A little over a month since Belle Gibson was slapped with a $410,000 fine for after being found guilty of building a business empire on fake claims that she had brain cancer, and had said-brain-cancer cured using alternative therapies, news continues to swirl around the disgraced ‘wellness’ blogger.
In 2015, Belle controversially revealed to The Weekly that despite claiming she was a brain cancer survivor, and making money of Australians who either sympathised or empathised with her harrowing (make-believe) story , she, in fact, had been lying to the entire country.
That’s because Belle never had brain cancer.
Now, more than two years since Belle’s shock admission, a new book uncovers even more worrying details surrounding the then-23-year-old’s wellness scam – a scam that included selling her fans books and uncorroborated health advice about kicking cancer using alternative therapies through her app to the sum of $420,000.
News.com.au have released an extract from the scathing new book by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, titled, **The Woman Who Fooled The World, Belle Gibson’s Cancer Con, that features shocking details surrounding the events leading up to Belle being found out.
In particular, the book recounts a time when Belle had organised a birthday party for her then-four-year-old son, Oli (a party she had invited five-year-old brain cancer suffer, Joshua Schwarz, and his father along to).
The writers of the book state that as the party came to an end, Belle’s eyes began to roll into the back of her head – “her legs buckled and she hit the wall, sliding down it, slowly, to soften the impact.”
She then lay on the ground, shaking.
But, as the book claims, when worried parents swarmed around Belle, seemingly then unconscious on the floor, awoke as someone pulled out their phone to call an ambulance.
Apparently someone was overheard saying that Belle didn’t like to get hospitals involved in her often-occurring seizures.
“It looked real. I believed it was real,” one of Belle’s close friends at the time admits.
“And I was mortified. I cried driving all the way home … I actually don’t know how I got home.”
Two weeks later, she posted this to Facebook:
“With frustration and ache in my heart // my beautiful, gamechanging community, it hurts me to find space tonight to let you all know with love and strength that I’ve been diagnosed with a third and forth [sic] cancer.”
“One is secondary and the other is primary. I have cancer in my blood, spleen, brain, uterus, and liver. I am hurting. As some of you remember, there was a scare I briefly spoke about here 4 months ago where we found gynaecological cancer that I stood up against with strength I wouldn’t of had if it weren’t for each of you.”
A little less than a year later, she told The Weekly the cancer diagnosis was a lie…
