As Kylie Willey struggled in hospital with the impact of near-daily chemotherapy, she scrolled Instagram.
There was one account in particular she was drawn to.
She watched as a woman, who also had cancer, lived her life full of smiles and green smoothies. This woman treated herself naturally without chemotherapy and her life looked great.
“I’m sitting in The Alfred hospital [in Melbourne],” Kylie told Mamamia. “I’d just been maid-of-honour for my best friend’s wedding and I was diagnosed going to her wedding rehearsal.
“I started treatment two or three days after that, so I’d been all glammed up… to straight away losing my hair, to being on steroid treatment that put on 30 kilos. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking I didn’t even know who that person was.
“It was absolutely horrendous, and there’s Belle Gibson, sipping coconut water, living this amazing life because she wasn’t going through chemo treatment.”
The 43-year-old Victorian mother-of-three had been diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in April 2014.
Kylie felt a connection to the woman on Instagram: “You’re like ‘I feel what you’re going through, it’s scary and it’s shit’,” she explained.
But this woman – Belle Gibson – was lying.
Just 23 at the time of her undoing, the wellness blogger and mother-of-one had falsely claimed her fabricated brain cancer was cured through alternative therapies. She’d also lied to consumers about donating to charities from the sales of her The Whole Pantry app.
After discovering Belle Gibson, Kylie would check her Instagram and read her blog daily. Comparing their different scenarios - Kylie, sick in a hospital bed and Belle, living it up on the beach - she couldn't help but ask: Why was she doing this? Was there another way?
Kylie approached her medical staff. She'd had enough.
And Kylie nearly gave up on chemotherapy - a decision that almost certainly would have killed her.
"I remember speaking to the doctor and one nurse in particular, who had been taking care of me, she was the one who said 'You're not going to survive this cancer if you don't have chemo. You can go down this alternative treatment but I'd be nursing you in palliative care'."
Kylie remembered exactly where she was when she learned of the lies. She felt betrayed, angry, pissed off.
She still does.
"I'm not normally one that would become so passionate about something, but I'm so pissed off at her for lying about it and I feel so betrayed," Kylie said.
"The more I learn about her and what she did... It absolutely infuriates me.
"It's the most frustrating thing that she's not being held accountable."
Thankfully, Kylie has been cancer-free since 2016. On one hand, she wants to put this all behind her, but on the other, she wants Belle Gibson to face consequences.
In September 2017, Gibson was handed a $410,000 fine by the Federal Court for duping her Australian consumers out of half a million dollars from the sales of her The Whole Pantry wellness app. She had promised to donate the proceeds to multiple charities.
After facing several warnings for not paying the fine for breaches of consumer laws, Gibson, now 27, was ordered to appear in the Federal Court on Tuesday to explain herself.
After a bizarre appearance (which you can read more about here) Belle Gibson's hearing was adjourned until June 6.
Kylie thinks there needs to be tougher consequences. Gibson has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the impact of her actions, she said.
"I think she needs to go to jail. She clearly has no intentions of paying the fines... The only alternative is to put her in jail so she can reflect on what it is that she's done.
"It wasn't just my life that she could have changed, there's so many people. The people that did follow her advice and did lose their battle with cancer, she doesn't understand the responsibility that she has making the claims that she did.
"I don't know how she lives with herself."
Given this all, it was surprising to hear that Kylie would still like to talk to Belle Gibson.
"I'd love to have a conversation with her, for her to clear up why she did what she did or how she thought that it was okay saying what she said.
"I think I'd walk away from it extremely frustrated like everybody else that's tried to have a conversation with her," she said.
But she'd try anyway.
Top Comments
Gibson absolutely needs to be held accountable, but so too should Apple and the publishing house who threw money and a platform at her without performing due diligence into the crap in which they were investing. Easy fixes like curing cancer with "natural therapies" are popular and a way to make money. I suspect they had their suspicions that it was all rubbish (Gibson's story was wafer-thin and totally unbelievable from the get-go) - but they didn't care. They just published that shit anyway.
Penguin lost millions because they had to immediately pulp all the books, paid a huge fine and I’m pretty sure their senior editor lost her job and a whole arm of the company she headed up was scrapped. They didn’t come out of it unscathed and it set a precedent for other ‘health’ books.
Apple were, in the end, a hosting platform. They dropped her like a hot potato, but it’s true they didn’t suffer ma’am consequences. Not really sure what could be done about that though, since we can’t even get them to pay taxes.
To me one of the most alarming things is that faith in doctors is so low that people were willing to take an instagrammers advice instead.
I don't think it's just a sign of faith being low in doctors. People with cancer will often try anything that gives them hope, no matter how expensive or ludicrous. Woo merchants package their products seductively and promise the world. They should be hung out.
Penguin suffered no direct punishment for endorsing a liar. Pulping the books was merely a consequence of a poor investment on their part. Apple and Penguin both should be held accountable for disseminating dangerous information. Ditto, anyone who provides a platform for anti-vax rhetoric etc.
Do you really want Publishers or media platforms to be moderators and held accountable and investigate for the things you or I might say on those platforms?
Yeah, I do. Particularly the large platforms like Facebook, Instagram and the like. If you allow people to disseminate deadly information - *particularly* when it's done for the mutual profit of the platform and the person using that platform - both should be held to account. The woo-industry is worth billions of dollars per year. Much of that is due to them being afforded time, attention and legitimacy by way of the platforms given to them.