Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ follows the story of Belle Gibson, who builds a business out of a pack of lies. She tells the world that she had brain cancer and was given weeks to live, but she braved all of that and turned the tide around by resorting to alternate forms of treatment and medicine. Based on the diet she says she followed, she creates an app, which becomes so successful that it eventually lands her a deal with Apple. Then, a book deal follows, and the money and followers on social media accounts pour in.
The grand scale of her success is mirrored by the exceptional fall she faces when it turns out that she has been lying about her cancer all this time. With all that unfolds in the story, one can’t help but wonder why someone would lie about having cancer. It isn’t just her lies but the way she treats people around her that raises questions about her mental health, the answer to which might finally explain why Belle Gibson did what she did.
Belle Gibson Has Been Described as a Compulsive Liar Since a Young Age
Belle Gibson’s scam was exposed by journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who received a tip about her fake cancer from her ex-manager, Chanelle. Like most other people, they too wondered why Belle would lie about such a thing, but their research also led them to discover that this wasn’t her first foray into fabricating fake medical issues to gain attention and sympathy. To dig deeper into her story, they reached out to people who knew her before she became the famous wellness guru of The Whole Pantry. The farther they went in her past, the more things started to get clear, and they wrote about all of it in their book, ‘The Woman Who Fooled the World.’
According to the accounts of Belle’s former friends, boyfriends, and acquaintances in the book, she had always been “prone to lying.” Described as “melodramatic with a tendency to imitate others,” young Belle had cooked up a reputation for herself as a girl who spun all sorts of stories about herself. According to one of her former boyfriends, she “couldn’t go five minutes without making up a story.” The words “pathological liar” were also used by an acquaintance in the same context.
Reportedly, she told one person that she was in witness protection, while she told another that she was a test tube baby. The stories about her having a brain tumor and cancer also went around in several circles years before she took to social media to talk about it. She told people that she had heart problems and that she had undergone several surgeries without which she would have died. She took it further and claimed that she had passed away due to cardiac arrest once and was dead for three whole minutes before she was resuscitated back to life. Reportedly, she even told her grandma she was on a waiting list for a heart operation in Sydney.
What’s worse is that it wasn’t just herself that Belle lied about. She told people that her brother was autistic, even though he wasn’t. One acquaintance claims that she told them the government was paying her $10k per week to look after her brother. In the same vein, she is also said to have told stories about the situations at her house, though none of her other family members have ever backed or confirmed her claims. If anything, they have come forward to dispel her lies.
Belle Gibson May Have the Factitious Disorder
Why Belle Gibson lied and what mental illness she has, if any, cannot be definitively answered as she has never been officially diagnosed by a psychiatrist. While there have been mentions of her seeing one, what came of it hasn’t been made public, which is why anything related to her mental health remains entirely speculative. One of the major theories about her is that she may have factitious disorder, also known as Munchausen syndrome, which is described as a mental health condition where a person lies about an illness or makes themselves ill or makes it look like they are ill. The reason behind these lies is not clear, and the intentions differ from case to case. In some cases, the lies serve a person’s financial condition, while in other cases, they help a person get attention from others.
Considering how Belle Gibson lied about a cancer diagnosis and raked in all the attention and money she could from it, it makes sense why one would suspect she may have the disorder, but again, there has been no official diagnosis. She has been confronted by people about it. In her interview with Tara Brown of 60 Minutes Australia, she was asked if she would call herself a pathological liar, and she said she wouldn’t. When asked if she might have Munchausen, she answered in negative.
What makes things complicated is that there are instances where it seems that Belle might, in fact, believe some of her own lies. In her interviews since the exposing of her scam, she has spoken of her reality, where she did believe certain things to be true, like her cancer diagnosis or even the discrepancies in her age. Some believe that perhaps she didn’t intend for her lies to blow up like this, and when they did, she had no option but to stick to them. Somewhere down the line, she started believing the things she was telling other people and forgot where the truth ended, and the lies began.
Read More: Clive Rothwell: Where is Belle Gibson’s Boyfriend Now?
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