Annabelle Natalie Gibson was born on 8 October 1991 and is an Australian health fraudster, former influencer and pseudoscience advocate.
51 Facts About Belle Gibson
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Belle Gibson is the author of The Whole Pantry mobile app and its later companion cookbook.
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Belle Gibson falsely claimed she had donated significant proportions of her income and company profits to numerous charities.
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Belle Gibson admitted in an April 2015 interview that she had fabricated her claims of having multiple cancers.
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Annabelle Natalie Gibson was born on 8 October 1991 in Launceston, Tasmania.
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Belle Gibson attended Wynnum State High School in Wynnum, Queensland, until dropping out in Year 10, although she later claimed to have been homeschooled.
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Belle Gibson worked for some time as a trainee for catering supply company PFD Food Services in Lytton.
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Belle Gibson was involved in the skateboarding culture and actively participated in its online community there.
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Belle Gibson moved from Perth to Melbourne in July 2009 and became a mother one year later, at age 18.
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In 2012, Gibson launched her Instagram account, "@healing_belle", claiming she had brain cancer and promoting nutrition and lifestyle interventions.
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Belle Gibson launched The Whole Pantry mobile app in August 2013, at age 21.
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Belle Gibson reportedly told a prospective business partner in 2014 that she had "several names" that she went under.
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Belle Gibson's mother changed her name five times when she was young, Gibson claimed in an interview with The Australian Women's Weekly.
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Belle Gibson 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.
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Belle 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".
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The Whole Pantry denied that Belle Gibson had helped any person to reject conventional cancer treatment.
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In interviews, Belle Gibson claimed to have had brain cancer, blood, spleen, uterine, liver and kidney cancers, which she falsely attributed to a reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine.
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Belle Gibson's story emerged as inconsistent: she told media outlets the cancer had reached her liver and kidneys; three months earlier, she had posted on The Whole Pantrys Facebook page that her cancer had spread to her brain, blood, spleen, and uterus.
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Belle Gibson had claimed she had undergone heart surgery several times and to have died momentarily on the operating table.
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Belle Gibson did not bear any surgical scars from her purported heart operations.
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However, on her now-deleted Instagram account and on other social media, Belle Gibson promoted dangerous pseudoscience practices, including Gerson therapy, anti-vaccination and the consumption of non-pasteurised raw milk.
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The controversial Gerson therapy had been similarly promoted by another Australian wellness blogger, Jessica Ainscough, whose funeral Belle Gibson attended when Ainscough died from cancer in late February 2015.
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Belle Gibson denied the charges, but Fairfax Media stated that she had "failed to hand over proceeds solicited in the name of five charities" and had "grossly overstated the company's total donations to different causes".
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Two charities confirmed to The Australian newspaper that Belle Gibson's company had used their names in fundraising drives but had either failed to deliver the donations or had inadequately accounted for the funds.
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Belle Gibson had claimed on several occasions in 2014 that The Whole Pantry had donated approximately $300,000 to charities, including maternal healthcare in developing nations, medical support for children with cancer and schools in sub-Saharan Africa.
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In late 2014, when The Whole Pantry app was pre-installed on the Apple iPad, Belle Gibson claimed through her Instagram account to be working with twenty different charities.
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Belle Gibson claimed in her LinkedIn professional networking profile, established in February 2013, to be a philanthropist.
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In relation to fraud proceedings, Belle Gibson eventually admitted that she had seriously overstated the charitable contributions that had been made.
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Subsequent media reports in March 2015 stated that it could be ascertained that only an estimated $7,000 of the previously claimed $300,000 had been donated to a total of three charities, with at least $1,000 of the $7,000 reportedly having been donated only after Belle Gibson became aware of the Fairfax investigation into her earlier claims.
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Also, in March 2015, the parents of a young child with brain cancer whom Belle Gibson had befriended came forward to report that they had been unaware that Belle Gibson had earlier been claiming to be fundraising for their child's treatment on their behalf.
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The family had never received any funds from her or The Whole Pantry and suspected that Belle Gibson had been using information gleaned from the family's experiences to underpin her own claims to have brain cancer.
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Elle Australia magazine, published by Bauer Media Group, admitted that following a laudatory December 2014 story on Belle Gibson, they had received but ultimately dismissed anonymous claims that she was fabricating her story.
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Once the controversy surfaced in the media, The Whole Pantry began removing any comments made on its Facebook page that questioned Belle Gibson's claims, asserting that these comments only added to "the misinformation" of the initial Fairfax article.
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Posts that Belle Gibson had made on her Instagram account that made reference to her cancers or charitable donations were selectively deleted.
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Belle Gibson subsequently established another Facebook account under an alias, which was used to defend her work and counter what she called "bullying" of herself and family.
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Belle Gibson wrote that she would shortly publish an "open letter".
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McAuliffe urged Belle Gibson to come forward with the truth, but she refused.
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Concerned about the harm Belle Gibson was causing to people with cancer, McAuliffe reported Belle Gibson to the police, a lawyer and an investigative journalist; they were not willing to look into the case.
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Concerns were expressed that Belle Gibson had led a profligate lifestyle by renting an upmarket town house, leasing a luxury car and office space, undergoing cosmetic dental procedures, purchasing designer clothes and holidaying internationally.
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Belle Gibson paid these expenses from donations she received for charities.
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Belle Gibson gave an interview to The Australian Women's Weekly in which she admitted to having fabricated all her cancer claims.
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Belle Gibson attributed her deceit to her upbringing, specifically to neglect by her now-estranged mother, claiming to having been forced to take care of herself and her brother since the age of five.
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Belle Gibson was fined $410,000, but the judge accepted Belle Gibson's story that she was acting out of delusion rather than criminal intent.
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In September 2017, Belle Gibson was fined $410,000 for making false claims about her donations to charity.
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Belle Gibson's home was subject to a second warrant on 21 May 2021 to "try to recoup her unpaid fines".
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On 23 January 2020, the day after the police executed the first search warrant, an October 2019 Shabo Media video surfaced in which Belle Gibson was wearing a headscarf and speaking partially in the Oromo language, discussing the political situation in Ethiopia with an interviewer and referring to Ethiopia as "back home".
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Belle Gibson professed to have been adopted by the Ethiopian community in Melbourne after volunteering for four years, calling the adoption a gift from "Allah".
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However, on the same day, the president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria, Tarekegn Chimdi, stated that Belle Gibson was not a registered volunteer, "is not a community member and she's not working with the community" and that he had seen her at events only two or three times.
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Belle Gibson said that nobody seemed to know who she was, and he had only just learned of her backstory and wished her to stop saying she was part of the community.
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In 2023, Netflix produced a two-part documentary about Belle Gibson titled The Search For Instagram's Worst Con Artist.
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Belle Gibson is portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever in the 2025 Netflix drama series Apple Cider Vinegar.