Belle Gibson

Annabelle Natalie Gibson (born 8 October 1991) is an Australian convicted scammer and pseudoscience advocate.

She is the author of The Whole Pantry mobile app and its later companion cookbook.

Throughout her career as a wellness guru, Gibson falsely claimed to have been diagnosed with multiple cancer pathologies, including malignant brain cancer, and that she was effectively managing them through diet, exercise, natural medicine, and alternative medicine therapies.

She additionally alleged that she had donated significant proportions of her income and her company's profits to numerous charities.

She worked for some time as a trainee for catering supply company PFD Food Services in Lytton, but social media reflected that by late 2008 she had relocated to Perth, Western Australia.

There, she was involved in the skateboarding culture and actively participated in its online community.

Gibson subsequently moved from Perth to Melbourne in July 2009 and became a mother one year later, at age 18.

Gibson launched The Whole Pantry mobile app in August 2013, at age 21.

It was voted Apple's Best Food and Drink App of 2013.

Gibson reportedly told a prospective business partner in 2014 that she had "several names" that she went under, and in her most recent interview with The Australian Women's Weekly claimed "her mother changed her name five times".

Gibson's corporate filings indicate that she is three years younger than she publicly claims to be.

After Gibson launched The Whole Pantry app, it was reportedly downloaded 200,000 times within its first month.

Gibson soon after signed a book deal with Lantern Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, for an accompanying table-top cookbook, which was published in October 2014.

She further worked with Apple Inc. in September 2014 to transition the app as a privileged pre-installed default third-party inclusion in the Apple Watch's April 2015 launch.

Before doubts were raised about her health and charitable donation claims, Gibson had intended to expand her brand beyond the app, having earlier registered the domain The Whole Life, and advertised in December 2014 to recruit an IT specialist to expand the app and brand portfolio.

Both The Whole Pantry app and The Whole Life were registered by Gibson's partner, Clive Rothwell, in her corporate name.

When the book was launched in November 2014, Gibson claimed in its preface that she had been "stable for two years now with no growth of the cancer", but her story soon emerged as inconsistent: she also told media outlets that the cancer had reached her liver and kidneys, and three months earlier had posted on The Whole Pantry's Facebook page that her cancer had spread to her brain, blood, spleen, and uterus.

She previously claimed that she had undergone heart surgery several times and to have momentarily died on the operating table.

Gibson also claimed to have had a stroke.

However, she was unable to substantiate her medical claims nor name the doctors who diagnosed and treated her.

She also did not bear any surgical scars from her apparent heart operations.

Gibson's and The Whole Pantry's statements regarding the benefits of exercise, healthy eating and a positive mindset were uncontroversial, being widely acknowledged as conducive to holistic well-being.

However, on her now-deleted Instagram account and in other social media, Gibson also promoted more controversial or potentially dangerous alternative medical practices, including Gerson therapy, anti-vaccination, and the consumption of non-pasteurised raw milk.

The sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal in Australia and, in Victoria, one three-year-old died and another four children under the age of five became seriously ill after consuming non-pasteurised milk in 2014.

In March 2015, after reports identified Gibson's fraudulent claims regarding her charitable donations, media investigation found that she had also fabricated her stories of cancer, and lied about her age, personal life and history.

Concerns were expressed that Gibson had led a profligate lifestyle, renting an upmarket town house, leasing a luxury car and office space, undergoing cosmetic dental procedures, purchasing designer clothes and holidaying internationally, using money claimed to have been raised for charity.

With a collapsing social media support base, Gibson admitted in an April 2015 interview that her claims of having multiple cancers had been fabricated, stating that "none of it's true".

Her actions were described as "particularly predatory", as well as "deceit on a grand scale, for personal profit".

By early 2015, it was estimated that in excess of $1 million had been made in sales of The Whole Pantry app and book.

Gibson chronicled her battle with cancer on a blog of the same name, but "doubts about her claims surfaced after she failed to deliver a promised $300,000 donation to a charity".

The Whole Pantry registrar was amended in March 2015 after the controversy broke.

While The Whole Pantry has unequivocally denied that Gibson ever helped anyone to reject conventional cancer treatment, Gibson has been quoted from her social media posts as claiming that she had "countless times helped others" to forgo conventional medical treatment for cancer and to treat themselves "naturally", as well as "leading them down natural therapy for everything from fertility, depression, bone damage and other types of cancer".

In interviews, Gibson claimed to have had malignant brain, blood, spleen, uterine, liver, and kidney cancers, which she attributed to a reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine.

The highly controversial Gerson therapy had been similarly promoted by another Australian wellness blogger, Jessica Ainscough, whose funeral Gibson attended when Ainscough died from cancer in late February 2015.

With approximately 97% of the Australian population under seven years of age immunised, Federal vaccination policy heavily penalises parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, by denying access to significant welfare and other benefits, worth approximately $11,700 per annum.

On 6 May 2016, Consumer Affairs Victoria announced legal action against Gibson and Inkerman Road Nominees Pty Ltd (originally known as Belle Gibson Pty Ltd) for "false claims by Ms. Gibson and her company concerning her diagnosis with terminal brain cancer, her rejection of conventional cancer treatments in favour of natural remedies, and the donation of proceeds to various charities."

On 15 March 2017, the Federal Court of Australia supported most of those claims, concluding that "Ms. Gibson had no reasonable basis to believe she had cancer."

Gibson was born in Launceston, Tasmania.

According to interviews she has given, she left her Brisbane family home at age 12 to live with a classmate, and later lived with a family friend.

Gibson attended Wynnum State High School in Manly, Queensland, until dropping out in Year 10, although she also later claimed to have been homeschooled.