalists who don't work for The Australian. They work at the Age in Melbourne.
It's an article for the Age that a woman faking terminal brain cancer, allegedly she's meant to have cured herself using.
Healthy Netflix based this series on a book written by two Age journalists, Nick Toscano and bo Donnelly. So what role did they actually have in exposing Gibson and how did their work and your work kind of interact in those early years.
Look, those two journalists have basically been claiming for the last nine ten years that they exposed Belle Gibson's cancer scam. The reality is that they were working on that story in Melbourne in twenty fifteen, and as is shown in Appleside of Vinegar, they couldn't substantiate that bell Gibson's cancer claims were false. So what they did was publish a story on page four of The Age which revealed that she had raised money for charities and had not donated
it as she claimed. And I think what they were hoping to do was flush out more information to go with the cancer angle. But instead what they flushed out was my stories. Because I'd been working on a story about Bill Gibson for two months, I had interviewed her, Unlike them, I discovered all these social media posts that she'd been putting up since she was seventeen, sixteen years old, in which she claimed to have had open heart surgery
and died on the operating table. And so we did publish immediately the following day, revealing that she had a history of basically fraudulent medical claims, and that she'd admitted to me that she couldn't substantiate many of her cancer claims, and that Penguin Books had never checked her bona fides before they published her book, and that was just devastating, and she went to ground immediately. She did not deny anything in the story, and at that point it became quite obvious.
That she was a fraud.
We ran a series of stories that week in The Australian and her business was pretty much dead by the end of the week. And now I was nominated for Scoop of the Year in the twenty fifteen Walkleys for those stories. And so we see them in this series battling away and then triumphantly at the end publishing that you know, she's a cancer fraud. So when I say that, you know, there are elements of the story that I didn't like. That was certainly one of them, you know,
because it's just completely not true. Obviously, the scriptwriters weren't attracted to the idea of a dramatic climax where the two reporters get scooped by The Australian. So I can see why they went with the angle they went, But still, you know it's not true.
Coming up, So what are the ethics of telling a sort of true story on screen? While I've got you? It's Valentine's Day, So if you haven't already rushed out to buy some chocolates or a bunch of roses, consider giving the one you love a subscription to The Australian. It's only a dollar a week for the first four weeks. But you won't come off as a cheapskate because this gift says loud and clear, I respect your intelligence. We'll
be back after the break. The disclaimer at the beginning of Apple Cider Viniges says some names have been changed to protect the innocent, and one of those innocent people is Jessica Ainsco.
My name is jess Aysco and I'm here it's talk to you about my book Make Peace with Your Plate, which has been selling super well and I'm so so grateful for that. So today I'm going to talk to you about my top five tips for a healthy life and healthy body in twenty fourteen. Number one is to start your day with lemon juice and.
Warm water that you have to make sure. She was twenty two when diagnosed with an aggressive epithelioid psychoma, so jess was advised the best course of action would be to amputate her arm. Instead, she decided to try holistic therapy and wrote a blog about her life, healthy living, and cancer. It became pretty popular. When Jessica's mum got breast cancer a few years later, they both tried alternative medicine. Unfortunately, Jessica's mum succumbed to the cancer and Jessica soon followed.
She died at the age of twenty nine. If you've watched Apple Cider Vinegar, you'll recognize this as the precise story of Miller Blake. Perhaps Miller's meant to be an amalgamation of wellness influence, but for anyone who knew Jessica, they would immediately recognize that this is her life. They're fictionalized, and according to her former fiance, Talent Palmenta, it's not a fair betrayal. Here's what he said to the Australian as read by a voice actor.
It's a falsified, dramatic, fictional portrayal, which isn't surprising considering none of us were ever consulted or referenced for information or fact checking. The series insinuates the jess fully shunned conventional medicine, which is also incorrect. In fact, she actually passed due to complications from conventional radiation therapy, not from her cancer spreading or taking action too late, as depicted in the media and in the series.
One of the primary tensions in Apple Cider Vinegar is a competitive phre enemy like relationship between Bell Gibson and the character portraying Jessica Ansco. It comes to a head and Jessica's character Miller, delivers this line.
I want to destroy her.
But in reality, Jessica Belly new Bell. They ran in the same wellness circles, sure, but there was no bitchy back and forth, no plans to destroy one another.
The fact that this new series puts a fake cancer frauds Delight Gibson guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in a court of law in the same storyline as somewhat honest and incredible like jess is a massive insult to her character and her legacy. It's heartbreaking for everyone who knew her.
Another real life person with reservations about Apple side of Vinegar is Chanelle mccauliffe. In real life, McAuliffe was a whistleblower, a friend of Bell Gibson who correctly suspected she was a fake, but in the show, she's betrayed as also being friends with the jess Ainsco character Miller. Here's Chanelle mccauliffe, the real one on TikTok.
I had nothing to do with the Netflix show, and I don't entirely feel comfortable around some of the ethics of this type of storytelling and how the truth has been distorted in the show.
Spoken to Chanel, and one of the things that she and, to be honest, I both were really quite shocked by was that the scriptwriters took that jess ains coo story of the mother and daughter who've got cancer, and they totally replicated everything about it, from the types of cancer they had to where they lived and when they died. But they changed the name of the character right so
they call her Miller Blake. But in the script they set Bell Gibson and this Miller Blake character up as these kind of bitchy rivals, and miller Blake discovers that Gibson's are fake and decides to sort of destroy her as she's dying. And I just thought, you know, like morally and ethically, like the Jesse Ainskoe's family went through a terrible tragedy, a mother and daughter dying of cancer after rejecting treatment within basically a sort of year of
each other. The other thing is that I met Bill Gibson, and look, her whole persona was. If you've watched the sixty Minutes interview, for instance, you'll know that her whole persona was this kind of airy earth mother who sort of stares off into the distance and is kind of have this dreamy slow voice. But in the show, she's portrayed as this kind of over caffeinated, foul mouthed, you know, negligent mother, and you know, they've set her up as this absolute villain, and I just thought it was a
completely unrealistic portrait. By the end of the show, I kind of was wondering, I hope Belle Gibson. I mean, I mean, if she's watching this, she's a troubled person you know, and she has she has a child. I just questioned some of the ethics of that.
Finally, Richard, your work on this story and a whole lot of other stories is the kind of work that makes you believe in journalism. Looking back on it all these years later, how does it make you feel about our craft of journalism.
Well, Look, I'm incredibly proud of those stories that I wrote. Because of all the stories I wrote, that one I think had an impact, perhaps beyond anything else I've done, just because of her profile and also the issues it raised. Look, I used to grind my teeth about those two guys down in Melbourne. But there are two documentaries about Belle Gibson. One of them is going to actually be on Netflix
next week. It's called Instagram's Worst con Artist. I'm in both of them, and they're barely in them at all, and so I kind of think that the record speaks for itself for anyone who wants to look at it.
Richard Gilliot and I worked together a couple of years ago on Richard's podcast investigation Shadow of Doubt. It's an exploration of the truths and lies in one family where a daughter accuses her parents of the most horrendous crimes, and Richard's search for certainty. You can binge Shadow of Doubt right now, wherever you get your podcasts, and on The Australian's mobile app