Who’s real in Netflix’s hit wellness fraud drama, and where are they now?

Apple Cider Vinegar has become the fifth most-watched show on Netflix globally and No.1 in Australia in its first week on the platform, with 3.8 million views of its six episodes. It’s a riveting watch, but it also has many people wondering just how much of this “true-ish” story is actually true.

Episodes of the series about wellness scammer Belle Gibson open with a version of “inspired by a true story”, with the caveat that “some characters have been fictionalised”. A voiceover adds “this is a true-ish story, based on a lie”. And then viewers are assured that “Belle Gibson has not been PAID for this story” (to which Gibson adds, in the first episode, a bitter “f---ers”).

With all that muddying of the water, what’s real and not is difficult to discern – which is, at least, entirely in keeping with the woman at the heart of the tale.

But some of the characters are real (or real-ish, at any rate). Here’s our guide to who they are, who plays them, and where they are now.

Character: Belle Gibson
Played by: Kaitlyn Dever
Based on: Belle Gibson
The main source for the series, which stars American actor Kaitlyn Dever delivering an impeccable Australian accent, is the book The Woman Who Fooled The World by Nick Toscano, a business journalist at this masthead, and his former colleague Beau Donelly.

Published in 2017, the bestselling book tracks Gibson’s rise from destitute single mum in Melbourne to fledgling Silicon Valley appreneur (her The Whole Pantry was announced as one of just 12 apps to be bundled with the first-generation Apple Watch in 2015, but was pulled just before the product launched as news of her faked cancer diagnosis began to surface).

Belle Gibson and actress Kaitlyn Dever, who plays her character in Apple Cider Vinegar.

Gibson’s deceit began in 2012, when she created an Instagram account with the handle Healing Belle, and a bio that claimed she was a “game changer with brain cancer + a food obsession”. She extended her profile from social to digital (the app) to print media (a cookbook published by Penguin) deploying artfully styled images, user-friendly design and recipes, and a defiantly glowing message (cancer had never looked so healthy). Her claim to be donating 25 per cent of her proceeds to charity didn’t hurt either.

In truth, Gibson never had cancer at all. And the charities received just $10,000, about one-10th of what they were due.

Doubts about her claims were first raised in this masthead in March 2015, and by late April she had admitted to the lies, while trying to blame them on her “neglectful” mother and the emotional damage she had wrought.

But while Apple Cider Vinegar is clearly a story about Gibson, series creator Samantha Strauss has been at pains to stress that the central character is merely a version of her.

“I’ve never met the real Belle Gibson,” she has said. “I only know what has been written about her. Through the process of adaptation I’m sure the character has become someone quite different to the real Belle.”

The same could be said of any biopic, of course. But one can’t help but wonder if this subtle distinction has something to do with the Baby Reindeer case, in which Netflix’s insistence that everything in it was true could cost it dearly if Fiona Harvey succeeds in her $US170 million defamation case.

The actual Gibson, meanwhile, still lives in Melbourne. Despite authorities having twice raided her home to seize assets, it appears she has made little or no effort to pay the fines levied against her, which, with interest, now top $500,000.

Character: Milla Blake
Played by: Alycia Debnam-Carey
Based on: Jess Ainscough

Jess Ainscough, and the character of Milla Blake, played by Alycia Debnam-Carey.

The Milla character, who defies her doctor’s advice to have her cancer-stricken arm amputated, is inspired by Jess Ainscough, a former journalist at Dolly who blogged as the Wellness Warrior and shot to fame by writing about her “successful” battle with a rare form of cancer by eating healthily. In her quest to survive, the Queensland-based Ainscough overhauled her lifestyle and became a devotee of the controversial Gerson Therapy, a regimen of coffee enemas delivered five times a day, raw juices, and an organic vegetarian diet. Despite all that, she died in 2015, aged 29, about seven years after being diagnosed with the rare, slow-growing and incurable epithelioid sarcoma.

Character: Chanelle
Played by: Aisha Dee
Based on: Chanelle McAuliffe

Chanelle McAuliffe, and the character of Chanelle loosely based on her, played by Aisha Dee. Credit: LinkedIn; Netflix.

In the show, Chanelle is a close friend of Gold Coast-based Milla, and later becomes Gibson’s manager. In truth, Chanelle was a friend of Gibson in Melbourne and the first person to confront her directly with her doubts. The real Chanelle also knew Ainscough, but was never Gibson’s manager.

She now works in venture capital in Melbourne and has resurfaced in recent days to decry the fact that Gibson has not yet paid a cent of the $410,000 fine she copped from Consumer Affairs Victoria in 2017 for misleading conduct.

Character: Clive
Played by: Ashley Zukerman
Based on: Clive Rothwell

The real Clive Rothwell, and the character Clive played by Ashley Zukerman. Credit: 60 Minutes/Nine; Netflix.

Described by Toscano and Donelly as “a mysterious figure”, “an older man, originally from Adelaide” and “a consultant in the IT department for RMIT University”, Clive Rothwell was Gibson’s lover from around 2013 and played some part in the launch of her The Whole Pantry app, registering and paying for the domain name. Beyond that, the authors wrote, “Clive has always denied having anything to do with the running of the business.” Rothwell appears to have taken Gibson’s cancer claim at face value, until the middle of 2014 when his father was diagnosed with cancer and he moved back to Adelaide to help care for him. “It was then, while Clive was really living alongside someone with the insidious disease, that he became suspicious of Gibson’s story,” the authors write. Rothwell has kept a low profile since the scandal broke and has not surfaced since the show was released.

Character: Lucy Guthrie
Played by: Tilda Cobham-Hervey
Based on: Kate Thomas and others

Lucy is a composite character, but based in part on a woman called Kate Thomas.Credit: Netflix

In the show, Lucy, who has cancer, is the wife of Justin, one of the investigative journalists at The Age who pursue Gibson’s story. In truth, the character is a composite of numerous people drawn in by the wellness myth promoted by Gibson.

Chief among them, though, is Kate Thomas, a woman described by Donelly and Toscano as “sweet, honest and funny” and “the kind of person you can’t help but like instantly”. Her husband is a musician, not a journalist. Today she works as a family support specialist at an addiction rehabilitation service in Melbourne’s south.

Characters: Justin Guthrie, Sean Mengotti
Played by: Mark Coles Smith, Rick Davies
Based on: Beau Donelly, Nick Toscano

The journalist characters in the show are fictionalised and composite. Arguably, Rick Davies, who plays Sean, looks a little like the real-life Beau Donelly, but Nick Toscano suspects he’s meant to be him (purely because of the Italian surname). That would make Mark Coles Smith’s Justin Guthrie the Donelly figure. At any rate, the pair began investigating Gibson in early 2015, published their first story in March, and released their book-length account of her story in September 2017. Today, the real Toscano is still at The Age, where he’s a journalist in the business team, while Donelly works for the online investigative publisher Bellingcat.

The real reporters at The Age, Beau Donelly (top left) and Nick Toscano (bottom left) and their fictional counterparts of Justin Guthrie and Sean Mengotti, played by Mark Coles Smith (top right) and Rick Davies (bottom right) .Credit: Suppled; Netflix

Character: Julie Gibbs
Played by: Catherine McClements
Based on: Julie Gibbs

Julie Gibbs, left, played by Catherine McClements.

Julie Gibbs was the director of Penguin’s lifestyle imprint Lantern when Belle Gibson visited her Sydney office in late 2013 and pitched her proposal for a cookbook based on her app. A hugely successful and respected publisher, with some of the biggest selling cookbooks in the country on her CV, Gibbs was bewitched by a proposal she deemed “excellent”, saying she felt Gibson’s “voice and brand has a unique essence about it”. She signed Gibson, with an advance of $132,500, and committed to a first run of 42,000 copies.

By mid-2015, the Lantern division was shut down and Gibbs was out of a job. She now works as a freelance publisher and lead consultant on the Powerhouse Museum’s Australian Culinary Archive, a project that “aims to preserve and celebrate our food culture and those who contribute to it”.

Character: Hek
Played by: Phoenix Raei
Based on: Alex Twomey

Alex Twomey (aka Titus O’Reily) and the fictional character of Hek loosely based on him, played by Phoenix Raei. Credit: Wayne Taylor; Netflix.

“People have gotten confused. That’s why I’m here to clean up those misconceptions,” Gibson tells Hek, the crisis management consultant she meets with in LA, at the start of the series. It’s all very sleazy, and a million miles from the actual troubleshooter who stepped in at the request of a friend to help out Gibson in her most desperate moment, and never received (or asked for) a cent for his troubles. His name was Alex Twomey, who worked for consultancy Bespoke Approach and has been doing this sort of thing for years. These days Twomey is doing some invention of his own, performing as Titus O’Reily, a character who appeared regularly on Ten’s The Cheap Seats and now co-hosts Mick Molloy’s breakfast show on Triple M.

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