This Woman Faked CANCER and Made Money From It

Wellness blogger Belle Gibson, 23, built an online community and sold a recipe book off the back of claims she cured terminal brain cancer through diet and lifestyle alone. But it wasn't true. She never had cancer.

“None of it’s true,” Gibson told the Australian Women’s Weekly.

“I don’t want forgiveness. I just think [speaking out] was the responsible thing to do. Above anything, I would like people to say, ‘OK, she’s human.’”

Gibson made everything from a mobile phone app, a website and a recipe book. 

Her story started to fall apart when it was revealed she never made thousands of dollars in charity donations she promised off the back of money raised through her success.

Later Gibson said she had been “wrongly” diagnosed with cancers she claimed to have in her blood, spleen, uterus and liver by a German magnetic therapist, but maintained her terminal brain cancer was real.

She refused to show journalists medical records or any proof to back her claims that by shunning conventional medicine, her brain cancer had been kept in check.

During the interviews whenever challenged, Belle "cried easily and muddled her words," Women’s Weekly reports.

“She says she is passionate about avoiding gluten, dairy and coffee, but doesn’t really understand how cancer works.”

Many criticised Gibson for putting cancer sufferers in danger by suggesting dietary approaches alone could successfully treat them.

Penguin have ceased publishing her book and her app is no longer available in app stores.

Her false illness claims date back to 2009, when she claimed on an internet forum to have undergone multiple heart surgeries and to have died on the operating table.

In the days following the allegations against her, Gibson posted on social media that she was being bullied and had changed “thousands of lives for the better”.

Gibson says the public backlash against her has been “horrible”.

“In the last two years I have worked every single day living and raising up an online community of people who supported each other … I understand the confusion and the suspicion, but I also know that people need to draw a line in the sand where they still treat someone with some level of respect or humility — and I have not been receiving that.”