‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ tells how Belle Gibson went from reverent influencer to lifted scams

On February 7, 2025By Littum

In the first years of Instagram, a young Australian mother named Belle Gibson quickly became one of the most popular Wellness influences on the platform that inspired thousands of followers with her story of overcoming malignant brain cancer with a healthy diet and alternative medication treatments.

Gibson claimed she had four months to live after being diagnosed in 2009, and said she ultimately rejected chemotherapy and radiotherapy and began a search for heal themselves naturally “Through nutrition, patience, determination and love.” Her inspiring story attracted a great social media after Gibson exploited for a successful lifestyle app called the whole pantry, a partnership with Apple and a book deal with Penguin.

The problem is that Gibson never had cancer. When she finally got ready, she had also lied about countless other things – from her age (she was three years younger than she claimed to be) to her recognized support for various charities (she had not given them any money until journalists started asking). When her story revealed publicly in 2015, Gibson from Media Darling went and celebrated Girl Boss to National Pariah – like an Australian Elizabeth Holmes.

The twisted saga is now the focus of “apple cider vinegar”, which is now streaming on Netflix. Created by Samantha Strauss, the six-episodes series is adapted from “The Woman Who Nooled the World: The True Story of Fake Wellness Guru Belle Gibson” by Nick Tuscano and Beau Donelly, the investigative journalists who postponed Gibson’s fraud through their reporting on Australian Newspapers aged and Sydney Morning Herald.

Kaitlyn Dever – makes an amazingly compelling Australian accent – stars like Belle playing the wannabe guru as a lonely but connecting young woman who uses lies to induce sympathy. But she is not the only focus of the drama, which also follows Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), an influencer who proclaims cancer-fighting benefits of vegetable juice and coffee colonics; And Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Herry), a young woman undergoing brutal cancer treatments who find herself drawn to Belle and Milla’s apparent softer remedies. The series toes a delicate line showing why alternative remedies can be so appealing to patients frustrated with traditional medicine but also illustrating how Dangerous Charlatans are willing to utilize this desperation for personal gain.

“Allure is so powerful because it seems friendlier, lighter, more beautiful. We wouldn’t just say medicine good, wellness badBecause there are beautiful things like communities that people do not necessarily find hospitals, ”says Strauss in a video call from Australia. Because cancer treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy can let patients feel completely exhausted, “It is intoxicating to want to run away from it and go to the person who promises, I’ll solve you in an easier way.“

The title of the show refers to the idea of a magical, yet easily accessible means of a bottle, and the lack of perception that “you can outsource wellness instead of doing all the boring, medically proven things” to maintain health, she says .

Like many in her homeland, Strauss became aware of Gibson around the time she gave a disastrous, ridiculously evasive interview to Australia’s “60 minutes“In 2015. (When asked at her age, Gibson replied, dressed in a Lyserosa Turtle Sweater,” I’ve always been bred as being a 26-year-old at the moment. “She was actually 23.)

“There was a lot of talk at the time about her pink jumper and how dishonest it was to see,” says Strauss. “She just felt so young and way over her head, not that it is excusable. The other thing I found interesting was the ruthlessness of the industry around her publishers that published her book without fact control and the wellness industry that loved to support her as this golden girl and heroic mother who had beaten cancer. “

For Dever, the topic is intensely personal: Her mother died last year after a long -term battle with breast cancer. “I was quite obsessed with the Wellness world and non-conventional therapies because I was looking for other options for my mother who still did all the conventional things at the same time,” says Derver in a zoom interview with his coar. Debnam-Carey. “I learned that there was a whole world out there of information that gives a lot of hope.”

“Apple cider vinegar” is the latest series in what has become a Flowering sub -genre sore Scammers and con -artists, Especially women – from ”Waived“To”Invention Anna. “Although most of the action takes place for a decade or more since in another hemisphere is its themes for Medical QuackAlternative facts and social-media ko chambers are more relevant than ever in 2025.

“Where we get our news from and what rabbit holes we are down, appear to inform and infect our belief system,” says Strauss. “We see how dangerous it is to become so stem because it just leads you away from the facts.”

“Apple Cider Vinegar” avoids spoon-feeding of a tidy version of events to the audience, instead of using an encrypted timeline and changing narrative perspectives to complicate the narrative. A disclaimer at the front of each episode calls the series “A true story based on a lie.”

There is also a repeated warning provided by various characters that speak directly to the camera: “Belle Gibson has not been paid for recreation of her story.” The reference hardly seems unintentional: Netflix was criticized for Paying fake heirs Anna Sorokin A fierce fee for the rights to customize his life story to “invent Anna.”

In Australia, Gibson remains a widely scattered figure. “I was talking to a friend whose partner was dying of brain cancer and they were horrified that I was telling this story. They are like, ‘Belle will earn this. She becomes more famous. ‘And I was like, no, no,’ says Strauss. “I felt it was just so important to tell the audience right ahead (that she wasn’t paid).”

“I’ve never met Belle, so my version of Belle is based on the facts that journalists had written in the book and my research. I created who I imagined Belle had to be,” Strauss continues. “If Real Belle called me up, she pointed out all the things that I got wrong.”

The series never apologizes for Gibson’s behavior or attributes it to a single case, rather than presenting her as someone with a desperate need for approval driven by social media. “I probably never think to feel enough and want to prove that people are wrong in her,” says Strauss.

Like the real Gibson, the series’ version of Belle grew up in the dingy suburbs in Brisbane, and as a dark-haired Goth-Teenager became active on skateboarding forums, where she first began spinning high stories of her health in a bid for attention. The show’s version of Belle considers illness as “a shortcut to being loved and to get out of things. If you’re sick, people can’t be bad for you, ”says Strauss.

In his search for Internet fame, Bella models himself at Milla, an increasing social media star. Instead of amputating her arm to stop the spread of cancer as her doctors encouraged her to do, Milla turns to a severely limited diet consisting primarily of juice. Milla’s choice is annoying, but her frustration over the condescending medical business is also understandable.

“The conventional medical industry can feel really sterile and impersonal, as much as it is incredible in what it is capable of achieving,” says Debnam-Carey. “Although it is difficult to see (Milla who rejects medical advice), you come away with some compassion for this decision and why she wants to find different alternatives.”

Milla is a composite character but her story is similar to the story of Jessica Ainscough, A self -proclaimed “Wellness Warrior” that was diagnosed with a rare cancer in his early 20s and persecuted alternative treatments, including Gerson therapyA dietary regime involving the hourly consumption of fresh vegetable juice. The cancer spread and she died in 2015 at. 29. As documented in “The woman who tricked the world,” Gibson was strangely fixed with Ainscough, even participated in her funeral.

For the Milla character, Strauss explored orthorexia, an eating disorder where humans are obsessed with “healthy” food, and also dived into the story of alternative medical retreats that one Milla visits in Mexico.

At the end of “Apple Cider Vinegar”, Gibson’s app and book have been drawn from the market, but her scam has had serious consequences. There is no post script to tell viewers what happened to Gibson after the scandal blasted or whether she was facing any consequences. Instead, Dever, who is in character as Belle, tells the audience to google it for themselves. They may think the results are disappointing: in 2017, a court ordered Gibson to pay $ 410,000 in fines for her false claims. From 2021 she had not yet paid the fines and authorities began to seize her assets. She also reappeared in 2020, claims she had been “adopted” of Melbourne’s Ethiopian community. (Spoiler Alert: She didn’t have.)

Gibson will soon be thrown back into the global limelight thanks to Netflix. But don’t expect her to get celebrity treatment, says Strauss. “I don’t think she will continue to” dance with the stars “in Australia after this.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.