Donelly and Toscano, two reporters for The Age, commenced their investigative work on the self-proclaimed cancer survivor and wellness promoter, Belle Gibson, in 2015. The Woman Who Fooled the World endeavours to understand what Gibson did, what were her personal associations are and what her motives and pathology were. The work is a riveting detective story weaving in and out of the wellness industry and self-help movement. Inevitably, this includes others who have become internet sensations in the alternative health industry, including ‘The Wellness Warrior’, Jess Ainscough, who sought out ‘Gerson Therapy’ when she developed cancer in 2008. By 2015 she was dead.
Gibson’s story of cancer survival commenced when she was 20 years of age in 2009. She maintained that she started experiencing memory loss, problems with her vision and walking difficulties. She said her concerns about her health were swept aside by her general practitioner, who simply offered her antidepressants. Then, she said, she suffered a stroke, and tests showed that she had terminal brain cancer with four months to live. She tried chemotherapy and radiotherapy but, frustrated with orthodox medicine, she decided to abandon conventional therapies and started exploring alternative medicine options and the detoxification properties of fresh produce, such as lemons. She travelled the country searching for a cure and embarked on a quest to heal herself with nutrition and holistic medicine, including salt, vitamin and Ayurvedic treatments, craniosacral therapy, oxygen therapy, colonics and other non-mainstream treatments.
Gibson developed The Whole Pantry mobile app, which was reportedly downloaded 200,000 times in its first month, bringing Apple knocking at her door and the promise of very significant commercial opportunities. Awards and book deals flowed. Her wellness ideas gained traction in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.
However, as Donelly and Toscano recount, everything was based on a litany of falsehoods. The Instagram fame of Gibson started to be questioned online by persons with real brain cancer, and bloggers commenced to query the authenticity of her cancer claims. In her inner circle, Gibson was confronted by those expressing doubts, but she sought refuge in vagueness and evasion. On the commercial front, questions started to be asked about the accuracy of her claims to be donating substantial amounts of her global profits to charities: Gibson had asserted at times that 95% of her app proceeds went to charity.
In March 2015, everything began to unravel. The Fairfax media group went live with a story that ‘A social media entrepreneur who shot to fame off the back of her cancer survival story failed to hand over thousands of fundraising dollars promised to charity’ (p. 146). As so often, the undoing of the miscreant came because of a paper trail of demonstrable falsehoods about finances. Gibson went into damage control. At first, many of her followers jumped to her defence, suspecting a conspiracy by Big Pharma and Big Medicine, but then the tide of public opinion shifted to being adverse. Her publisher, Penguin, needed to answer accusations that it had been on notice of Gibson’s questionable status.
Gibson went from being adored to being reviled. Ruin and prosecution were at hand. The Australian Women’s Weekly summed up the question to which everyone wanted an answer: ‘is Belle a hoax mastermind or simply troubled?’(p. 198). In the end Gibson admitted that she had never had cancer. She sought sympathy:
It’s just very scary, to be honest. Because you start to doubt the crux of things that make up who you are. You know, I’m blonde and I’m tall, and I’ve got hazel eyes and I’ve got cancer. And all of a sudden, you take away some of those high-level things and it’s really daunting.’ (p199)
At that stage the Director of Consumer Affairs commenced what evolved into lengthy legal action against Gibson in the Federal Court, culminating in findings under the Australian Consumer Law and Fair Trading Act 2012 (Vic) by Mortimer J in Director of Consumer Affairs Victoria v Gibson [2017] FCA 240 that, amongst other things, Gibson had engaged in false, misleading and deceptive conduct, as well as unconscionable conduct. In turn this gave way to lengthy enforcement proceedings against Gibson, which, at the time of this review, were still ongoing.
For readers of PPL the most intriguing aspect of Donelly and Toscano’s book will be the attempt made by the authors to understand Gibson’s mental state. In 2011 she attended at the Alfred’s Neurology Unit with reports of a complex array of physical problems. By then she had been telling people for more than two years that she had a brain tumour. But it emerges that from the time she was an adolescent, she had sought attention for health conditions that she claimed spuriously that she suffered.
They interview Gibson’s mother and her step-father. Both are very focussed on the money that they can be paid. Another interview with Gibson’s grandmother is tantalising. She suggests that Belle Gibson had emulated behaviour learned from her mother. In the end, the authors depict a woman who created an international business empire founded on lies. Whether at any stage Gibson believed her own stories is unclear. That she profited from them is straightforward. They float the possibility that she suffered from a version of Munchausen’s syndrome or even ‘Munchausen by Internet’, where people ‘identify as a patient, a fighter, or as survivor, and they crave attention, sympathy, and control.’ (p215)
Donelly and Toscano situate the conduct of Gibson within the reality of cancers that cannot always be cured, and which can involve terrible suffering, and therefore vulnerability. They also take the reader inside the world of nutrition fads, wellness warriors and health bloggers, including spurious entrepreneurs such as Milan Brych. It is a world often based on mythologies, quackery and pseudo-science, but another aspect of that world is that it creates the opportunity for predatory exploitation.
The Woman Who Fooled the World is a well-written and thoroughly researched account of an Australian phenomenon. Belle Gibson deserves to be recorded in the way that she has been. She was an internet sensation because she manipulated sympathies and took advantage of vulnerabilities of persons in the community (not just in Australia) keen to become healthier and, more significantly, to fight diseases to which conventional medicine was not providing the resolution to which they aspired. She profiteered mercilessly from people’s weaknesses and very quickly became wealthy.
Donelly and Toscano recount memorably how they played a role in bursting the bubble of Gibson’s frauds. But The Woman Who Fooled the World is more than a record of outstanding investigative journalism. It provides an opportunity to think further about the spurious wellness industry, which presents itself so beguilingly, and it leads us into the complex psyche of a woman prepared to publish online (again and again) an elaborately fabricated account of her own health history. Ultimately, the reader is left unclear as to whether Gibson suffers from pathology that has led to her craving attention so desperately that she has serially concocted illnesses and then taken advantage of opportunities, or whether she is a psychopathic manipulator.
Donelly and Gibson’s tale of Belle Gibson is a story of modern times. It wrestles with the opportunities provided by social media and wellness blogging, an arm of the Internet and self-publicising that is not always as effectively regulated in the community’s interest as it needs to be. It chronicles the response of the law to abuse of trust through successful consumer affairs intervention. And it probes the psyche of a person with a complex familial background, multiple psychological issues and unclear personality flaws. The Woman Who Fooled the World will frighten, intrigue and challenge. It can be thoroughly recommended at many levels.
Ian Freckelton QC
i.freckelton@vicbar.com.au