Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s true crime drama series, ‘Apple Cider Vinegar,’ follows the life and scams of Belle Gibson, a wellness blogger who turned out to have made outrageous lies about her health and profited off of it. The six-part series goes back and forth in time and explores the perspectives of different people in Belle’s orbit to explore the true depths of her lies and the impact they had on the ones around her. To an outsider, Belle looks like a miracle and a success story for the ages. According to her, she was diagnosed with brain cancer and was given six weeks to live, four months tops. After several months of chemo, she decided to ditch conventional medicine and turned towards holistic methods, focusing on her diet and other forms of therapy to treat herself. Or so she says.
It turns out that Belle always had a penchant for telling lies, especially about her health, to get attention. Her problems started with a negligent mother whose attention she always craved. When she got older, she found a whole new world online, where she could tell people whatever she wanted, and they would shower her with love and attention. This attention becomes a drug that she craves the more she gets, which leads her to develop a set of outrageous lies, a lot of which are inspired by the real journey of another person, Milla Blake. When Milla discovers she has cancer and would have to cut off her arm to survive, she refuses to do that. When the doctors fail to provide an alternate path, she finds her own at the Hirsch Institute in Tijuana, Mexico.
Belle follows Milla’s journey online and convinces herself that they are good friends. So, when they finally meet in person and Milla neither recognizes her nor pays her much heed, Belle is spurned. Based on Milla’s journey, she decides to build her own wellness brand and calls it The Whole Pantry. It begins as an Instagram account and an app, which blows up pretty quickly, bringing Belle millions of dollars and followers. She even finds a way to get herself a book deal with Julie Gibbs at Lantern Publishing, but it is when she reaches the top that things start to go downhill for her.
One of Belle’s many followers is Lucy Guthrie, who has breast cancer. She is inspired by Belle’s journey and it leads her to consider the path of alternate medicine. This frustrates her husband, Justin, who believes that Belle is a fake. When his suspicions are confirmed by Belle’s ex-manager, Chanelle, he launches an investigation that eventually exposes Belle’s worst crimes. As everything starts to fall apart around her, Belle desperately tries to salvage whatever she can. In the end, she is left with no other option but to run. SPOILERS AHEAD.
What Happens to Belle?
For someone who has scammed people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and lied extensively about everything regarding herself, one would think that Belle’s story would end with her going to prison. However, things rarely turn out the way we expect them to, and in the case of Belle Gibson, where every new thing is a shock or a revelation, the ending is just as unconventional as her lies. By the end of the story, we find her struggling to keep her life together. She is abandoned by everyone. Since the story about her charity frauds is published, she receives unanimous hate. As her following diminishes significantly, she is also dropped by her publisher and Apple. All her friends, employees, and anyone she kept around her with lies leave her. Luckily for her, Clive sticks around, and it is his support, even in the worst of times, that gives her a new idea.
Prior to her own fall, Belle had seen people going back on their words. She knew of the influencer whose entire persona was based on her being vegan, but when the doctor told her to start eating meat again, she had to rewrite the whole narrative. And she succeeded at it. Belle wishes to do the same, but she knows she cannot do it while living in Australia. So, she proposes the plan to move to America, where she is not as well known, which means she will have a cleaner slate to start fresh. Even then, she has to give an interview to rid herself of her lies by finally telling the truth.
Three months after her move to the States, she sits down for the interview, but even then, it is riddled with all sorts of lies. As soon as the interview ends, Belle knows that she has messed up and no one will believe her anymore. The only people she has left by her side now are Clive and her son. She looks at them with love and longing and then joins them by the pool to spend some time with them. Does this mean that she has finally accepted her guilt and decided to do better? There is no way to confirm that.
From the way Belle Gibson seems to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth, it seems that she may, in fact, have decided not to build another social media empire on lies. Perhaps she finally realized that the love and attention she had been trying to find out there was right by her side all this time. And so she decided to leave all the mess and actually start anew in the States, where she now lives in relative peace and complete anonymity. This decision also tracks keeping in mind that should she return to Australia, she has prison time waiting for her.
Instead of giving us title cards to tell us of the repercussions of her actions, we are told to Google it, and here’s what comes up when you do that. The revelation of Belle’s scam led to an investigation, where her guilt was proved beyond doubt. In September 2017, her false claims of donating to charity led the court to impose a fine of $410,000 on her. Reportedly, she didn’t even bother attending the court hearings. Eventually, she showed up and claimed that she was in no position to pay the fine, following which her house was raided in January 2020 and in May 2021 to get the money back in other forms.
The details of her whereabouts remain a secret, but it was reported after the first raid that she had become involved with the Ethiopian community in Victoria, Melbourne. However, soon after this news, the Australian Oromo Community Association cut ties with her, and since then, she seems to have completely rescinded in the shadows with no online or offline presence to speak of. Still, there are rumors that she may be working on something new, so perhaps we haven’t heard the last of her.
Does Clive Leave Belle? Why Does He Stay With Her?
Belle tells some pretty outrageous lies through the course of her story, and everything she does makes her even more hatable. By the end of the show, whatever empathy one may feel for her is gone, and she seems completely irredeemable. But there is only one person who seems to believe in her, or at least pretend to do it till the end: Clive Rothwell. He met Belle when she was a single mother trying to set up a business that would stick. He saw the best in her and tried to support her through her journey. He took complete responsibility for her son, whom he raised as his own. There came the point when Clive realized what Belle had been doing, but even then, he didn’t leave her. However, she didn’t seem to acknowledge or appreciate that, and she took him for granted until, eventually, he was the only one left, still supporting her.
When the entire world seems to be hating on Belle, Clive is the only one who sticks by her, and it makes everyone, including the journalists, question why he is doing it. What does Clive get out of being with her? At first, money would seem to be the obvious reason, but when her entire business falls apart and the money disappears from the equation, Clive is still there. By now, she has also given him several reasons to hate her. However, she has also given him her son, and that is the only reason he stays. It’s not that Clive didn’t want to leave her. When he considered the scenario of having shared custody, he was made to realize that he wasn’t the child’s legal guardian, which meant that separation from Belle would mean complete separation from his son as well.
Clive tries another option where he prods Nathan to go for full custody. He is even ready to take on all responsibilities of the boy, becoming a co-parent with Nathan, but the latter seems to have no interest in the well-being of his son. Clive could still have left, but he didn’t want to leave the boy he raised as his own behind. Moreover, as everything goes to hell for Belle, he knows that the boy will be forced to face the consequences of his mother’s actions. Considering all this, he couldn’t leave without him, so, despite everything, he stays with Belle, even when he is fully aware of what she has done. In any case, his loyalty isn’t expected to last forever. Not shockingly, it was reported in 2023 that real-life Clive Rothwell and Belle Gibson had gone their separate ways.
Does Lucy’s Cancer Go Away? Does She Die?
The reason Justin Guthrie so dedicatedly follows Belle Gibson’s case and does whatever it takes to bring her down is because he hates the woman for influencing his sick wife into believing that conventional medicine is not good for her. He hates Belle for having influenced many other people the same way and ruining their lives with her lies. In the end, he succeeds in his mission, but at the same time, he loses sight of what is the most important thing for him: his wife. His obsession with Belle drives a wedge between him and Lucy, especially as she starts to become more and more dejected with her treatment. At one point, she accepts that she is going to die and wants to come to terms with it. For this, she wishes to go to Peru, but Justin is not supportive of this.
While Justin is busy digging dirt on Belle, Lucy embarks on her own journey, which brings her the peace and perspective she had been looking for. Her husband gets a perspective of his own when he gets a reality check from Fiona Cross, who had been duped by Belle into believing that her son could get money for his surgery, which could potentially save his life. Not only does her scam ruin his chances of getting treatment, but it also worsens things by turning their family into a target for all the people who hate Belle. Due to their association with her, people believe that the Cross family is also complicit in her lies. Eventually, they sit down for an interview to reveal that they, too, are victims of her actions.
Talking about her son’s fate, which looks pretty bleak now, Fiona says that she is still glad to have known him. Justin, too, has the chance to love and live with his wife while she is still alive rather than chase after things that don’t really mean anything. Taking her advice, Justin goes back to Lucy, and they reconcile. She seems a little better now, and when they go to the doctor, they are told that Lucy should get her surgery and then hope for the best. So, that’s what they do. In the end, it is not revealed what will eventually become of Lucy, whether the surgery will be successful in ridding her of cancer, or if she will die because of it. What is confirmed is that she will live the rest of her life, however much of it she gets, as best as she can. And what’s more important is that Justin will be right by her side all through it.
Read More: Where is the Belle Gibson Now?
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