Where is Instagram's Worst Con Artist Belle Gibson now?
New two-part documentary series Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, showing on ITV1 at 9pm on Thursday 25 April and Thursday 2 May, focuses on the inside story of Belle Gibson.
She is the social influencer who gained millions of followers – as well as a lucrative app and book deal – by claiming she had cured her terminal cancer through wellness and healthy eating.
However, her story unravelled when journalists investigating her discovered she had never had inoperable brain cancer in the first place.
The series speaks to family and friends going on the record for the first time about how she misled them, and also features Belle’s own voice from her recordings and social media posts where she claimed she had six weeks to live, had given up on chemotherapy after it made her sick and had instead chosen to adopt a healthy living lifestyle.
The Australian influencer’s rise to fame began back in 2013. Annabelle Gibson, known as Belle to her followers, was a young mother living in Melbourne when she launched the app The Whole Pantry, offering recipes and lifestyle tips. In her first post she wrote: “Five years ago today, I was sitting in front of a man who was about to tell me I was dying from malignant brain cancer with six months to live.”
In other posts she claimed she had had heart surgery, a stroke and had temporarily died on the operating table. She also stated: “Nobody wants to live with the fear of terminal illness or dying. I’m really honest about my journey with my health and that opened up everyone else’s honesty and everyone else’s stories.”
The Whole Pantry app gained a huge following among people who believed Belle had ‘cured’ herself – it was voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App in 2013 and was reported to have been downloaded more than 200,000 times in its first month. A book deal followed, but an investigation into whether she had stolen proceeds she claimed she had donated to charity led to her entire story being found to be false.
Her friends had begun to suspect, too. In the documentary, Belle’s friend Chanelle McAuliffe remembers how Belle had a ‘seizure’ but recovered very quickly when someone suggested calling an ambulance.
“I started to question everything and go over things in my mind,” Chanelle says. “She always looked so well and she never looked sick. She was very passionate about wellness but then there would be times where I noticed her and another friend went to a solarium to do tanning, and other time we went out to a nightclub and she was ordering shots and lots of drinks and drinking quite excessively. These weren’t things she shared with her online community.”
Where is Belle Gibson now?
In 2015 after her lies were exposed and her lavish lifestyle that was funded with money she had supposedly raised for charity was revealed, Belle admitted in an interview that she had never had cancer.
The following year, Consumer Affairs Victoria took legal action against her and in 2017 she was fined $410,000 for for five breaches of Australian consumer law, which includes making false claims about her donations to charity. Belle stated she was unable to pay the fine because she was $170,000 in debt, and Australian authorities subsequently raided her home in an attempt to recoup the funds.
Belle later claimed that she had been adopted by the Ethiopian community in Melbourne after volunteering for four years, but the president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, Tarekegn Chimdi, stated that Gibson was not a registered volunteer.
He added that nobody seemed to know who she was, and also asked her to stop saying she was a part of the community.
Belle is reported to be living in Melbourne at the present time.
Belle Gibson: Instagram's Worst Con Artist is available to stream on ITVX.
