Cancer faker Sabontu, sorry, Belle Gibson has had a makeover. Apparently she is now an Ethiopian or more specifically an Oromo, an ethnic group within Ethiopia.
Gibson added to the long list of her ‘look at me’ moments appearing in a Facebook video back in October last year, offering criticisms of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Abiy Ahmed, claiming human rights abuses without any evidence and praising Allah.
To be clear, the Oromo are not defined by Islam or indeed any other religion. Many are Catholic, some Protestant, some Muslim while others cling to Waaqeffana, an indigenous monotheistic religion.
A senior figure within the Oromo community in Australia rejected suggestions Gibson had been or was acting on their behalf.
The Oromo have a long history of persecution in East Africa but for all the troubles they have had to face, the last thing they need is Belle Gibson in their corner.
Not one to be easily deterred though, Gibson refers to Ethiopia, or a large part of it as “back home.” Northcote and her previous home in Elwood are nowhere near big enough for Belle Gibson’s ego.
Back in May last year, Gibson finally appeared at the Federal Court after numerous unexplained absences, wearing an expensive outfit and sunglasses, sporting immaculate hair and make-up. Let’s just say she showed no sign of a sudden shift into poverty.
The bailiffs attended her home this week. She’s not the homeowner so they could only seize goods they believe Gibson owns.
We should be able to get $20 for her sunglasses at Cash Converters. That still leaves a tick under $500,000 unpaid.
Given the large amount of money owed and her unwillingness to reach some accommodation with Consumer Affairs Victoria, surely a jail sentence is the next step.
The only problem is by the time Gibson serves her sentence she will probably end up ‘top dog’ of the women’s slammer, trading on wellness cigarettes and demanding sympathy for a bad dose of the Black Death.
It’s not a crime to fake cancer. Perhaps it should be but it isn’t now. It only becomes an offence where the fake cancer sufferer obtains some benefit, say by a donation drive or for some exhortation of money based on the cost of treatment that will never take place.
In 2017, former Hockeyroo Kathryn Hubble was fined $2620 and placed on good behaviour bonds after pleading guilty to make and use false documents to obtain financial advantage. Hubble had been employed at children’s charity Redkite. Hubble was paid $1266 in sick leave after producing fraudulent medical notes.
Those medical documents also included a suggestion that Hubble be transferred from the charity’s Perth office to Sydney on compassionate grounds. A role was created for her in the Sydney office and the charity maintained her salary while in Sydney was obtained fraudulently. The court dealt only with the sick leave benefit.
For all that, Hubble maintained she had been diagnosed with cancer but was unable to produce any evidence of a diagnosis.
During sentencing Magistrate Greg Grogin, with more than a hint of exasperation, told the court, “I don’t know whether to treat Ms Hubble as a long-term liar or a person who deserves sympathy because she’s suffering from cancer.”
In any event, this was relatively small beans compared to Gibson’s deceit.
Gibson claimed to have cancer up the wahzoo – brain, cervical; her entire body racked with malignancy only to pronounce herself cured by diet and that most absurd term in the 21st Century lexicon, wellness.
However, it was not a straightforward matter of fraud. Under the circumstances, a non-criminal finding of deceiving consumers was as far as the law could go.
Gibson traded on her unlikely story of a non-medical cure for cancer. She obtained substantial financial benefit by creating a wellness app and received a significant advance from Penguin Books who published The Whole Pantry in 2014 before taking it off the shelves when the hoax was exposed.
What sort of person fakes cancer? Cancer fakery is fundamentally a woman’s transgression. The corner store psychology puts it at an extreme form of attention seeking but it is far worse than that.
Most fall comfortably into a condition known as Histrionic Personality Disorder characterised by exhibitionism, constant attention seeking, rapidly shifting emotional states that may appear superficial or exaggerated to others, blaming others for their own failures, a need to be the centre of attention, a belief that relationships they have are more intimate than they actually are and yes, faking illnesses.
Many shrinks believe HPD is a close relative of Anti-Social Personality Disorder, a condition that includes sociopathy and psychopathy depending on who you speak to.
We don’t need to peruse the DSM V to understand how dangerous people like Gibson can be both at a personal level and in a wider societal context.
Most cancer patients follow expert medical advice and have confidence in it. When it comes to the vast array of weird wellness therapies, which often involve way too many coffee enemas, most take the view that if it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit then it’s sensible not to step in it.
But not all do. It is something of a contemporary shortcoming of living in a mass media environment, tapping into the anti-vaxxer nonsense and other drivel that questions scientific knowledge and expertise. Driven by cynicism or more likely by a sense of desperation, some cancer sufferers will look for miracles.
Given what is at stake, there will always be a market for chicanery and deception.
I have heard of miracle cures. They are rare but they do exist. I know of one fellow who was riddled with metastatic tumours. He was given just a few weeks to live. He was placed on an IV drip of a drug, Keytruda – an immunotherapeutic treatment which at the time was being used in trials for lung and bowel cancers. He was scanned up a month later and the tumours had vanished. It was a kind of automatic remission. He’s still alive today.
Keytruda has a very low rate of rate of effectiveness, perhaps less than one in five and then only for specific cancers. I know this because I was administered the drug myself on a clinical trial. It didn’t do me any good and the surgery I had done everything in my power to avoid had to go ahead.
The point is the only miracle cures I’m aware of occur within clinical environments where expert medical opinion is in place. I guarantee there have been no miracle cancer cures where 100 ml of espresso is sprayed up one’s blurter on a regular basis or from gnawing on an apple with a nasty looking bruise on it.
Perhaps the greatest crime of a faker like Gibson is that she has made people suspicious of all cancer sufferers. Or perhaps it is that those who are diagnosed may be disinclined to tell their stories for fear of being considered fake.
Which ever way you look at it, it’s a big crime.
