How Cancer Scammer Belle Gibson Became “One of the Most Hated Women in Australia”

Except for the terminal brain cancer, 2014 was the best year of Belle Gibson’s life. The juvenile Australian entrepreneur’s wellness app, The Whole Pantry, had been voted Apple’s “best new food and drink” app the previous year, and chosen for pre-installation on the upcoming Apple Watch. The 300,000 followers she’d attracted on Instagram helped score Gibson a lucrative book deal with Penguin. She’d banked over half a million Australian dollars in two years, ostensibly giving a enormous part of it to charity. Elle Australia called her “the most inspiring woman you’ve met this year.” Cosmopolitan bestowed their “Fun Fearless Female” award on her. But beneath Gibson’s inspirational success story hid a gigantic, shadowy secret: She never had cancer.

When her con was finally exposed, Gibson didn’t apologize and beg for forgiveness. She didn’t explain she was a single mom who needed the money for her juvenile son. She staunchly denied she suffered from Munchausen’s or pathological lying or any other mental illness. In fact, like all good grifters, Gibson’s motives remain intriguingly unclear.

“She’s my absolutely favorite kind of protagonist to write because she’s so deeply flawed and problematic, but we can only speculate why,” says Samantha Strauss. She explores Gibson’s story in a recent Netflix miniseries that drops Thursday, Apple Cider Vinegar, the next stop for fans of Inventing Anna and The Dropout—anyone captivated by pretty, white, blonde scammers. “We love their audaciousness, their naked ambition, the moral complexity of it all,” says Strauss. “We’re all told to strive for success, but what happens when that success comes at any cost?”

Apple Cider Vinegar has a few ideas. But before it introduces its version of “Instagram’s worst con artist” and “one of the most hated women in Australia” to this side of the world, here’s everything to know about the real Belle Gibson.

“The identity crisis there is big”

Before claiming to have two birth certificates and four name changes, Annabelle Smillie was born in Tasmania in October 1991—not 1988, as she’d later tell people. She grew up in a impoverished Brisbane suburb with an older brother, Nick, and her mother, Natalie, who indeed changed the family surname to “Gibson.” In the introduction of her since pulled cookbook, Gibson described a “dysfunctional home” where “I never knew my dad, and grew up with my mum, who had multiple sclerosis, and my brother, who is autistic.” She says she left home to live with a friend at 12 years aged and, though teachers reported she’d once been a diligent student, dropped out of school in grade 10.

Investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, authors of The Woman Who Fooled the World on which Apple Cider Vinegar is based, dug deep into Gibson’s past. They found records showing that by 2009, Gibson had moved to Perth in Western Australia, where she got a job listening to medical claims at a private health insurance company. Before long, Gibson was telling people she too was ill—with terminal brain cancer. On a skateboarders’ chat forum, she posted increasingly dramatic accounts of her health: “I just woke up out of a coma type thing. The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes.” In early 2010, Belle retold her cancer story to the parenting forum What to Expect; at just 18, she was pregnant with her son, Oliver.

“Right from the start I was very open”

In 2012, a year-old profitless startup called Instagram welcomed a recent user: “@healing_belle,” a self-described “game changer with brain cancer + a food obsession.” Her highly curated and perfectly stylized posts featured inspirational quotes, posed selfies, recipes for Buddha bowls and superfood smoothies—par for the course today, but an innovation by the standards of the era. Gibson’s captions read like a private diary, which was also a novel approach to the platform at the time. “She framed cancer in a way that it hadn’t been framed before,” write Donelly and Toscano. “She gave her fans a glimpse of life with a terminal disease, and what she showed them was living.” Within a year, @healing_belle amassed 200,000 followers, many of whom fawned over her every word.