The story of ‘Instagram’s worst con artist’ Belle Gibson is being retold in a new ITV documentary.
Once celebrated by Cosmopolitan as a ‘Fun Fearless Female’, Gibson soared to fame as a wellness influencer before a downfall more dramatic than her rise.
It’s been nearly a decade since the tales she’d spun about her childhood, charity donations, and cancer-beating diet rapidly unravelled.
Now a new ITV show – Instagram’s Worst Con Artist – reveals the inside story of the fake cancer patient who conned thousands.
Born in Launceston, Tasmania in Australia, Belle Gibson grew up on the outskirts of Brisbane.
She first rose to prominence as a food and health blogger in May 2013, gaining hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers as she documented her journey with terminal brain cancer.
Gibson, then a 21-year-old single mother, claimed to be recovering, despite a doctor allegedly telling her, ‘You’re dying, you have six weeks, four months tops’, in 2009.
The trick, she told her followers, was not chemotherapy or radiotherapy but eating a plant-based diet free of gluten or dairy, along with alternative medicines like oxygen therapy and colonics.
She launched an app called The Whole Pantry, and published an accompanying cookbook, to promote her pseudoscientific claims.
They were bestsellers that reportedly earned her £213,500, much of which she claimed to donate to charity.
Soon tragedy supposedly struck when her cancer returned, spreading to her blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver in July 2014.
But her social media following started to collapse in 2015, and finally she told the truth.
‘None of it’s true’, she told Women’s Weekly in April 2015 amid doubts about her claims.
Police had started to investigate Gibson after friends and family – people who knew her in real life – questioned the authenticity of her claims.
Even the claims about having to care for her mother, and about her brother being autistic were challenged, Cosmopolitan reported.
It turned out Gibson had never been diagnosed with cancer, and had never donated money to charity.
Her mother, Natalie Dal-Bello, said: ‘What a lot of rubbish. Belle never cared for me, her brother is not autistic, and she’s barely done a minute’s housework in her life.
‘I’ve practically worked myself into an early grave to give that girl everything she wanted in life.’
Gibson’s followers and customers were furious, Daily Mail reported.
‘Lies, Lies and more Lies. I demand a refund’, one wrote on her Facebook page.
Her social media accounts, disappeared. Apple withdrew her app from its store.
And a court fined her £240,000 in 2017 after falling foul of Australian customer law by lying about donating the proceeds of The Whole Pantry to charity.
The judge said: ‘Once again, it appears she has put her own interests before those of anyone else.’
Since then, Gibson’s home has been raided twice because she hadn’t paid the fine, once in 2020 and again in 2021.
Gibson owed money for her son’s school fees, and had borrowed some £47,000 from her housemate Clive Rothwell by 2017, ABC reported.
She bought a more than £100 dress for a court appearance, and spent £2,600 on a holiday to Kenya and Ethiopia.
The fraudster then embedded herself in Australia’s Ethiopian community in Melbourne, which she claimed had adopted her.
Gibson attended BBQs, weddings and community meetings. She claimed to have been ‘blessed by Allah’, and introduced herself as ‘Sobantu’ in the Oromo language.
‘She was coming across as more Oromo than Oromo people’, Dr Tarekegn Chimdi, president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, told Daily Mail Australia.
That alarmed community leaders when Gibson started talking about ‘raising large amounts of money’ for them, and she was finally booted out in 2021.
Dr Chimdi said: ‘It was concerning when someone is using the community’s name who is not a member of that community.’
Gibson still lives in the Melbourne area, but she has been quiet since then.
Her social media accounts are gone, and there had been few reports about her until ITV announced a new documentary about her story.
That will be broadcast at 9pm tonight.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
