Transcription
A young, beautiful woman gets given the terrible news: she has inoperable brain cancer and only four months to live. The courageous Belle Gibson tries chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but no luck, so turns to alternative medicine to battle the disease. Thankfully, it seems to work, as she tells the world through social media. It's a truly inspiring story. Hundreds of thousands of sympathetic followers and fellow sufferers live every step of her journey and celebrate her success as she becomes the poster girl for the alternative wellness industry. There's an award-winning app and a cookbook. Belle Gibson has made it—except it's all a lie, a great big lie. She doesn't have cancer; never did.
Until this day, Belle claims unscrupulous natural therapists duped her into believing she was dying, but tonight we have the proof that this is a lie too. Belle Gibson is not a victim; she is a fraud.
"Belle, are you prepared to tell the truth today, the whole truth?"
"No, absolutely true. It's no gobbledygook. No, I've been really transparent."
For all her sweetness and light, Belle Gibson is not as she appears. I guess you could say she's here to explain her complicated past, but one problem remains: every time she speaks, there's every chance she's lying.
"So, just for clarification, are you prepared to sign a statutory declaration to say that everything you tell me today is the truth?"
"Absolutely. There's nothing left to lose, and if that requires a stat dec, then I'm comfortable with that."
"I guess why a stat dec is required is because you don't have a good record on telling the truth, do you?"
"But as you'll see tonight, not even this was the truth."
"That's a lot of bad luck for one young woman, isn't it?"
"It's a hell of a lot of bad luck—just the start to an extraordinary and confounding interview. You talk about pain; you want people to send you flowers, so you don't recall any of that. How can we believe anything you say now, Tara?"
"I have lost everything." [Music]
Belle Gibson was a strikingly sympathetic and inspirational figure to her legion of followers when she started posting her story on Instagram in 2013. She said she was a sick young mom who found her salvation in wholesome foods and natural therapies when conventional medicine failed her—a woman who defied the doctors who told her in 2009 she had an inoperable malignant brain tumor and just four months to live. Four years on, her followers lived every health high and low with her, and fellow cancer sufferers had no reason to hope. [Music]
"I have been healing a severe and malignant brain cancer for the past few years with natural medicine, Gerson therapy and foods. It is working for me."
"Do you accept the level of damage you've done to people's trust?"
"I do, and they are feeling disrespected; they are feeling hurt; they are feeling betrayed. And your whole trade was on—on these poor people that you inspired them, that they felt sorry for you, that you showed them a path. I mean, you profited from that; you gained from that in reputation and in income."
"I didn't trade in my story or in other—or in other people's lives."
"You did trade in your story, Belle. It's all here; it is all here. You know, you go on Instagram in 2013: '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.'"
"It is. And if you didn't have brain cancer…"
"No, I didn't."
"No, but when I was writing that, I thought that I did, and I was feeling well."
"Yes, but even then you misrepresented what you thought was your truth, which was all a big lie anyway. I'm really sorry, and it hurts me, and I beat myself up every day for how I have—uh—hurt those who mean a lot to me."
For all her apologies, when you start to unpick Belle's story, you uncover a lifetime of deception and invention. The whole hoax started with The Whole Pantry, a wellness movement Belle adopted and promoted with the release of her world-first healthy lifestyle app and companion cookbook. From the first page, you're touched by Belle's struggle for survival.
"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. He called me in and said, 'You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You're dying. You have six weeks, four months tops.' I remember a suffocating, choking feeling and then not much else."
But there was no real doctor, no doctor's office, and no conventional test results, as most people would expect and demand. It's highly questionable, but this is Belle's revised story now. She says in 2009 she met a man called Mark Johns who told her he was an immunologist and neurologist, though no record of him exists.
"He had come to my home and went through a series of tests, and this was dubbed integrative medicine."
"So he comes to your home and he does some tests on you. He does—how do—what sort of tests?"
"It was a box, a machine with lights on the front, and that machine was apparently German technology. There's a two pads, two metal pads, one that goes below the chair and one that goes behind your back, and then that measures what I believe or remember to be frequencies."
"And what were the results?"
"He said to me that I had a stage four brain tumor and that I had approximately four months to live."
"Why did you write in the forward of your book that you got this information in your doctor's office—that you got this prognosis in your doctor's office?"
"Because I think that being open and telling people the way that it happened would—um—not be understood, and that people would be disappointed or angry for me, you know, not—um—following what is the right way to go about this."
"So you lied because you feared you wouldn't be believed? Is that what you're saying?"
"Um, it's not what I'm saying."
"Well, can you be clearer on what you're saying? I mean, you—you were absolutely misleading, weren't you? You said a doctor gave you this terrible prognosis in his office. Now you've just admitted that you didn't—say it was at your home, and it wasn't with a real doctor."
"Because you thought…"
"I believed he was disappointed in you."
"No, I believed he was a real doctor."
"Did you lie to be believed is the question?"
"I didn't see him in his doctor's office in Perth."
"You didn't see him in his doctor's office ever, because he doesn't have an office, does he?"
"No."
"Right. You claimed also in your book that you underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy for two months. True or false?"
"At the time, true or false?"
"True."
"Because at the time I believed I was having radiotherapy."
"So false."
"I believed that I was having radiotherapy when he gave me medication. I was told that it was oral chemotherapy, and I believed it."
It turns out now, if you believe Belle, that Mark Johns's treatments were alternative, but in her book she describes them as conventional.
"I pulled myself out of chemo and radiotherapy and takes pride in dumping them because of the side effects. My doctors freaked out."
To heal herself, she embraces alternative therapies and eventually a new career and a new-age celebrity is born.
"I was empowering myself to save my own life through nutrition, patience, determination and love."
But today she has yet another reason for why she walked away from cancer medication.
"Very soon after I'd been started this treatment here in Melbourne, I felt pregnant, and that was a huge catalyst for me."
"In what way?"
"Because I thought, well, if I'm going undergoing chemotherapy, then I don't want that to affect my pregnancy."
"So you stop the chemotherapy because you're pregnant?"
"I stopped the chemotherapy for various reasons. I didn't know…"
"Truth, the truth, Tara. I'm trying to draw on information…"
"No, no, don't draw on information, just be honest."
"I am being honest with you. I'm trying to be open to what you're saying, but you were just muddying the waters with every answer. You set up a guy who's some quack—you're now saying—as a conventional doctor giving you conventional treatment that is not helping your brain tumors, so you leave it. That's what you set up in your book, right? You didn't write it as you've just told it to me. You didn't write it—who this man was. You didn't write that he came to you in your home. You didn't write that the chemotherapy and radiotherapy claim to have is not what most people would have. You didn't write it like that."
"I wrote…"
"You rewrote history."
"I wrote five introductions to my book."
"Okay. Whose fault is it now? It's nobody's fault, right? But that is a very brief version of my—of my story and my life coming up."
You had three heart operations; you suffered two cardiac arrests; you died twice on the operating table. Belle's year of disease: you had a stroke and you were diagnosed with inoperable brain tumor.
"Correct."
"But the new evidence proving her fraud—that's not melodramatic; that's straight out lying—extraordinary lies—that's next on 60 Minutes."
The woman who pretended to have cancer and to this day still won't tell the truth that she knew she didn't. Her struggle with terminal brain cancer won the sympathy of hundreds of thousands of followers on social media here and overseas, which she then parlayed into a nice learner, a wellness app, a cookbook, and celebrity appearances. But well before she became famous, Belle established a habit of astonishing fabrications involving myriad serious medical conditions, seemingly designed to gain maximum sympathy. You won't believe the diseases she's had.
"I mean, 2009 was a really bad year for you, wasn't it? You had three heart operations; you suffered two cardiac arrests; you died twice on the operating table; you had a stroke; and you were diagnosed with inoperable brain tumor and given four months to live. Correct?"
"And I do—haven't I still have the heart condition, and I was supposed to have surgery for that."
"You were supposed to have surgery, and you didn't."
"And why did you tell people that you had three surgeries at the time?"
"I think going back I was late teens, and I was going through a lot of emotional trauma and a lot of abuse at the time."
"What sort of abuse?"
"Someone who was really prominent during my childhood was stalking me at the time."
Belle was living in Perth and was a frequent contributor to an online skateboarding forum. But instead of chatting about skateboarding, Belle was telling her friends an elaborate fairy tale, supposedly from her hospital bed in not one but three admissions for life-saving heart surgery.
"Were you in hospital at the time that you were posting these?"
"No."
"I mean, you go into extraordinary details: 'I had surgery about seven hours ago. The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed, and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes. I had the most intense bruising from the paddles when they electrocuted me back to consciousness—minus the wires and constant throwing up of blood. Anyway, the procedure failed, and I died.'"
"See, I haven't read back through all of that, but I also think when you're young and have gone through the situation I had just gone through, you are melodramatic."
"I don't have melodramatic now."
"I mean, they—they're straight out lies. You weren't in hospital. You're claiming you were—claimed you died twice; you didn't. You claimed you had two cardiac arrests; you didn't. That's not melodramatic; that's straight out lying. It's extraordinary lies. And if you lie about that and you go to those extraordinary lengths to create the story around that lie, how can we believe anything you say now, Tara?"
"I have lost everything, and I'm not here to regain it. But when you hit rock bottom, there is only an opportunity to be honest and to heal and to apologize, and I'm here to do that. There is no reason for me to lie, and it's not something I want to be doing either."
You can only wonder if Belle was seduced by the sympathy her heart surgery deception won her, but whatever the reason, her next claim of terminal brain cancer came a month later in 2009. While today Belle accepts she doesn't have a brain tumor, she maintains that up until earlier this year she thought she did because her so-called doctor, Mark Johns, tricked her into believing so. Why he would, or if he even exists, are still mysteries.
"I know the question is why did I not initially go and get a brain scan, exactly."
But curiously, at this point in the interview, Belle makes a stunning admission: she says as far back as 2010 she was having her own doubts about her tumor.
"So I didn't know whether I was getting worse; I didn't know if I was getting better; I didn't know if it was the same. I thought that it was important to go and seek a scan and be confident in where I stood. I don't mean to be crass about it, but it was also the fact that despite being given a four-month deadline, you were still alive."
"Yeah. Was that like an indicator to you that you didn't have brain cancer?"
"It wasn't an indicator. I went to the Alfred Hospital, and I contacted Mark and I said to him, 'I'm not sure where things are at, so I want to go and get a brain scan.' He had me sign paperwork which enlisted him as my medical professional where the scan from the Alfred would be but then passed on to him so we could also consult on it, right."
"So what did the brain scan show?"
"He brought in scans, and it showed a brain tumor, but that wasn't my scan. Because most recently I went back to the Alfred, and I got my full portfolio from them, and I did get that brain scan, but there is no brain tumor there."
"Okay. So what date was that, Belle? When did you go to the Alfred?"
"I will be able to give you this information…"
"Well, we've already asked for background information; we've asked for all your medical records and your medical history. You haven't given us any dates; you haven't given us any brain scans; you haven't given us any MRIs; you haven't given us any tissue tests; you haven't given us anything."
"I wasn't explicitly asked for any of that, but I have it."
"Well, really, of course I do. The producers I've been working with are aware of my health position. I wasn't…"
"Belle, Belle! Please! I mean, either you're interested in getting to the bottom of this and presenting the facts as they are—the facts—or you're not. Okay. It was in 2010 that I went to the Alfred initially."
"Do you know who you saw then?"
"No, I don't. But again, I have that information."
After our interview, Belle finally did hand over a few medical records, but you have to wonder why—because this one is damning. It shows yes, she did visit the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, and yes, she did have a brain scan, but she didn't go because she thought she had brain cancer. And curiously, she didn't even mention she had brain cancer. She went because she was now convinced she had multiple sclerosis. The scan revealed she didn't have MS, but most importantly, it also showed there was no sign of a brain tumor. It was actually 2011, and a neurologist in a 40-minute face-to-face consultation tells Belle her brain scans are normal. We've also checked with medical professionals who say even if Belle was complaining about MS symptoms, only the MRI would have revealed any tumors in her brain. That 40-minute consultation with the neurologist proves that even if Belle thought at one time she had a brain tumor, she definitely knew in 2011 that she didn't—that's two years before she sold her sob story to the world, before she went on Instagram, before she developed The Whole Pantry app, and before she wrote the book claiming she was healing herself naturally from a malignant tumor. Belle Gibson was never a cancer survivor; what she is is a fraud.
"Do you believe you have a mental illness?"
"No, me…"
"It's been suggested perhaps you have Munchausen syndrome or a factitious disorder. Do you accept that perhaps you do?"
"I don't accept that because I don't feel that I do. And with Munchausen's, it's a—it's a disorder where you create these syndromes, and you believe it, and you cause physical pain for that to be believed, and I'm not doing that, and I didn't do that."
Belle's profile and business flourished from 2013, all on the back of her terrible lies.
"Belle Gibson is a mother, a businesswoman, and she's also living with brain cancer."
She knew she wasn't sick. For a person living with brain cancer, you look incredibly healthy. So what did she do next? The Whole Pantry was born through Belle's own battle with brain cancer. In 2014, she sought out another quack, and guess what he told her: the cancer she knew she didn't have had spread.
"It was five years ago I was diagnosed with terminal cancer."
Belle couldn't wait to share the awful news with her followers.
"With frustration and ache in my heart, 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 fourth cancer."
Belle says her new health guru told her the cancer was now in her blood, spleen, brain, uterus, and liver. Unlike Mark Johns, this man does exist, but when we spoke to him, he denied giving Belle such devastating news because he's not qualified to diagnose cancer.
"He's saying he never ever told you that you had cancer throughout your body. Did he ever say that to you?"
"He did."
"So he's lying?"
"You're not lying?"
"I'm not lying. He definitely told me that my brain tumor is still present and that I have new and secondary cancers."
"And how did he assess that?"
"In the same way that Mark did—similar machines and similar equipment."
"Um, did you think to go to a doctor? Did you think to go to the hospital? Did you think to get this checked out?"
"Not really. Not initially. I was devastated."
"Just sounds like you chose to believe that you had cancer."
"Nobody wants to live with the fear of a terminal illness or dying."
"No. And nobody knows that better than people who actually live with that."
"And you didn't live with that. That's not what you had."
"No, it's not. But I lived for years with the fear that I was dying, and that is horrible, and I'm still coming to terms with that. I can take that off my shoulders now."
"Did you live in fear of being found out?"
"No, because I wasn't living in a space where I didn't know that this wasn't my reality."
"Would you accept that you're a pathological liar?"
"No."
"Coming up. Okay, this is a really, really simple question: how old are you?"
Belle can't keep up with her own truth.
"I believe that I'm 26."
"How old are you?"
Finally, an admission.
"Do you take responsibility for driving any people away from conventional medicine?" That's next on 60 Minutes.
Perhaps for all of her deceit, her greatest sin is the false hope she gave true cancer sufferers who were inspired by her story and her glowing health. She also promised money to charities—promises she broke. But even more damaging, she's broken the inherent trust we place in each other. And despite all her riddles, the only thing Belle can't spin is the truth.
"Do you know what the definition of truth is?"
"Yes."
"What's your definition of truth?"
"Speaking with honesty and—um—with clear definition around fact."
"And what's your definition of a lie?"
"Well, obviously the opposite of that—a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive—an intentional untruth—a falsehood."
"And I've not been intentionally untruthful. I've been openly conveying and speaking about what was my reality and what is my reality today."
"And will you accept that your reality does not actually match reality?"
"It doesn't match your normal or your reality, but I also know that Belle's normal suggests a difficult childhood. She says she doesn't know her father; she's estranged from her mother and brother; and spent much of her younger years moving frequently. But is that reason enough for a woman who never has a simple answer, even when it comes to her age?"
"You're 23, right?"
"Well, actually…"
"How old are you?"
"I've always been raised as being currently a 26-year-old."
"How old are you?"
"Well, I live knowing as I've always known that I would be 26."
"Okay, Belle. Um, this is a really, really simple question: how old are you?"
"I believe that I'm 26, and I have two birth—two birth certificates, and I've had my name changed four times."
The identity crisis there is big.
"But that was my normal when I was growing up, Tara—that…"
"What do you know the truth to be now?"
"That's probably a question that we'll have to keep digging for because it's not something I've ever understood or had answers around."
"So when you needed to file some financial documents, how did you choose the birth date you gave if you don't know?"
"With my most recent deed poll paper, which has—um—the younger of the age and the most recent of the name."
"Right. So currently then, according to those documents, you're 23."
"Correct."
It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. And the really serious side to this is those who were caught out by Belle—the Schwartz family. They believed and befriended Belle. Sadly, their seven-year-old son, Joshua, does have terminal brain cancer.
"What type of an apology would you like to make to the Schwartz family?"
"Their family means a lot to me because of the care and the love and the friendship that we had grown over the last year."
"They believe that you pumped them for information about their son's symptoms so you could take them on as your own."
"That family was one that I did have little interaction with."
"That's not how they describe it. They say you cried with it—they cried with you; you cried with them; your children placed…"
"I understand that they're hurting, but I also know that I never questioned Joshua or his mother about his symptoms."
Along with the Schwartz family, there have been a number of charities Belle has pledged money to which have not seen ascent, and there are disputed donations of up to three hundred thousand dollars. This was Belle's undoing. She promoted her promise to raise money for various charities, but when the funds failed to materialize, her deception was exposed in March this year. The act was up, and she's been trying to lie her way out of it ever since.
"I mean, you—you praised your community for raising five thousand dollars for two charities that you nominated, but then when you were pressed on it because that money never showed up, he said, 'Well, in fact, we didn't raise that money,' despite praising the community for raising that amount of money. And you know a portion of that money gets sent to one charity, but only after you're—you're questioned by media."
"I took my books and my finances and my accounting to business managers and accountants, and I said, 'I'm way in over my head with this. Can you please help me out and get this up to date?' And eight months on, it's still not finalized."
"I don't know that you need to be an expert in accounting to know that you don't make promises that you're not sure you can fill."
"So I still stand by those promises."
"You can't have it both ways, Belle. You can't say, 'You know, my community has raised this amount of money,' 'Oh, actually, no, they didn't…'"
"Um, what did you do, Mr. Speak—um—or is it the accountant's fault that you made that claim when in fact it's not the truth?"
"And I'm keeping those promises, Tara."
"You didn't fulfill them, and you misrepresented yourself yet again."
"I am not misrepresenting myself." [Music]
For many, she was the wellness warrior; her good health was the great hope for her followers, especially those battling cancer themselves. What is really worrying is how many of them may have given up conventional treatment to follow Belle's alternative path. Again, Belle tries to dodge her responsibility.
"But I was not an expert in anyone else's health, and I was…"
"Excuse me, but don't be naive now. I mean, you are appealing to an incredibly vulnerable audience—incredibly vulnerable people. You have a responsibility to make sure your story is right."
"I'm not trying to get away with anything; I'm not trying to smooth over anything. It's not easy for me to be here; it's not easy for me to relive and relive and relieve detail."
"How do you think it is for the people who followed you, whose heart went out to you when you wrote about how unwell you were—how well you were—your—your progress—your decline—these people who cried for you? Have you thought about them?"
"I know you sit here and tell me how you feel. Have you thought about how they're feeling at the moment in the same way?"
"I just said—I put them in my shoes, and I know that they're feeling the same way I feel."
"Some of them want you to go to jail. That's how they feel."
"I know that they feel that way. I've seen the emails; I've seen some of the comments. I'm on the receiving end of all of that, Tara, and I take responsibility for how this is unfolded."
"Do you take responsibility for driving any people away from conventional medicine in seeking treatment for their cancer?"
"That would be really heartbreaking to me because I never intended on doing that."
"Do you accept that that's what you might have done?"
"I accept that might have happened."
While she concedes she might have caused damage to others, extraordinarily Belle maintains she's the real victim here. The lie continues—to herself and to the rest of us.
"But I've been going through this, Tara, with—since last year—not since the media broke it, but since months and months before that. So this has been a really private ordeal for me to know where I stand."
"I mean, but shouldn't it have been a public one? I mean, you were happy for the—the lies to be public. What about the truth?"
"It was going to be public."
"I just wonder, Belle, if—and I don't know if you're at a stage where you'll ever admit it—but whether you just didn't know what you were getting yourself into. You probably thought you weren't doing any harm, but that you thought you could get away with it."
"There was nothing to get away with, Tara."
"Oh, of course there was. There was adulation; there's sympathy; there's a community who loves you; there's huge amounts that I love…"
"I'm just wondering if you just kind of were playing in a grown-ups' world without realizing it—that it was all going to end badly."
"It didn't need to. Once I started to figure out where I stood and what reality actually was, and I had received—um—the definitive, 'No, you do not have cancer,' then that was something that I had to come with—come to terms with. That takes a lot, and it was really traumatizing. I was feeling a huge amount of grief—grief for not having cancer—no—that I had been lied to, and—um—that I felt like I had been taken for a ride. It took me a lot to unpack that, and once I was strong enough, I was ready to come out and speak with my community about it, and I had a definitive date, and that date was only 10 days before the media broke it."
"Okay. Thank you. Thank you." [Music]
"To have your say about tonight's show, you can find us on Facebook. Coming up: What if your child was abducted by terrorists? Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Held hostage for ransom. It was the beginning of the very worst nightmare. Should our government pay up? What does a family do when a child is taken hostage? Where do you begin? If you pay a ransom, you're going to be prosecuted. Inside the lucrative world of kidnapping: anybody with an AK-47 on a Toyota is potentially in the kidnapping business. That's next on 60 Minutes."
"Hello, I'm Tara Brown. Thanks for watching. To keep up with the latest from 60 Minutes Australia, make sure you subscribe to our channel. You can also download the Nine Now app for full episodes and other exclusive 60 Minutes content."