Liar Liar

the truthphobic walk among us

A still from Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix

We live in the golden age of scams. We have more information at our fingertips than ever in human history, and yet people increasingly feel like they can negotiate with reality. There are liars everywhere you look. Gaslighting and love bombing are so common that these phrases are now planted in the zeitgeist. It’s not cute. I once had someone tell me that the biggest problem we had was that I always believed myself over them. No shit. When people expect you to believe them over your own eyes, ears, and common sense, you’ve got to tell them to kick fucking rocks. You can’t gentle parent your way into making them a better person. Trust me, I’ve tried. I don’t care if it’s your boyfriend, BFF, business partner, or the president of the United States. Give no quarter to liars. You’ll only get hurt and end up mad as hell.

Netflix’s newest miniseries Apple Cider Vinegar tells the mostly true story of the meteoric rise and fall of Belle Gibson, once one of Australia’s most famous health and wellness influencers, and how she pretended to have terminal brain cancer to further her career.¹ Yeah, it’s a doozy. It can be hard to imagine that someone would lie about something as big as cancer, but there are people who can’t stop themselves.They’ll say whatever is expedient, whatever will give them their desired outcome in that moment. Call them compulsive liars, narcissists, whatever you want. They’re assholes who have a blackhole in them where their humanity should be. If you look closely, you can see that they’re just doing an impression of a person. They work tirelessly to appear good, trustworthy, and kind instead of actually being good, trustworthy, and kind, because appearance is all that matters. They’re a mirage. But even a mirage can do a lot of damage. Apple Cider Vinegar shows exactly how empty and destructive people like wellness grifter Belle Gibson are.

Belle Gibson on your left, and Kaitlyn Dever playing Belle in her 60 Minutes interview on your right

If you haven’t heard of Belle Gibson before, you’re forgiven. The story didn’t make big waves outside of Australia when it first broke back in 2015. Let’s get you caught up. Belle rose to minor fame on Instagram in the early days of 2012 by claiming she was healing herself from terminal brain cancer through diet. Typical wellness snake oil. It was a great hook and people ate it up. In 2013, she launched an app, The Whole Pantry, full of health-focused recipes that gave users the ability to build their shopping lists as they went so that they could heal themselves, just like Belle. It was voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of 2013 and launched her career into the stratosphere. It was set to be one of the pre-downloaded apps on Apple’s newest product, the Apple Watch, when it debuted in April 2015. In the fall of 2014, her cookbook, also named The Whole Pantry, dropped and was set to publish all over the world the following year. She was killing it but of course, it was all built on a lie. In March 2015, a story broke in The Age about Belle failing to give money she publicly promised to a whole host of charities. It only took a few days for people to correctly infer that she must be full of shit about a lot of other stuff too, including her mysterious cancer. Her whole empire crumbled and no amount of fake crying in interviews was gonna fix it.² And trust me, they always fake cry.

If you’ve ever had someone like Belle in your life, you know how disorienting it can be. It fucks you up for a long time. When you catch them in a lie, you’re suddenly the one on trial. Your reaction to their shit is always the real crime. Simple situations are made falsely complicated in an attempt to obscure their bad behavior, and cast doubt on you. It happens over and over until you doubt yourself. That’s by design. I’ve lost years of my life to circular arguments and disproving obvious lies with mounds of evidence I shouldn’t have needed but knew I had to collect. Not that evidence will sway them from their bullshit. It’s fucking exhausting and wears you down. Liars like Belle Gibson make themselves the victim and the hero of everything. They insist they are being transparent, that they’re telling the truth, but their words are meaningless. They’ve made them that way. All you have to do is look past their version of events, right to their actions. Reality still exists if you dig for it.

At every opportunity to humanize Belle, Apple Cider Vinegar makes sure to let you know that she’s a grifter to her core and not worth any of your sympathy. Even her rough childhood isn’t offered as a get-out-of-jail-free card, there’s no medical diagnosis hinted at for her obvious pathology. She’s just a piece of shit, no explanation needed. I appreciated this because searching for motivation in these sociopaths is a waste of time. Would there be a story good enough to excuse their horrific behavior? If so, they’ll be happy to tell it to you in vivid, completely made-up detail. I’ve had someone make up a whole ass phone call, talking about it for 10 minutes, and when I pointed out it was an obvious lie, they said it was my fault for asking so many questions. I made them lie. I’ve dealt with fake cancer scares, endless threats of suicide, and so many insane everyday lies that your head would spin if you heard it all. You will never, ever win with a person like that but I was stubborn enough to try. They’re hardly a person at all.

It’s tempting to think that hucksters are more prevalent in the wellness space but don’t be fooled. It’s just easier for us to look at women in an overwhelming female-coded space like wellness and point out that they are full of shit. The hustle bros selling success courses are liars, the ‘roided up workout bros selling supplements are liars, Sam Altman is a liar, RFK Jr. is a liar, and Elon Musk is a giant fucking liar. They’re everywhere. We’re just scared to call out some liars more than others.You’ve probably got one in your family, at work, or had the unfortunate experience of dating one. Vent it out in the comments babe.

Dever really kills it as Belle

Belle Gibson isn’t unique in her bullshit, except that The Whole Pantry app was actually a good idea. Liars can have good ideas, they can be talented, but at the end of the day they’ll always fuck it up because they can’t stop lying. That’s the only way they know how to be. Eventually their lack of humanity, their quicksand personality gives everyone the creeps. One of the few moments of introspection from Belle in the series comes when she’s talking with a crisis manager and refusing to admit that she’s lying about her cancer. She admits to a small lie to appear honest, but instead shows that she can only take her act so far:

“When I said people like me instinctively, that’s not totally factually correct. I try really hard, like really, really, hard for them to like me. And in the end, they never, ever do.”

She knows how this goes. Eventually, liars always get caught. They have to pack up and move to another city, change friend groups, change careers, and start a relationship with a new victim or enabler. They get too high on their own supply and fall in love with their own lie. When their mask slips, we should all be ready to push them into oblivion. Don’t be fooled by their tears. They’re only crying for themselves.

Go stream Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix and enjoy all the madness. I hope Belle doesn’t remind you of anyone you know.

Tomorrow, paid subscribers are getting a brand new recipe that’s been helping me battle this never-ending cough I’ve had all 2025: Double Potato Winter Sunshine Soup. It uses winter veggies and a little miso to make a bowl that will bring you a little comfort on these long, shitty nights. Not on the list? Come on over, we’d love to have you.

xoxo,

Michelle

1. Apple Cider Vinegar was adapted by Samantha Strauss for TV from the book The Woman Who Fooled the World: The True Story of Fake Wellness Guru Belle Gibson written by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, the reporters who first broke the story.

2. I happened to be in Australia in March 2015 to speak at a couple food festivals and do press in Melbourne and Sydney while promoting my first book. Everyone wanted to talk about Belle so I spent my jetlag-addled nights reading every article I could and scouring Belle’s Instagram. I was excited to watch the show so you all could finally catch up on this decades-old tea with me.