A healthy dose of scepticism about Belle Gibson

Belle Gibson with son Olivier in a photograph from her book The Whole Pantry.

MELBOURNE social media entrepreneur Belle Gibson once told her 200,000 online followers not to be deceived by her healthy ­appearance.

Given the myriad health catastrophes Gibson had detailed to her Facebook and Instagram audience — the terminal brain tumour she first revealed in 2009; the multiple secondary cancers riddling her body; the seizures, brain-swelling and hospitalisations she had described — some had expressed wonderment that she maintained such a chic appearance while caring for her four-year-old son and running her internationally successful “wellness” business, The Whole Pantry.

“It’s confronting to most, even those attached to my life each day, that I get up and get on with everything,” Gibson wrote on Instagram last September. “That I ‘don’t look sick’, that cancer isn’t always the dramatised scene it is in (the) media.”

As she sat sipping peppermint tea in a Melbourne cafe three weeks ago, Gibson still did not look sick — in fact, she looked the embodiment of youthful beauty, with her honey-blonde hair tied back and her casual T-shirt and shorts revealing a tan acquired on a recent ocean cruise to Vanuatu and Noumea.

It’s not hard to see why Cosmopolitan and Vogue have jumped on her story of miraculous survival from cancer through natural healing, or why international book publishers and computer giant Apple have turned The Whole Pantry into a multimedia global brand.

Gibson responds to cancer claims

Gibson’s dreamy ingenue air gives her story of cancer survival a powerful emotional appeal; her cosmetically enhanced teeth and sculpted brows are television-ready, and even the tattoos decorating her arms offer an intriguing glimpse of the “weird” youth she sometimes alludes to.

Gibson had agreed to be interviewed by The Weekend Australian about her story of beating terminal cancer without conventional medical treatment and the conversation soon turned to the dramatic day last July when she all but announced her imminent death on Instagram.

“With frustration and ache in my heart,” she had written, “… it hurts me to find space tonight to let you all know with love and strength that I’ve been diagnosed with a third and forth (sic) cancer. One is secondary and the other is primary. I have cancer in my blood, spleen, brain, uterus, and liver. I am hurting.”

In her final comments she talked of handing over the business so others could carry on her legacy.

The post had sparked hundreds of anguished messages from ­people as far away as Zimbabwe, Sweden and the US, many of them young women who declared a spiritual bond with Gibson and spoke of her as a warrior, an angel and a “beacon shining through your suffering”.

“Without doubt you are THE most inspirational person I have ever encountered,” said one. “I have never met you but I ‘know’ you. I have never heard you speak but I ‘hear’ you. I have never seen you in person but I ‘look’ at you in awe, in wonder and in the greatest admiration I have ever felt for anyone.”

Yet nearly eight months later, as Gibson sat sipping tea, her demeanour suddenly changed at the mention of those multiple secondary cancers. She launched into a long, meandering story about how she had been “led astray” by a doctor who had diagnosed her. Tears began to fall as she admitted she might not actually have cancer of the liver, spleen, uterus and blood after all.

“It’s hard to talk about it,” she said plaintively. “I would say that it was more of a misdiagnosis than completely fictional.” Would she name the doctor? No. Was he a medical practitioner? She seemed uncertain. Suddenly Gibson broke down sobbing, saying she had never wanted her private medical details to become public property.

“I want some of my privacy back,” she declared.

In the five days since The Australian first revealed details of that interview, along with new evidence of Gibson’s history of unusual and dramatic medical crises, her reasons for wanting more privacy have become obvious.

Her claim of an aggressive terminal brain cancer, it’s now clear, was disbelieved by many who knew her as far back as 2009; her more recent claims so disturbed some friends and colleagues that they say they demanded proof she was ill; even her age is in doubt.

But as Gibson’s business and personal story unravels, a bigger question hovers in the background: to what extent did the world’s biggest computer company and largest publishing house fail to check the veracity of the ­social media sensation they helped create?

THE mysteries surrounding Gibson go back to her birth because in her book and her many interviews she has said consistently that she was 20 in June 2009, when a Perth doctor first told her she had only four months to live because of an aggressive malignant brain tumour. But Gibson was born in October 1991, according to her own corporate filings, which would make her 17 at that time.

About her childhood she has provided only sketchy details: a father who left the family when she was seven; an autistic brother; a mother stricken by multiple sclerosis whose relationship with her was so fractious that Gibson moved out when she was 12.

But former friends from her days at Wynnum State High School, in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs, caution that they rarely took anything she said literally.

“She had a new illness every day,” says one. “At one point she was a test-tube baby. At another point she was raised in foster care. She told me that she had to have chemotherapy for cervical cancer. I knew her for five years and I never met her mother or brother or dad; it almost seemed a conscious decision by Belle to keep her family distant.”

Like many 20-somethings who came of age in the Facebook era, however, Gibson has left scattered traces of her younger self on social media sites.

Her talents as a photographer are evident in the urban images she uploaded to one website as a 15-year-old, along with a commentary that referred to her visiting a psychotherapist who is “more psychotic than me”.

American poet EE Cummings was a favourite author, and writing and photography were listed among her passions; according to one friend she attended acting classes for several years.

But around 2008 she dropped out of school and moved in Perth. Pictures from the time show a chubbier, 16-year-old Gibson with an “emo” look — straightened jet-black hair, black jeans and jacket, and heavy-framed spectacles.

It was in Perth, in mid-2009, that Gibson created another ­ruckus with her dramatic medical ­stories when she joined the online chat forums at Skateboard.com.au.

The “Belle Gibson” of the skater forums was the anti­thesis of the organic earth-mother of today; she was a trash-talking provocateur who engaged skater boys in epic late-night exchanges about pornography, tattoos, her life as a “straight-up f..king bisexual” and her passion for John Lennon and Nelson Mandela. At times she claimed to be living off Centrelink benefits; at others, working in an office. Her life plan included launching “a marketing business”.

In her interview with this newspaper last month, Gibson recalled that she suffered anxiety and social isolation during this period and was prescribed antidepressants. “I became very insular, whereas I had always been described as quite bubbly and outgoing,” she recalled.

“I kept going to my GP saying: ‘Something’s not quite right — can you please tell me what you can do to help resolve this?’ ”

She says it was only after she suffered a stroke that she discovered she had a brain tumour.

Gibson says it was June 26, 2009, that she received the shocking news. “I will never forget sitting alone in the doctor’s office … waiting for my test results,” she writes in her book The Whole Pantry. “He called me in and said ‘You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops’.”

But Gibson’s old skater friends have known for years that even before these events are said to have happened, she had spoken of surviving an equally extraordinary medical drama.

In early May 2009 the “Belle Gibson” of the chat for­ums told her friends she was writing to them from a Perth hospital ward where she was waiting for “the first of three or more operations” to remove fluid from around her heart. Across the ensuing weeks she recounted in vivid detail a series of heart operations, describing the hospital surroundings, her appointments with her specialist, her visit to the hospital chapel, the tests she was undergoing for a heart tumour and her preparations for chemotherapy.

On May 21 she claimed to have woken from a post-operative coma after briefly dying on the operating table:

The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes … (I) went straight into a coma situation for 6 hours and just woke up crying for my iphone. Haha. They’re amazed I’m sitting up testing already and claim miracle. Anyway, the procedure failed and I died! Pretty gnarly.

Even at the time, some participants on the chat forum were openly sceptical amid the outpouring of sympathy. Only two months later, soon after she had moved to Melbourne, Gibson announced on Facebook that she was suffering “a stage two malignant tumo(u)r of the brain”, prompting another rush of sympathy. It was during the following two months, Gibson has since claimed, that she underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy before abandoning treatment in favour of holistic remedies, colonics, oxygen therapy, Ayuvedic medicine and other alternative treatments.

In the past week, several of Gibson’s friends from this period have surfaced to say that she never showed any signs of illness or the after-effects of chemotherapy.

One former friend told The Australian many in the skate community were angry with Gibson because two skaters had recently been lost to cancer. “It upset a lot of people, actually,” he said. “It was why I de-friended her.”

Gibson’s own blogs and Twitter feed from mid to late 2009 remained archived on the internet and feature “selfies” of her goofing with friends, posing happily in urban settings and showing off a more gothic hairstyle. She does not have the appearance of someone close to death and recovering from recent heart surgery.

In an interview last year, Gibson suggested that the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine was responsible for her brain tumour, and in 2009 she tweeted about “the government giving me cancer”. Her anti-vaccine stance became more staunch after the birth of son Olivier in 2010, when she entered a new phase of advocating organic food and alternative medicine via a blog on which she sported a new natural look.

In early 2013 she launched an Instagram blog called @healing_belle, introducing herself as a young mother with a malignant brain tumour who had decided to heal herself naturally and now aspired to make “Health and Wellness accessible to the world”.

Social media was exploding at the time and Gibson’s story of beating cancer without medical treatment, combined with her blog’s seductive visuals and recipes, built a passionate following. By mid-2013 she had nearly 100,000 followers and had turned her recipes into an iPhone and iPad app called The Whole Pantry, which has since been downloaded more than 300,000 times.

Book deals here and overseas soon followed, and magazines lined up to publish her story. The Whole Pantry recipe book — complete with a first-person foreword in which Gibson recounts her “quest to heal myself naturally” — was published in Australia before Christmas by Penguin imprint Lantern, and was scheduled for British and US publication next month.

That no one paused to question Gibson’s story seems remarkable, given that her claims had become increasingly less plausible even before the book’s release. Cancer specialists consulted by The Australian said the only brain tumour severe enough to cause death within four months is a grade 4 glio­blastoma, and they could find no known record of anyone surviving such a tumour for five years without treatment.

In March last year Gibson said she was being tested for additional “neurological” cancers, then spoke of “gynaecological” cancers several months later. In July she made her extraordinary claim about having cancer of the spleen, brain, uterus, and liver, but shortly afterwards flew to California to work with Apple on a new app for the Apple Watch.

Penguin Books has acknow­ledged it never asked her for documentary verification of her condition. A spokesperson for Apple said this week that it saw no reason to review its relationship with her as long as her app “works properly”.

What’s now clear is that Gibson’s house of cards was already teetering before her book was ­released. Former friends and skater mates had begun posting mes­sages to Gibson’s blogs last year expressing doubt about her stories, but those comments were quickly deleted. Old friends from Wynnum State High were sharing memories of Gibson on Facebook. One former colleague of Gibson, who is named in the acknowledgments page of The Whole Pantry, says several people in her inner circle became so alarmed by her claims late last year that they demanded proof of her medical diagnoses, without success.

More recently, charities that Gibson claimed to have raised funds for began complaining to her that they had never received the money, allegations that are now the subject of an investigation by Consumer Affairs Victoria.

In her cafe interview, Gibson seemed to acknowledge the storm that was gathering when she spoke of her fear of being “torn apart” and attacked by unnamed forces.

“People have said, ‘This is going to happen to you,’ ” she said.

“I don’t want it to happen. I want to put a stop to that. I want to be in control of who knows my information.” Perhaps she had divulged too much about herself, she speculated, adding that it had never been her intention to be in the public eye.

Gibson did indeed start disappearing from public view this week — her Instagram account was turned private, old bulletins about her health dramas were taken off her social media pages, and those 2009 skateboard posts were taken down. It was too late, however. By mid-week, US publication of her book had been suspended and thousands of her followers were denouncing her online after she went to ground and failed to produce any evidence of her cancer.

“It’s been a hard life,” Gibson said with a sigh towards the end of our interview, wiping away more tears. She was facing some “traumatic” events in the final weeks of March, she said, because a new medical team was now trying to get to the bottom of her condition. As we got up to leave, she explained that she was scheduled to undergo surgery in a few weeks.