Impressions // Illness, Wellness & The Woman Who Fooled the World
It’s been another long, long break since writing anything for this space, and when I eventually decided I wanted to talk about Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s The Woman Who Fooled the World, I wasn’t wholly convinced that it’d be the most appropriate piece for the beginning of a new year. After all, the story of Belle Gibson’s cancer con is not exactly awash with the kind of positivity people are often grappling for as one year ends and another begins. But then I thought some more, particularly about the kind of resolutions people make around this time – to be healthier, fitter, stronger, kinder, more confident, more ‘at peace’ – and I realised that, really, there’s hardly a more appropriate time to discuss Gibson’s story since at one point all these ‘goals’ together formed the very backbone of her constructed persona. What’s more, Gibson’s apparent ability to both preach and practice each of them so flawlessly (and so photogenically) was the very reason she was, for that short time, considered so extraordinary.
For anyone unaware of Belle’s story, the short version is thus: A young woman with the handle healingbelle emerges on Instagram, where she describes herself as a ‘gamechanger with a food obsession.’ She claims to have been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and to have been given between just six weeks to a few months to live. She eschews conventional cancer treatment, withdrawing from chemotherapy after collapsing in a park, and instead opts to heal herself of her illness by adopting a plant-based diet (in addition, she says, to salt treatments, oxygen therapy and colonics). She develops a hugely successful app, ‘The Whole Pantry’, and publishes a hugely successful recipe book with Penguin Random House to complement it. She becomes famous around the world for her wholesome, healthy brand, wins awards for her bravery, and is generally lauded as an all-round good egg; Elle Australia gushingly referred to her as ‘The Most Inspiring Woman You’ve Met This Year’. Among Belle’s close friends, however, doubts about her story begin to intensify as her health claims grow more outlandish while she continues to look the very picture of health. She is finally confronted by a pair of journalists (Donelly and Toscano) who inquire as to the whereabouts of her promised charity donations, and everything seems to unravels from there. Belle Gibson finally admits that, ‘No, none of it is true’, her reputation is irrevocably destroyed, and she is handed a hefty fine of $410,000 for good measure.
This book did quite a few things for me. The first, which is perhaps its most urgent objective, was to consolidate what was, for me, an already pretty well-entrenched scepticism for any form of New Age ‘science’ including bizarre dietary claims and fads, and alternative medicine. The second was to develop a keener awareness of the alacrity with which newspapers and magazines are willing to jump on these assertions and publish glowing write-ups of their originators without thoroughly researching anything about the person pushing their new brand of ‘wellness’ or the claims they’re making. I am not a scientist, and I don’t wish to go much further into the specifics of Belle’s medical claims and the pseudoscience behind the alternative treatments she promoted. But it’s so important, particularly in an age where information (and indeed, misinformation) can be disseminated so quickly online, that we look to the sources of these claims, and understand how easy it is to create panic by cherry picking scientific facts without the presenting the whole picture. The chapter ‘No Such Thing as Superfood’ is probably a good starting point for this, and I would also recommend Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science if you’d like to read a more thorough investigation into this irresponsible, and frankly downright dangerous world.
Like I said, I’m not a scientist, and I’d like to avoid simply regurgitating the arguments about nutrition and medicine that are made far more coherently in Donelly and Toscano’s book. Instead, I’d like to think more about the personal, human side of this whole mess. When she was finally outed, Belle said in an interview, ‘above anything, I would like people to say: “OK, she’s human”,’ and that’s precisely what this book does.
Something that struck me relatively early on reading this is that it isn’t just the extended take-down piece it could have easily become if left in the wrong hands. Instead, her story weaves together the wider, public issues of journalistic responsibility and the reporting of science and medicine in the popular press, as well as the private issues of her own elusive, evidently troubled background. Not to excuse any of Belle’s wrongdoing, I do think it’s necessary to think about the conditions that might prime somebody to behave in this sort of way. The book introduces us to Belle’s mother, Natalie Dal-Bello, whose bizarre Jekyll and Hyde behaviour towards Donelly and Toscano is matched only by her volte face in the media; she went from being thoroughly embarrassed by what Belle had done and her lack of remorse, to later describing that deception as a mere “white lie”. It’s also worth noting that even at this point, Dal Bello had, like her daughter, lied about her age, telling journalists she was 51, despite actually being 54.
The reminiscences of her friends from adolescence are also illustrative of just how engrained Belle’s tendency to lie really is. One former boyfriend says he’d grown so accustomed to her constant lies that he no longer even bothered to listen to her, let alone challenge her. The people around her knew she was lying, and simply tuned out whatever fantasy she’d be touting that week, whether it was dying on the operating table during open heart surgery or earning thousands of dollars a week to care for her autistic brother (who, it turns out, is not actually autistic).
Much has been said in the media about the state of Belle’s mental health, and it’s not difficult to see why when, even in her interview on Australia’s 60 Minutes, she still fails to take full responsibility for what she’s done, insisting that she’d simply been misled herself by quack doctors. It makes for difficult viewing. She still hasn’t quite got her story straight, and she doesn’t seem even remotely prepared to field these questions, questions which, by this point, you’d think she might have anticipated. The remote diagnoses of Belle offered by the curious observers of this unfolding farce range from mere narcissism to factitious disorders like Munchausen’s syndrome, but in the midst of so much confusion, I doubt her true reasons will ever be public knowledge (and I’m not entirely sure they ought to be, at this point). Ultimately, The Woman who Fooled the World stops short of diagnosing Belle, or explaining her motivations for such a colossal lie, and rightly so; only Belle can ever tell us, and until then, all we will ever have is conjecture.
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