Within the early years of Instagram, a younger Australian mom named Belle Gibson quickly turned one of the fashionable wellness influencers on the platform, inspiring hundreds of followers together with her story of overcoming malignant mind most cancers with a healthful eating regimen and different medication remedies.
Claiming that she was given 4 months to reside after being identified in 2009, Gibson mentioned she in the end rejected chemotherapy and radiotherapy and launched into a quest to heal herself naturally “through nutrition, patience, determination and love.” Her inspirational story attracted a big social media following, which Gibson leveraged right into a profitable way of life app referred to as the Complete Pantry, a partnership with Apple and a ebook take care of Penguin.
The issue is that Gibson by no means had most cancers. As ultimately turned clear, she’d additionally lied about numerous different issues — from her age (she was three years youthful than she claimed to be) to her professed help for numerous charities (she hadn’t given them any cash till reporters began asking). As her story unraveled publicly in 2015, Gibson went from media darling and celebrated woman boss to nationwide pariah — like an Australian Elizabeth Holmes.
Kaitlyn Dever — doing an astonishingly convincing Australian accent — stars as Belle, taking part in the wannabe guru as a lonely however conniving younger girl who makes use of lies to evoke sympathy. However she shouldn’t be the only real focus of the drama, which additionally follows Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), an influencer who touts the cancer-fighting advantages of vegetable juice and occasional colonics; and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a younger girl present process brutal most cancers remedies who finds herself drawn to Belle and Milla’s seemingly gentler cures. The collection toes a fragile line, displaying why different cures may be so interesting to sufferers annoyed with conventional medication, but additionally illustrating how harmful charlatans are keen to take advantage of that desperation for private achieve.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey performs Lucy, a lady battling most cancers who finds herself drawn to Belle and Milla’s seemingly gentler cures.
(Ben King / Netflix)
“The allure is so powerful because it seems kinder, easier, prettier. We didn’t want to just say medicine good, wellness bad, because there are beautiful things like community that people don’t find necessarily in hospitals,” says Strauss in a video name from Australia. As a result of most cancers remedies like radiation and chemotherapy can depart sufferers feeling fully depleted, “It’s intoxicating to want to run away from that and go to the person promising, I’ll fix you in an easier way.”
The present’s title alludes to the concept of a magical but available treatment in a bottle, and the flawed notion that “you can outsource wellness instead of doing all the boring, medically proven things” to take care of well being, she says.
Like many in her residence nation, Strauss turned conscious of Gibson across the time she granted a disastrous, laughably evasive interview to Australia’s “60 Minutes” in 2015. (When requested her age, Gibson, wearing a vivid pink turtleneck sweater, replied, “I’ve always been raised as being currently a 26-year-old.” She was truly 23.)
“There was a lot of talk at the time about her pink jumper and just how excruciating it was to watch,” Strauss says. “She just felt so young and way in over her head, not that it’s excusable. The other thing I found interesting was the recklessness of the industry all around her — the publishers who published her book without fact-checking and the wellness industry that loved to prop her up as this golden girl and heroic mum who’d beaten cancer.”
For Dever, the subject material is very private: her mom died final yr following a protracted battle with breast most cancers. “I became quite obsessed with the wellness world and non-conventional therapies because I was looking for other options for my mom, who was still doing all the conventional stuff at the same time,” says Dever, in a Zoom interview together with her co-star, Debnam-Carey. “I learned that there was a whole world out there of information that does offer a lot of hope.”
“Apple Cider Vinegar” is the newest collection in what has develop into a thriving subgenre about scammers and con artists, particularly ladies — from “The Dropout” to “Inventing Anna.” Although a lot of the motion takes place a decade or extra in the past in one other hemisphere, its themes of medical quackery, different info and social-media echo chambers are extra related than ever in 2025.
Kaitlyn Dever as wellness influencer Belle Gibson in “Apple Cider Vinegar.”
(Ben King / Netflix)
“Apple Cider Vinegar” avoids spoon-feeding a tidy model of occasions to the viewers, as an alternative utilizing a scrambled timeline and shifting narrative views to complicate the narrative. A disclaimer on the entrance of every episode calls the collection “a true story based on a lie.”
There’s additionally a repeated caveat, delivered by numerous characters talking on to the digital camera: “Belle Gibson has not been paid for the recreation of her story.” The reference hardly appears unintentional: Netflix was criticized for paying faux heiress Anna Sorokin a hefty charge for the rights to adapt her life story into “Inventing Anna.”
In Australia, Gibson stays a broadly reviled determine. “I was talking to a friend whose partner was dying of brain cancer, and they were horrified that I was telling this story. They’re like, ‘Belle is going to profit from this. She’s going to become more famous.’ And I was like, no, no,” Strauss says. “I felt like it was just so important to tell the audience right up front [that she wasn’t paid].”
“I’ve never met Belle, so my version of Belle is based on the facts the journalists had written in the book and my research. I created who I imagined Belle might be,” Strauss continues. “If real Belle called me up, she would point out all the things that I got wrong.”
The collection by no means excuses Gibson’s conduct or attributes it to a single trigger, as an alternative presenting her as somebody with a determined want for approval that was fueled by social media. “I think probably never feeling enough and wanting to prove people wrong is at the very core of her,” Strauss says.
Like the true Gibson, the collection model of Belle grew up within the dingy suburbs of Brisbane, and as a dark-haired goth teenager turned energetic on skateboarding boards, the place she first began spinning tall tales about her well being in a bid for consideration. The present’s model of Belle views illness as “a shortcut to being loved and to getting out of things. If you’re sick, people can’t be mean to you,” says Strauss.
Aisha Dee, left, as Chanelle, greatest pal to Milla, performed by Alycia Debnam-Carey. Within the collection, Belle fashions herself after Milla, one other social media star.
(Ben King / Netflix)
In her quest for web fame, Bella fashions herself on Milla, a rising social media star. As a substitute of amputating her arm to cease the unfold of most cancers, as her medical doctors urged her to do, Milla turns to a severely restricted eating regimen consisting primarily of juice. Milla’s decisions are vexing, however her frustration with the condescending medical institution can be comprehensible.
“The conventional medical industry can feel really sterile and impersonal, as much as it is incredible in what it’s able to accomplish,” Debnam-Carey says. “While it’s hard to watch [Milla rejecting medical advice], you come away with some compassion for that decision and why she’d want to find different alternatives.”
Milla is a composite character, however her story is just like that of Jessica Ainscough, a self-proclaimed “wellness warrior” who was identified with a uncommon most cancers in her early 20s and pursued different remedies together with Gerson remedy, a dietary routine involving hourly consumption of recent vegetable juice. The most cancers unfold and he or she died in 2015 at 29. As documented in “The Woman Who Fooled the World,” Gibson was surprisingly fixated with Ainscough, even attending her funeral.
For the Milla character, Strauss researched orthorexia, an consuming dysfunction through which individuals are obsessive about “healthy” meals, and likewise delved into the historical past of different medication retreats just like the one Milla visits in Mexico.
By the top of “Apple Cider Vinegar,” Gibson’s app and ebook have been pulled from the market, however her rip-off has had dire penalties. There is no such thing as a postscript to inform viewers what occurred to Gibson after the scandal blew up, or whether or not she confronted any penalties. As a substitute Dever, in character as Belle, tells the viewers to Google it for themselves. They could discover the outcomes disappointing: In 2017, a court docket ordered Gibson to pay $410,000 in fines for her false claims. As of 2021, she had not but paid the fines, and authorities started to grab her belongings. She additionally resurfaced briefly in 2020, claiming she had been “adopted” by Melbourne’s Ethiopian group. (Spoiler alert: She had not.)
Gibson will quickly be thrust again into the worldwide highlight due to Netflix. However don’t anticipate her to get the superstar therapy, says Strauss. “I don’t think she’s going to go on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ in Australia after this.”
