In 2015, 23-year-old Belle Gibson was the head of a wellness empire she'd built after claiming she'd cured her inoperable brain tumor with a healthy diet and alternative medicine — but it all came crashing down when an investigation revealed she'd never had cancer at all.
Belle Gibson/FacebookBelle Gibson was the wellness guru behind the successful health app The Whole Pantry.
In 2015, an Australian health influencer named Belle Gibson had built a wellness empire. By just 23, she’d launched a popular app called The Whole Pantry and written an accompanying cookbook. Her success was partly due to her own inspirational story.
Gibson claimed that she’d been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor at the age of 18 and given four months to live. However, by changing her diet, exercising, and using alternative medicine, she’d cured her cancer. She even wrote as much in the preface to her cookbook, saying she’d been “stable for two years now with no growth of cancer.”
Then, inconsistencies began to emerge in Gibson’s story. Just four months before her cookbook was published, she’d posted on Facebook that her cancer had spread elsewhere in her body. What’s more, investigative journalists determined that she’d never donated $300,000 she’d raised for various charities.
As Gibson’s following began to crumble, she made a shocking confession: She’d never had cancer at all. All of her blog posts promoting the pseudoscience that healed her had been lies. She was ultimately ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for intentionally deceiving people, but she was unable to do so after losing all of her money when The Whole Pantry was pulled from the App Store and her book deals were scrapped.
Now, the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar is documenting Belle Gibson’s dramatic rise and fall.
How Belle Gibson Became A Social Media ‘Wellness Guru’ And Fooled Her Followers
NetflixKaitlyn Dever plays Belle Gibson in the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar.
Before Instagram even existed, Belle Gibson rose to fame as one of the first major “influencers” through her blog. In 2009, when she was just 18, she announced that she’d been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given just four months to live. She also made outrageous claims that she’d suffered a stroke, undergone three heart surgeries, and died on the operating table.
However, her story struck a chord with her readers. Gibson had just given birth to her first child, and people were stunned that the young mother was facing such tragic news. Then, something miraculous happened: Gibson continued to thrive despite her prognosis. She attributed this to lifestyle changes she’d made, including eating more fruits and vegetables, exercising regularly, and learning about holistic medicine.
“I pulled myself out of chemo and radiotherapy — my doctors freaked out, but they couldn’t stop me,” Gibson later wrote in The Whole Pantry. I was empowering myself to save my own life, through nutrition, patience, determination and love — as well as salt, vitamins and Ayurvedic treatments, craniosacral therapy, oxygen therapy, colonics and a whole lot of other treatments.”
Belle Gibson/FacebookBelle Gibson on July 14, 2009, just after she claimed to have been diagnosed with cancer.
Gibson joined Instagram when it debuted in 2010, and within three years, she had nearly 300,000 followers. Then, in August 2013, the 21-year-old influencer launched The Whole Pantry, a health app that provided recipes and lifestyle tips. It was downloaded 200,000 times during its first month on the App Store and was named Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of 2013.
According to a lawsuit that was filed against her in 2017, Gibson earned more than $300,000 from her app alone over a three-year period. She also signed a deal with Penguin to launch a cookbook called The Whole Pantry to accompany the app, receiving an additional $132,000 as an advance. This doesn’t even account for any social media partnerships or advertisements she may have been paid for.
As Belle Gibson’s story continued to spread, she also used her fame to raise money for various charities. In 2014, she explicitly stated that she’d donated $300,000 to five organizations. This, it turned out, would be her downfall.
How The Popular Health Influencer’s Elaborate Scam Fell Apart
In early 2015, one of Gibson’s close friends, Chanelle McAuliffe, tipped off reporters at The Age that she believed the influencer was faking her cancer diagnosis. Nick Toscano and Beau Donelly began digging into the claim — and what they found shocked them.
Donelly told The Morning Edition podcast, “I went to Instagram, and I looked Belle Gibson up. I looked at what she’d been saying, and I very quickly noticed that everything, including her health claims, were either really vague or totally inconsistent or just seemingly implausible.”
Belle Gibson/InstagramBelle Gibson amassed 300,000 followers on Instagram before her scandal.
However, rather than accuse Gibson outright of lying about her health, Toscano and Donelly decided to report on her charitable donations — or the lack thereof. The charities she’d claimed to have donated $300,000 to revealed that they’d never received anything from her.
Then, the parents of a child suffering from brain cancer came forward and said that Gibson had used their child’s name while fundraising without their knowledge. They also hadn’t seen any of the donations.
Penguin BooksThe cover of The Whole Pantry.
At first, Gibson’s social media pages began deleting any comments that mentioned these reports. Soon, however, she was unable to ignore the mounting criticism, and she was forced to come clean.
In April 2015, The Australian Women’s Weekly interviewed Gibson, asking her directly if she had ever had cancer. “No,” Gibson responded. “None of it’s true.”
“I don’t want forgiveness,” she continued. “I just think [speaking out] was the responsible thing to do. Above anything, I would like people to say, ‘Okay, she’s human. She’s obviously had a big life. She’s respectfully come to the table and said what she’s needed to say, and now it’s time for her to grow and heal.'”
Belle Gibson/FacebookBefore Belle Gibson’s scandal, The Whole Pantry was set to be a default app on the Apple Watch.
Gibson claimed she’d had a tough childhood marked by neglect. She also named two doctors who had told her she had cancer, but her attempts to justify her lies simply turned the public against her even more. The fallout of her admission was instant — but it was hardly the end of the trouble Belle Gibson would find herself in.
Where Is Belle Gibson Now?
While Gibson never faced criminal charges for her scam, she was slapped with a $410,000 fine for engaging in trade or commerce intended to mislead or deceive in September 2017. However, she later claimed that she was unable to pay this penalty due to her loss of income. She had spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’d made — including the money purportedly raised for charities — on a beachfront apartment, a luxury car, designer clothes, cosmetic procedures, and international vacations.
In 2020 and 2021, authorities raided Gibson’s home in an attempt to recoup the unpaid fines. Gibson also became involved in an additional controversy around this time.
FacebookA recent photo posted by Belle Gibson on an alternate account under the name Harry Gibson.
In January 2020, The Weekend Australian reported on a video of Gibson wearing a headscarf and claiming she had become a member of Victoria’s Oromo Ethiopian community.
In the video, Gibson praised Allah and referred to Ethiopia as “back home.” In response, Tarekegn Chimdi, the president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, told the newspaper, “We hadn’t been aware of this woman and we do not know her backstory… She is not a community member and she’s also not working with the community.”
Since that bizarre incident, Gibson has largely remained quiet and out of the public eye. Now, however, the spotlight has been turned back on her once more with the release of the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar, which stars Kaitlyn Dever as Belle Gibson. It remains to be seen if Gibson will respond to this latest adaptation of her story.
After reading about Belle Gibson’s fake cancer scam, learn about how another blogger, Amanda Riley, also became famous for faking a cancer diagnosis. Then, read about history’s nine worst con artists and the elaborate scams they pulled.
