How Cancer Scammer Belle Gibson Became “One of the Most Hated Women in Australia”

Except for the terminal brain cancer, 2014 was the best year of Belle Gibson’s life. The young Australian entrepreneur’s wellness app, The Whole Pantry, had been voted Apple’s “best new food and drink” app the previous year, and chosen for pre-installation on the upcoming Apple Watch. The 300,000 followers she’d attracted on Instagram helped score Gibson a lucrative book deal with Penguin. She’d banked over half a million Australian dollars in two years, ostensibly giving a large part of it to charity. Elle Australia called her “the most inspiring woman you’ve met this year.” Cosmopolitan bestowed their “Fun Fearless Female” award on her. But beneath Gibson’s inspirational success story hid a big, dark secret: She never had cancer.

When her con was finally exposed, Gibson didn’t apologize and beg for forgiveness. She didn’t explain she was a single mom who needed the money for her young son. She staunchly denied she suffered from Munchausen’s or pathological lying or any other mental illness. In fact, like all good grifters, Gibson’s motives remain intriguingly unclear.

“She’s my absolutely favorite kind of protagonist to write because she’s so deeply flawed and problematic, but we can only speculate why,” says Samantha Strauss. She explores Gibson’s story in a new Netflix miniseries that drops Thursday, Apple Cider Vinegar, the next stop for fans of Inventing Anna and The Dropout—anyone captivated by pretty, white, blonde scammers. “We love their audaciousness, their naked ambition, the moral complexity of it all,” says Strauss. “We’re all told to strive for success, but what happens when that success comes at any cost?”

Apple Cider Vinegar has a few ideas. But before it introduces its version of “Instagram’s worst con artist” and “one of the most hated women in Australia” to this side of the world, here’s everything to know about the real Belle Gibson.

“The identity crisis there is big”

Before claiming to have two birth certificates and four name changes, Annabelle Smillie was born in Tasmania in October 1991—not 1988, as she’d later tell people. She grew up in a poor Brisbane suburb with an older brother, Nick, and her mother, Natalie, who indeed changed the family surname to “Gibson.” In the introduction of her since pulled cookbook, Gibson described a “dysfunctional home” where “I never knew my dad, and grew up with my mum, who had multiple sclerosis, and my brother, who is autistic.” She says she left home to live with a friend at 12 years old and, though teachers reported she’d once been a diligent student, dropped out of school in grade 10.

Investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, authors of The Woman Who Fooled the World on which Apple Cider Vinegar is based, dug deep into Gibson’s past. They found records showing that by 2009, Gibson had moved to Perth in Western Australia, where she got a job listening to medical claims at a private health insurance company. Before long, Gibson was telling people she too was sick—with terminal brain cancer. On a skateboarders’ chat forum, she posted increasingly dramatic accounts of her health: “I just woke up out of a coma type thing. The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes.” In early 2010, Belle retold her cancer story to the parenting forum What to Expect; at just 18, she was pregnant with her son, Oliver.

“Right from the start I was very open”

In 2012, a year-old profitless startup called Instagram welcomed a new user: “@healing_belle,” a self-described “game changer with brain cancer + a food obsession.” Her highly curated and perfectly stylized posts featured inspirational quotes, posed selfies, recipes for Buddha bowls and superfood smoothies—par for the course today, but an innovation by the standards of the era. Gibson’s captions read like a private diary, which was also a novel approach to the platform at the time. “She framed cancer in a way that it hadn’t been framed before,” write Donelly and Toscano. “She gave her fans a glimpse of life with a terminal disease, and what she showed them was living.” Within a year, @healing_belle amassed 200,000 followers, many of whom fawned over her every word.

In April 2013, now with a healthy following to commodify, Gibson registered her business name, “The Whole Pantry.” She recruited a group of young developers to build her an app on the cheap. By August, Donelly and Toscano write, The Whole Pantry launched with 50 gluten-free, plant-based vegan recipes, a shopping-list function, and a conversion tool. The app proved an instant success: it earned the No. 1 rating in the App Store during its debut month, was named Apple’s “best food and drink” app of 2013, and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times around the globe—often by users told via social media that their $3.79 AUD would go partly, or all, to charities. Gibson, meanwhile, rented a million-dollar beachside house, bought a BMW and designer clothes, and had her teeth straightened, according to The Woman Who Fooled the World.

“You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months tops”

While riding high on her app’s surprise success, Gibson sent a cold email to an editor at Penguin, Donelly and Toscano write. She traveled to Sydney for an in-person meeting and soon signed a book deal with an advance of $132,000 AUD. The Whole Pantry cookbook would be 250 glossy pages with 100 recipes and a 3,000-word intro titled, “The Story So Far.”

For the first time, Gibson put her lies officially into print proper: “I will never forget sitting alone in the doctor’s office three weeks later, waiting for my test results,” she wrote. “He called me in and said, ‘You have malignant cancer, Belle. You’re dying.” She claimed she quit traditional chemo and radiotherapy in favor of natural foods and alternative medicines, which had kept her alive and well. (For failing to fact-check Gibson’s story, Penguin Australia was later fined $30,000 AUD—though they did provide Gibson media training for interviews with investigative journalists who might question her claims.)

“I don’t actually use or keep any app money”

Throughout her rocket to success, Gibson said “a large part of everything” she earned—sometimes 25% of annual profits, or 95%, or all—would be donated to various charities. Thanks to a news tip, Donelly and Toscano wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about the influencer’s failure to donate the promised funds. Five charities for which she’d allegedly fundraised had no record of Gibson’s donations; four of them didn’t know a fundraiser had happened at all. Gibson hit back via Instagram against “incorrect claims and assumptions” and blamed a “cash-flow problem.”

Still, the article sparked Gibson’s rapid exposure and immediate decline: Two days later, on March 10, 2015, Donelly and Toscano published another article titled “Friends and doctors raise doubts over ‘Healing Belle’ cancer claims.” Over the next several days, there were two more: “‘Cancer survivor’ Belle Gibson retains lawyer” and “Supporters turn on Belle Gibson as cancer claims unravel.” Before the end of the month, Gibson’s app had been pulled from sale, her American book launch was canceled, and both Penguin and Apple had severed ties with her.

“When you hit rock bottom, there is only an opportunity to be honest”

Gibson pivoted to damage control, though never by taking accountability or apologizing. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, for which Gibson was reportedly paid $75,000 AUD, the disgraced 23-year-old health guru faced cutthroat journalist Tara Brown, who pulled no punches in a painful-to-watch exchange. “How old are you?” asked Brown. “I’ve always been raised, um, as being currently a 26-year-old,” Gibson replies. Brown doubles down. So does Gibson: “I live knowing, as I’ve always known, that I would be 26.”

“What do you know the truth to be now?” asks Brown. Gibson’s reply: “That’s probably a question that we’ll have to keep digging for.”

After the disastrous 60 Minutes interview went viral, Gibson deleted her accounts, scrubbed her online footprint the best she could, and—besides a 2015 interview headlined “Belle Gibson: ‘My lifelong struggle with the truth’”—all but disappeared from the public eye.

“That was the moment I first heard about Belle Gibson,” says Strauss. “Tara is just skewering her, and she’s so young, and it’s hard not to feel sorry for her.” Many viewers were certain Gibson suffers from some kind of mental illness or disorder, likely Munchausen’s syndrome. “She could have easily used her mental health as an excuse, that could have been her get-out-of-jail card, but she adamantly refused and really resisted that.” That a person who fakes illnesses would deny the only illness she might actually have is as ironic as it is fascinating.

“I am not advised to discuss facts at the moment”

With Gibson’s continued silence on the matter, whether she deserves empathy remains debatable a decade later. Strauss has landed somewhere in the middle. “Without absolving her of her crimes,” she says, “I wanted to find empathy for her.” While Gibson’s current whereabouts aren’t known, as recently as 2017, she was reportedly living in a Melbourne suburb where her neighbors wouldn’t speak to her and former friends walked the other way when they’d see her in the street. At that time, her family said they were estranged from her.

But just when one’s starting to feel sympathy for Gibson, she makes it hard again. While she never faced criminal charges in connection with these actions, Consumer Affairs Victoria sued Gibson in Melbourne federal court in 2016 for violating Australian Consumer Law, Gibson didn’t show up to any hearings. She was found liable nonetheless and fined $410,000 AUD for misleading conduct regarding her health and charitable donations. According to a recent article in the Herald Sun, nearly nine years later, Belle Gibson has yet to pay a cent.