BELLE’S WEB OF LIES?
Inside the disgraced wellness guru’s latest claims
As Belle Gibson entered the Melbourne Federal Court on May 14, reporters swarmed the former wellness blogger who appeared before a judge – for the first time ever – after failing to pay a $410,000 fine for falsely claiming she was curing her terminal brain cancer with alternative therapies.
There, alongside her lawyer Andrew Tragardh, the ‘fake wellness guru’ took the stand claiming she had no funds and was currently living off Centrelink benefits.
She was quizzed about her current financial situation and asked to produce two years’ worth of bank statements, after she was accused of taking a lavish holiday to East Africa instead of paying her fines. Gibson then revealed she was living with a friend, Clive Rothwell, 43, who had paid for the $5000 holiday for her and her 8-year-old son. Little is known about Rothwell, however Gibson revealed in court that the pair are “just friends” and not romantically linked, or engaged. She confirmed he pays her half of their $600 a week rent as well as Gibson’s legal fees and has been providing her with financial support for the past four years. “I contribute where I can,” she said.
In total, Gibson is $90,000 in debt to Rothwell, according to a letter she wrote to the Department of Justice.
Yet when questioned if she knew what Rothwell does for a living, Gibson’s response was: “No. That’s not my business.” Her answer raised eyebrows, but it’s not the first time Gibson’s credibility has been called into question. In 2009, she claimed to have been given four months to live, yet she was thriving five years later. It seemed like a miracle, and one that Gibson decided to capitalise on. Within six months, the young mum made a profit of $420,000 from her mobile app and cookbook, The Whole Pantry.
In her book, she recalls her original diagnosis. “I had a stroke at work – I will never forget sitting alone in the doctor’s office three weeks later, waiting for my test results,” Gibson writes. “He called me in and said, ‘You have a malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops.”
She wrote: “I have been healing a severe and malignant brain cancer for the past few years with natural medicine, Gerson therapy and foods. It’s working for me.”
Her followers on social media – some 200,000 – praised Gibson for being so raw and open about her illness and for the numerous charities she vowed to help through the profits of her sales, including the family of young boy Joshua Schwarz, who had been also been diagnosed with the same type of terminal brain cancer. Her book’s acknowledgements call Joshua, “the second little man after my own heart.”
These days, Gibson, 27, is known as
a fraud – after the Federal Court found her to have lied about her cancer and subsequent ‘treatment’, as well as lying about the amount she had donated to charity (Gibson failed to show up at court hearings). Justice Debra Mortimer said in handing down her decision on March 26, 2017 that, “Ms Gibson had no reasonable basis to believe she had cancer from the time she began making these claims in public to promote The Whole Pantry book and the apps in mid-2013.”
Prior to being found guilty, Gibson was the subject of much media attention when her web of lies began to untangle. In March 2015, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article revealing that five people close to Gibson at the time had questioned her over her cancer diagnosis. One former friend told the publication: “I asked her when she got her diagnosis, she said she didn’t know. I asked her who gave her the diagnosis, she said Dr Phil. I asked if Dr Phil had a last name, she didn’t know, he disappeared.”
Medical professionals had questioned Gibson’s claims after she wrote on social media the cancer had spread to her blood, spleen, brain and uterus. Head of the Department of Surgery at the University of Melbourne,
Dr Andrew Kaye said Gibson’s story didn’t add up. “There is the very occasional case out of many, many thousands that may have a spontaneous regression … but I have never seen that,” he told the SMH. “I wouldn’t believe any of this unless I saw the pathology report with my own eyes and the pathology itself.”
Two months later, Gibson was interviewed on a segment of 60 Minutes, for which she was reportedly paid $75,000, amid the public backlash. In reference to her cancer treatment claims, Gibson admitted, “No, I didn’t [have cancer], but when I was writing that I thought that I did.”
Her story came to pieces once and for all when scans showed she was healthy and well, prompting Gibson to claim she had been wrongly diagnosed by a German alternative medicine practitioner, Dr Mark Johns. “Once I received the definite, ‘No, you do not have cancer,’ that was something I had to come to terms with and it was really traumatising and I was feeling a huge amount of grief,” Gibson told 60 Minutes.
The parents of Joshua Schwarz revealed they had no idea Gibson claimed she would be donating to them and never received any sum of money. “I feel humiliated and betrayed,” Penelope Schwarz told The Sunday Telegraph in March 2015. Their son lost his battle with cancer in January 2017.
The former health blogger has previously been warned she could be charged with criminal contempt for refusing to settle her fines, however she can’t be charged for not having the money to pay them. Tragardh emphasised Gibson’s lack of financial support and asked for a speedy resolution saying, “My client doesn’t have unlimited resources to pay for lawyers to assist her.” Gibson will return to court on June 6.
“No, I didn’t [have cancer] but I thought I did” —Gibson