Faking It

Every few months, a Netflix show becomes the talk of the online and offline world, recently we had the over-the-top Bridgerton. Now it is a new woman scam artist. In 2022, we had Inventing Anna, an American drama television miniseries created by Shonda Rhimes, inspired by the story of Anna Sorokin who infiltrated New York’s high society by pretending to be a German heiress. The most recent show which is spawning many a fevered discussion is the Australian limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, adapted from the book The Woman Who Fooled the World written by journalists, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who broke the story in 2015. Even while the show purports to be “inspired by a true story”, and claims that “certain characters and events have been created or fictionalised,” there is now a frenzy to tell fact from fiction. Once again real life reflects reel life, as on the show too there is a scramble to tell the truth from lies!

Helmed by Kaitlyn Dever and Alycia Debnam-Carey as wellness guru Belle Gibson and Milla Blake respectively, this is a show set in the early days of social media, which holds a mirror to today’s realities. Milla Blake, diagnosed with cancer, decides to spur conventional medicine for more “alternative” methods. Following her example, Belle Gibson does the same. She tells the world she has brain cancer, and that changing her diet allowed her to beat it. Of course, as one will discover she never had brain cancer, or any cancer for that matter.

Watching the show today one can’t help but think of all the many “wellness gurus” who mushroom online. While some of their tips might come handy, many of them peddle “cures” that are at best misleading, and at worst, injurious. In Belle’s case the drives are fame and wealth, and no altruism. While she does emerge as a complete narcissist—who will even gatecrash a wake—her story is complicated by her past. Here is a woman who has never known love, either from friends or family. Here is a girl who could feign a heart attack. And here is a person desperately seeking validation. And once she gets a taste of it, she will go to unimaginable lengths to keep the adulation coming.

According to news reports, Belle’s story on Apple Cider Vinegar adheres rather closely to the truth. She was smart and ambitious, and saw the potential of social media in its infancy. In 2013, she started to develop an app called The Whole Pantry, branded the “world’s first wellness app,” it was packed with well shot lists of paleo, gluten-free and vegan recipes. It was named as Apple’s best food and drink app and the second-best iPhone app in the world by the end of the year.

While her success was skyrocketing, a couple of dogged journalists, working on a tip off, started to question whether she’d ever had cancer. While they could not print a story with no medical proof, they decided to follow the money, and realised soon enough that all her claims of donating to charity etc were simply rubbish.

Apple Cider Vinegar shows how isolation and greed make for ugly bedfellows. It tells of the dangers of “fake news”, much before the term became a trend. It spotlights the loneliness of fighting cancer, both for the patient and the caregiver. Doctors might often know best, but they pay too little heed to the desires of their patients. Given Belle’s wide scale fraud, it is little surprise that this series sides completely with conventional medicine. And its scepticism for the alternative is unsubtle, especially in such scenes as when a cancer patient travels to Peru for an “alternative” track, and the night after she has been wracked by dreams and revelations, the nurse at the forest camp pulls out a credit card machine for her to transfer the next lot of many thousands of dollars. Cancer treatment does not come cheap, but neither do these herbal potions and seances in the jungles.

The character of Milla is truly a tragic figure. At first, the five coffee enemas and juice on the hour diet seems to send her cancer into remission. Her father, who loves his daughter but believes more in the medical establishment than cleanses and drinks, is an equally heartbreaking character. Unable to help them, he must watch his wife suffer and his daughter die. The family’s story is a painful reminder of how there is no easy path when it comes to finding cures and fixes. And how families are destroyed when they have differing approaches to the same problem.

Apple Cider Vinegar also shows desperate humans are for hope. We fall for these “alternate” routes because the conventional track provides such little sustenance. Belle turns to the online world because in the real world she can hold onto neither friends nor family. The online world with its hearts and emojis fills her with an optimism that has always lingered out of reach.

Today we are caught in a dangerous vortex of wellness culture and medical misinformation. Both these play out on social media. While one Belle Gibson might have risen too high and was burned by the fall, many more still exist. The point to ponder is not why people knowingly spread lies, but why we fall for stories that are quite simply—too good to be true.

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