Diksha Sundriyal
A social media empire is built on lies and then crumbles just as easily in Netflix’s ‘Apple Cider Vinegar.’ The protagonist is a woman named Belle Gibson, who amasses a huge following on Instagram after claiming that she treated her brain cancer entirely through her diet and other unconventional forms of therapy. She monetizes her alleged success story through her app, which eventually gets a deal with Apple, and a book, which is picked up by an imprint of Penguin. However, when her lies about the cancer start to come out, other claims about her health are also brought under questioning.
Belle Gibson Made Up Lies About Having Heart Problems
When the truth about Belle Gibson’s fake cancer came to light, not everyone was entirely caught off guard. To some people, this was just another fabrication in a long list of fictitious health problems she had claimed to have for a very long time. In digging into the truth about her claims, journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano talked to people who had been in and out of Belle’s orbit over the years. Some of these people knew her from her teenage years and claimed that this wasn’t the first time she had claimed to have been miraculously cured of a disease that should have killed her.
Reportedly, she had claimed to have had heart problems as early as 2009, maybe even before that. By this time, she had moved to Perth and mixed with the skateboarding crowd. She was a constant presence at the online forums, but instead of talking about skateboarding, she talked about all sorts of health problems she had. She claimed to have gone through three heart surgeries, saying that the fluid in her pericardium needed to be drained and also that she needed valve replacement to stay alive.
She also claimed to have died on the operating table for about three minutes due to cardiac arrest and was electrocuted back to life. Eventually, all of these claims were proven to be lies, and Belle Gibson herself confessed that she had lied about all of it. When confronted with the facts in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, she said that at the time, she was a teenager going through some difficult times, which made her melodramatic.
Belle Gibson Claimed She Had a Miscarriage During Her Second Pregnancy
The thing about making up lies is that when a person actually tells the truth, it becomes rather difficult to believe them. Something similar may have happened with Belle Gibson and the story of her miscarriage. Initially, like her lies about brain cancer, no one thought twice when Belle revealed that she had lost her second child in a pregnancy and miscarried in the fifth month. At the time, she was with her partner, Clive Rothwell. On her social media posts and later in her book, Belle talked about losing the baby and revealed that it was her desire to seek community and support during a tough time that led her to create The Whole Pantry app.
She said that her pregnancy had been a welcome surprise due to the complications caused by her cancer. Later, in a social media update, she wrote she had “extreme issues with her reproductive system because of losing a child at five months pregnant.” She received nothing but support about this grave loss from her social media followers. But then, when her scam was exposed, and people discovered the sheer number of lies she had told over the years, some even started to question whether she actually had a miscarriage or whether this was yet another fake health crisis she concocted to gain sympathy and attention.
A thing to note in this context is that, in the end, Belle Gibson came clean about her lies, one way or another. She confessed to lying about her heart problems, the cancer, and other issues she claimed she suffered from. But she never denied having a miscarriage. In her first confession interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly, when she was asked whether she had lied about losing her baby, she insisted that she hadn’t and that the miscarriage was, in fact, real. In the same interview, she clearly came forward about the lies surrounding her cancer.
Read More: Belle Gibson’s Net Worth: How Rich is the Scammer?
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