Aussie blogger faces jail time

by Bernard Sinai · July 11, 2018

Belle Gibson, disgraced wellness blogger.

An Australian blogger faces possible jail time if she does not pay her $410,000 fine, according to SBS News.

Wellness blogger Belle Gibson was fined last year after the Federal Court of Australia found her guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct for claiming that she had brain cancer and was cured with alternative medicine.

According to the report, Ms Gibson made the claim that she healed her terminal cancer by eating whole-foods. She also accumulated more that $400000 from app and book sales. Her book, The Whole Pantry, has since been removed from publication.

Ms Gibson rose to fame after convincing her more than 200000 followers that she had cured her cancer with only a healthy diet. She then sold an app (The Whole Pantry) and then a book deal of the same name.

The app was published in August 2013 and reportedly had more than 200000 downloads within the first month. However, she would not have done it alone. According to The New Daily, Apple helped take her lie global.

Monetising that staggering deception via her wildly successful healthy living app The Whole Pantry, the global corporation handpicked Gibson to work on their Apple Watch prototype, hugely boosting her profile. An international cookbook deal with Penguin followed.

“Apple and Penguin needed to check out what they were standing behind,” Donelly insists. “They failed on a monumental level.”

Gibson’s truth through a carnival mirror came shattering in 2015 after two young journalists at The Age, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, began suspecting her claim was a lie.

Ironically, Donelly and Toscano have now published a book based on their expose of Gibson appropriately titled “The Woman Who Fooled the World“.