My sister’s a master manipulator: As children Nick Gibson and his sister Belle were the best of mates. They quibbled like any siblings but he recalls her being a placid and caring sister.
‘She was my best buddy growing up,’ he says. ‘We got on so well everyone thought we were twins.’
Fast forward three decades and the 35-year-old forklift operator is as horrified as anyone by the person his little sister has become.
Belle Gibson, it turns out, is a heartless hoaxer, a woman dubbed ‘Instagram’s worst con artist’ after she faked having terminal brain cancer to scam thousands of pounds out of her fans with her wellness advice and recipes.
Nick, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two children, is as decent as his sister is twisted. He is not autistic, as Belle once claimed. He simply struggles with reading and writing, he tells me.
Belle Gibson built a wellness empire by convincing fans she had cured herself of cancer
What he doesn’t struggle with is right and wrong. Because while Belle, who built a career as a wellness guru after claiming to have beaten cancer with natural remedies, has never apologised to those she duped, Nick wishes he could personally say sorry to every one of them on her behalf.
‘I feel pretty upset by what she did to those families,’ he tells the Mail. ‘None of them deserved it. They were actually going through problems for real and then you’ve got Belle who’s faking cancer and pretending to fix herself and play doctor herself and all this other rubbish. The people she was scamming actually had cancer.’
Belle Gibson is a household name Down Under where she built a wellness empire by convincing fans she had cured herself of cancer with good nutrition and alternative therapies.
Alongside her Instagram, healing_belle, which amassed some 300,000 followers, she launched an app called The Whole Pantry in 2013, attracting 200,000 users in the first month, a feat which meant it was voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of the year.
Before long she’d signed a deal with Penguin Books to produce a cookbook with the same name, promising to give 25 per cent of the proceeds to cancer charities. With her extraordinary story of survival and her positive outlook, she quickly became a national hero. Cosmopolitan magazine even presented her with their Fun, Fearless Female Award in 2014, months before her downfall.
But the cancer, along with claims of having a stroke, two cardiac arrests and heart surgeries where she apparently died twice on the operating table, was a lie so shocking that betrayed fans are still furious nearly a decade later.
Indeed Belle, who is the subject of new ITV documentary Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, was such a deceptive master manipulator, according to her brother, that he believes she should go to prison.
‘The things she’s done to those families, well, technically it’s fraud,’ he says. ‘I think she should be locked up, spend some time in prison and have a bit of a think about it because I don’t think she realises what she’s done to them.’
Belle Gibson built a wellness empire by convincing fans she had cured herself of cancer with good nutrition and alternative therapies
Belle’s brother Nick Gibson speaks in new ITV documentary Instagram’s Worst Con Artist
‘I shouldn’t be saying this because I’m her brother but what she did was nasty. Some prison time would give her a wake-up call. The things she’s done… I don’t want my kids to be around that.’
With the second part of the ITV documentary due to screen on Thursday and Netflix filming a drama, Apple Cider Vinegar, inspired by Belle’s story, the Daily Mail sought to track the elusive Belle down. Now 32, she’s the mother of a teenage son living in Melbourne where the Federal Court fined her £215,000 in 2017 for her deception. Despite calling her and leaving numerous messages, however, she failed to respond to our interview request.
When questioned by Australian TV’s A Current Affair at a service station in February this year about her scam and why the fine remains unpaid, she said: ‘Have some humanity, I haven’t paid things because I can’t afford to. You know I can’t get into the workplace.’ When asked if she wanted to apologise for betraying her followers, she stayed silent.
His sister’s lack of remorse troubles Nick and he wants Belle to take responsibility by at least paying the fine.
‘Basically, she got a slap on the wrist. If we got a fine and we didn’t pay for it in a certain time, we’d probably get locked up. People are angry, I’ve seen death threats on Facebook directed at her.’
But it’s not just the lying that disturbs her brother; it’s the fact that vulnerable cancer sufferers believed in her and saw her as a saviour.
Belle may be Australian, but the chilling truth is her deception flourished across the globe. In an age when people turn to their phones as much as their physicians for medical advice, attractive and convincing influencers can easily profit from misery and desperation with their unexamined claims.
Kylie Willey is one of those who fell for Belle’s claims. This month marks ten years since the 49-year-old Melbourne mother-of-three learned she had a Grade 3b T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. She had tumours from her neck to her pelvis and needed urgent treatment to stop the disease spreading to her brain.
Belle Gibson leaves the Federal Court in Melbourne in June 20, 2019
‘For the next 18 months the doctors smashed me with daily chemotherapy,’ the former personal trainer says.
‘Over the course of my treatment I had 27 lumbar punctures so they could inject the chemo straight into my brain to try to prevent the cancer spreading throughout my body and getting to my brain.’
Desperately sick yet determined to fight the illness so her three sons would not be left without their mother, Kylie battled daily headaches, brain fog and huge weight gain caused by steroids.
‘I didn’t recognise myself,’ she says. ‘I was dying and horribly unwell and because I was so neutropenic [with a severely weakened immune system due to a low blood cell count] I couldn’t be around anyone, even my children, because if they gave me something it was likely to kill me. Nobody could come near me unless they were in full PPE so I’d be like, “just don’t bother.”’
As she languished in Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, Kylie found herself spending more time on social media and became increasingly intrigued by Belle.
A friend had mentioned the young cancer sufferer and as Kylie began scrolling through Instagram posts full of health-giving smoothie and raw salad recipes, she became entranced by how luminous and full of life she appeared even as she allegedly battled a brain tumour.
‘I was in awe,’ Kylie recalls. ‘She’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer but she’d shunned traditional treatment and instead overhauled her diet and lifestyle to beat the disease. It seemed a reasonable thing for somebody to have success with eating healthily and while I look back on it now and think it was a pretty damn naïve way to think, I was so desperate to have relief from what I was going through.’
Keen to know more, Kylie messaged Belle to tell her how inspired she was by her journey. When Belle wrote back, telling her she was thinking and praying for her, Kylie was further buoyed.
‘Her kind words meant a lot and I felt she was my friend.’
So inspiring was Belle’s decision to spurn conventional therapies in favour of curing herself with recipes and alternative treatments that Kylie decided to do the same.
‘I threw a tantrum five months into treatment,’ she says. ‘I was so sick and upset with what my life had become I told my doctors that I was done. I said: “You can’t guarantee that this is going to cure me so I want to give the alternative a go because Belle is doing so well.” She looked fantastic while I had this buffalo hump on the back of my neck and couldn’t string sentences together.’
Kylie Willey during her cancer treatment. She said she was previously ‘in awe’ of Belle
Some will view Kylie’s decision with incredulity; but that is to underestimate both the nature of hope and the power of storytelling.
In an age when we form attachments to famous or inspiring people, is it really inconceivable that a despairing person might look to another who has seemingly dodged death by following an alternative path? Addled by drugs, seduced by Belle’s message and pictures of health, and with hope ebbing away, Kylie was not gullible. She was desperate.
Ultimately, her saviour would not be the self-styled wellness guru but a conventional nurse who listened to her rationale but was unequivocal in her advice.
By telling Kylie that she would be nursing her through palliative care if she eschewed chemo treatment, she returned to conventional medicine.
A decade on, Kylie is free of cancer and thriving but, like many, she wonders about those who were influenced by Belle and opted to abandon treatment. Having persevered with chemotherapy, Kylie, ironically, was in the hairdresser’s tending to her post-chemo regrowth when a story on social media alerted her to the fact Belle had lied about having cancer.
Belle’s Instagram account, healing_belle, amassed hundreds of thousands of followers
The shock, fury and betrayal was instant. The radiant cancer survivor who had entranced hundreds of thousands with her message that a healthy lifestyle had cured her of the dreaded illness was a fraud.
‘It made my blood boil,’ says Kylie. ‘It was total deception. I wasn’t an idiot. I look back and think I was probably easily manipulated, but there would definitely have been other people who were heavily influenced by her and perhaps didn’t have the support system to talk them through continuing with treatment or didn’t have the money because cancer treatment is expensive in Australia.’
Belle was ultimately rumbled by her friend Chanelle McAuliffe, who confronted the wellness guru over her cancer claims after realising she had no symptoms. Journalists began investigating and, in an interview in The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2015, Belle finally admitted she had lied for years about having cancer.
‘No, none of it is true,’ she said. ‘I am still jumping between what I think I know and what is reality.’ The publication also checked her birth certificate and discovered she had been christened Annabelle Natalie Smellie in 1991, making her 33. She had previously added three years to her age.
While her brother acknowledges that being raised by their single mother, Natalie, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and died in 2019, was difficult at times, he says his sister has long struggled with telling the truth and had ‘a lot of attitude’ growing up.
He confirms that Belle left home aged 12 to live with an older man in his 60s, but can’t or won’t explain what triggered her to do so so young. On the occasions he visited his sister she had a separate bedroom and he saw no evidence the pair shared an intimate relationship. Asked if he thinks she’s a clever psychopath or a deeply troubled liar, he says he’s unsure and often asked Belle himself why she claimed to have cancer.
‘When I asked her those questions she just kept on changing the subject, as she does,’ he says.
While he remains hurt by her claims that he is autistic and distressed by her deception of others, he still cares for Belle.
‘I’m always going to have a bit of love there for my sister. I just hope she gets some help for herself.’
Instagram’s Worst Con Artist is on ITV1 at 9pm on Thursday
