Apple Cider Vinegar: Will the real Belle Gibson please stand up?

Few Australians will forget the image of cancer fraudster Belle Gibson in the pink turtleneck jumper, faced down by Tara Brown on 60 Minutes.

Exposed for having lied about the brain cancer she supposedly treated herself through lifestyle and diet choices, Gibson’s answers in that interview made no sense. It was a lot of “what I believe” and “what I remember”.

She obfuscated, defended and danced. She never confessed.

When screenwriter Samantha Strauss saw that interview, she was both fascinated and repelled. “I had all the feelings, and then also felt sorry for her, watching Tara grill her. She’s sad. It was a weird feeling,” Strauss told The Nightly.

The writer sought out The Age reporters Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s book, The Woman Who Fooled the World, and got sucked into that world.

“It really widened the aperture (so wasn’t just) the rise and fall of a cancer scammer, to something that had a whole lot to say about wellness and medicine,” she added. “They looked at cancer scams across history, and they spoke to doctors about why people are drawn to wellness, and they followed people who had followed Belle.

“I fell in love with the conversation you could have around this fascinating protagonist.”

The Gibson story has now been dramatised as Apple Cider Vinegar, a six-part Australian Netflix miniseries that pieces together wellness, medicine, social media and the enigmatic woman that intersected them all.

Gibson is played by Emmy-nominated American actor Kaitlyn Dever, sporting a pretty decent Australian accent, with an ensemble of top local talent including Aisha Dee, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Mark Coles Smith and Ashley Zukerman.

Strauss and the production never met Gibson and every episode has a character breaking the fourth wall and speaking direct to camera to emphasise the fraudster has not benefited from the making of the series.

“That was something that was never really on the table for us because we never wanted her endorsement in the show. There’s an interesting thing in adapting true stories that you do have more freedom when you haven’t met the real person.

“In terms of using her name or not, you can wrestle with that one for sure, because she’s a real person, she’s out there, she’s got a family. But it did feel like what she had done was worthy of critique, so I don’t feel guilty about leaving her name on it.”

You can have watched everything Gibson has ever put out about herself and still have no real sense of who she is. A huge part of that is so much of what’s she said were lies, and the other is a feeling that maybe she, a fantasist, might not even know who she is.

“Our Belle is very different, no doubt, to the real Belle,” Strauss said. “We’ve looked at the facts that exist in her life, and we’ve created (the character in our show) in the writers room. Then Kaitlyn brought her to life so superbly.

“But it felt like every time we would want to understand her and empathise with her, or even kind of root for her sometimes, we didn’t ever want to absolve her of what she had done.

“It felt really important to keep remembering people like Tilda’s character, Lucy, who are the real-world cost of it, and the real people that you speak to who are going down wellness rabbit holes.”

The Lucy character is a fictional one, representative of the eons of people who followed Gibson on Instagram and on other platforms, who took to heart what she said about alternative cancer treatments rather than following established medical advice.

There is also the character of Milla (Debnam-Carey), whose story appears to have been drawn from Jessica Ainscough, a wellness warrior who really did have cancer and died from it in 2015 at the age of 29.

For Strauss, the Gibson story is an entry point into the larger tapestry and the question of why so many people are turning away from conventional medicine, and are ready to believe in the promises of the wellness industry.

She started writing Apple Cider Vinegar before the Covid pandemic, which only supercharged scepticism and division.

“We really saw in the pandemic as well, what happens when people turn away from facts, science and doctors,” she said.

But there is enormous value in trying to understand the why of it. Many people, especially women, have not felt heard by doctors. There has notoriously been comparatively little research or attention paid to women’s health and conditions such as endometriosis.

Dee, who plays the character of Chanelle, a friend to Milla and an associate of Belle, said, “It speaks to a general kind of feeling that I think a lot of people, not just women, feel in terms of wanting to be seen.

“There are amazing medical professionals out there, but we have all experienced going to the doctor’s office and saying, ‘I’m experiencing this thing’ and they say nothing or tell you it’s just anxiety or something.

“I think that’s why often people turn to alternative (treatments) because you finally talk to someone who makes you feel like what you’re feeling is valid, which I think is also very valid.”

That uncertainty, that vacuum leaves vulnerable people open to believing the promise of being cured or having their problem solved for them, especially in the unregulated spaces of social media.

Dever said, “There is not a lot of room for nuance and details. I also think we’re not meant to consume as much as we do right now.”

Debnam-Carey added, “The news cycle is so fast and people are so quick to jump on something straight away or report on something without all the information. We just immediately read the clickbait, and we’re like, ‘Well, that’s what it is’ without even reading the article.

“It’s become almost easier to believe in the lies because there’s so much volume of content and information now.”

The Gibson story holds special allure, first for Australians as it was unfolding and soon to the rest of the world who will discover it through Apple Cider Vinegar, because it touches on a lot of personal and collective anxieties.

Whether it’s about scammers and deceit, or trying to take control of something you have so little sway over, or the rise and amplification of social media influence, Gibson knew how to exploit people’s trust and desire to believe in a better alternative.

But Apple Cider Vinegar’s Belle is just a version of that person, a way to explore these wider conundrums.

Dever said that even after playing the character, she never felt she got close to understanding the real person.

“I appreciated the fact that Sam wasn’t so focused on trying to figure out who the real Belle is. She really wanted to create a woman based off of Belle Gibson and use the essence of her in this story.

“I don’t think we’ll ever really know who the real Belle is.”

Apple Cider Vinegar is streaming on Netflix from February 6