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THE WOMAN WHO FOOLED THE WORLD

The extraordinary story of the woman who fooled the world begins in the decidedly ordinary suburbs of Brisbane’s eastern beaches. The beaches aren’t known for swimming, though; mangroves cover the shoreline, and mudflats emerge when the tide dips low. The mouth of the Brisbane River cuts into the land from Moreton Bay, separating the once working-class suburb of Wynnum from the city’s international airport. On the Wynnum side of the river are a busy container port, Caltex’s 50-year-old oil refinery, and a Wastewater Treatment Plant. The smell of decaying mangroves, like rotten eggs, rises up late in the afternoons. This is the suburb of wide streets and weatherboard homes, about 20 kilometres east of the city, where Annabelle Natalie Gibson grew up.

She lived here with her older brother, Nick, and her mother, Natalie, in a single-storey, gabled brick veneer on Louis Street. The house is owned by the Department of Housing and Public Works, which runs Queensland’s social-housing program. Today, as investors are lured closer to the waterfront, and entire streets in Wynnum get a facelift, the three-bedroom house Gibson grew up in still stands out. Three old Fords are parked out the front, one lying on the lawn with its bonnet up under a leafy tree with pink flowers. A bright-red unregistered ute sits in the driveway, next to a rusting trailer and a refrigerator.

Wynnum was a neighbourhood beset by pockets of poverty, and has been afflicted by above-average unemployment levels. It has had a problem with armed robberies, and, to some degree, it still does. A spate of liquor store hold-ups in recent years led to local police enforcing an unusual ban on ‘hoodie’ jumpers. Locals, especially businesses, are trying hard to change Wynnum’s image and lure tourists to the area. The suburb’s new moniker, Brisbane’s Seaside, has been printed onto brightly coloured bumper stickers.

In magazine interviews at the height of her fame, Gibson shared poignant memories of hardship from her childhood here: as a six-year-old standing on a chair, reaching over the stovetop to cook meals for her older brother; being thrust into the role of the family’s primary carer; and carrying the burden of responsibility for all the housework and shopping because her mother was too sick. She describes a complicated and neglected childhood, one where she was left to fend for herself and was denied toys. ‘I grew up in a dysfunctional home,’ Gibson writes in her book. ‘I never knew my dad, and grew up with my mum, who had multiple sclerosis, and my brother, who was autistic. Because mum was so ill, she needed a lot of help.’

Gibson rarely invited friends over to her house. Some remember seeing her older brother once or twice, but not one said they had met her mother. ‘There was always an excuse as to why I couldn’t,’ a friend said. ‘She knew my family well, but I never knew hers.’ Gibson, who is estranged from her mother, says she moved out of home when she was 12 years old. ‘I was, at times, begging for her to be my mother rather than the opposite way around,’ she told one interviewer. Gibson’s family maintains that what she has said about her childhood are barefaced lies, albeit innocuous ones in the greater scheme of things. But maybe it was lies like this that convinced a young girl she could get away with anything.

Growing up, Gibson was resilient. In the space of three years, she went to three different primary schools. Teachers described her as attentive and conscientious, and said she always did her homework. Gibson’s grade-six report card calls her ‘cooperative, friendly and well-mannered … a pleasure to have in class’. By the seventh grade, she was enrolled at Wynnum Central State School. It was here where the young Gibson seemed to have really thrived. School records show that, not long after arriving, she was made school captain, and went on to win a string of awards. She was said to be an all-rounder, and a particular high-achiever in literacy. The primary-school principal remarked she was an ‘exemplary’ pupil whose behaviour set a good example to her peers and younger schoolmates. According to her application to the local high school, in December 2003, Gibson belonged to a youth group run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It also said that she cooked and cleaned for elderly residents in the neighbourhood, was involved in fundraising activities for her primary school, and volunteered for the Breast Cancer Foundation.

Gibson was accepted to Wynnum State High, the co-ed public school about a 15-minute walk from her house. She has claimed to have been severely overweight as a child, although she looks perfectly healthy in school photographs from these years. As a teenager, she was tanned and slender, with hazel-green eyes and a winning smile. Early high-school pictures reveal a girl with honey-blonde hair that hung in a long ponytail over her shoulder. By year 10, her hair was cropped, her eyebrows sculpted. Later, she went through an ‘emo’ phase and mixed with the local skater crowd. Gibson would get dressed up with her friends and catch the train into the city. They’d go shopping, and eat fast food and hang out on Queen Street.

Gibson said she studied hospitality and management while at school. She landed a job working part-time in sales for catering supply company PFD Food Services. It had a warehouse in the nearby industrial suburb of Lytton, where semi-trailers pull off the motorway to pick up stock, then head back out along roads burnt with black tyre marks. According to her old employer, and confirmed by her family, at one point she moved in with a local man, who also worked at the food company, and his two sons. Different people who knew her at this time put his age at between 40 and 60. No one seems to know why Gibson lived there, and no one appears to have questioned the curious living arrangement at the time. One former friend said she moved out of her mum’s place when she was a teenager and into a small, two-storey house in the nearby suburb of Lota. Gibson might have lived with someone else, the friend recalls, but she never met them. She and Gibson would mostly hang out downstairs by themselves, drinking and talking.

‘Whether there was some type of guardian thing, I don’t know,’ says Jenny McDonald, who runs the nearby Manly Hotel, a family-owned pub and bistro with a gaming lounge on Wynnum’s main drag. She briefly employed Gibson at the restaurant, and remembers that the teenager wasn’t living with her family at the time.

Gibson had a love of acting, and enrolled in classes run by the Mercury Youth Theatre, at the local St Peter’s parish hall. ‘She was quite good, actually,’ one of her old drama teachers remembers. Another teacher, Brendan Glanville, recalls that she also attended acting camps run by his Australian Acting Academy. In her circles in Wynnum, Gibson was known as a storyteller. But she was quickly earning herself a name for spinning stories that were nothing but fairy tales. Those who knew her describe a melodramatic girl with a tendency to imitate others, who was prone to lying. She’d say things about her life and about her family that seemed totally unbelievable. Over the years, she told a number of people that she was in a witness-protection program. One classmate recalls Gibson claiming she was a test-tube baby. ‘We all felt like none of her stories she told us were true,’ she says. Margaret Weier, who started high school with Gibson in 2004, said that, after having lunch with Gibson a few times at school, ‘it was clear that she was a pathological liar’. Another classmate said Gibson’s supposed health crises were part of an attempt to keep a boyfriend at the time.

A pattern evolved from these early years. Gibson would tell her friends and workmates stories of bogus medical dramas. First, it was her heart. It is said that she often recounted in detail how she had suffered major heart problems, that she had undergone a series of life-saving operations. ‘Her story has changed multiple times over the years she told it,’ said Kelsey Gamble, who went to a neighbouring school but attended drama classes with Gibson, and mixed in the same social circles. ‘In our hometown, she was extremely well-known for what basically amounts to compulsive lying. She was honestly a laughing stock half the time … people made fun of her.’ Kelsey was friends with Gibson on Facebook until 2014, when she wrote a public Facebook message accusing her of lying, and was blocked.

Dianne Karger remembers Gibson as a bully who didn’t have many female friends in high school. ‘She used to hang out with the skater boys,’ recalls Dianne. ‘She wasn’t the nicest girl. She used to make girls cry … used to call them names.’

One of Gibson’s former boyfriends said she ‘couldn’t go five minutes without making up a story’, and so he simply started ignoring her. ‘Back then it was about her heart,’ said Jacob. ‘It all just went over the top of my head because it was that frequent.’ Jacob, who dated Gibson for a few months until she moved interstate, said she once told him the government was going to pay her $10,000 a week to look after her autistic brother. ‘That’s how she works,’ he says. ‘She just opens her mouth and starts saying stories.’

On the internet, though, something different was starting to happen. In a chat room about rock band The Flaming Lips, her stories of astonishing medical miracles were beginning to be believed. There were some doubters, but also huge outpourings of sympathy and support. Here, Gibson’s biggest, most prolific, and most dangerous lie was born. ‘As early as 2005, she started sharing information with me and posting in general forums on the board that she was suffering from brain cancer,’ said Jason Klemm, who used to chat online with Gibson. ‘I couldn’t help but believe she was truly suffering from something horrible.’

In 2008, in her final year, Gibson dropped out of school. She was 16. Looking at a map of Australia, there is no place further away from Wynnum than Perth. And that’s where she went, crossing the country to Western Australia, more than 4,000 kilometres away. She settled in the city, and found a job with private health insurer HBF. The company has a record of her working in its call centre for seven months until 5 January 2009. Gibson worked on the phones, listening to policyholders calling up to detail their various injuries and illnesses. A former friend says she knew Gibson in 2009, while she was working in the call centre and living in Duncraig, a northern suburb of Perth. She said Gibson was dating her friend’s brother at the time. ‘Back then she was telling people she had a terminal brain tumour,’ she said. ‘I didn’t believe it. Someone with terminal brain cancer isn’t going to work at a call centre every day.’

Gibson’s grandmother hasn’t had much to do with her since she was very young, but they used to talk on the phone. Every now and then, she would post a $5 note folded inside a letter so her granddaughter could buy herself a coffee down at Fremantle with her new friends. In a telephone conversation, the grandmother recalls, Gibson once told her that she was on a waiting list for a heart operation in Sydney with Dr Charlie Teo, a well-known neurosurgeon.

By May 2009, Gibson was crude-talking and had long, black-dyed hair. She was posting comments on a skateboarders’ chat forum of mostly boys, and regularly divulging a litany of catastrophic medical problems she claimed to be suffering from. The posts became more and more incredible. She wrote not only about being treated for cancer and undergoing major surgery, but described dying on the operating table and finding bruises on her chest from the paddles that were supposedly used to shock her back to life.

‘I just woke up out of a coma type thing,’ she said. ‘The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes.’

In another post, she said: ‘I had fluid in the pericardium (sac around heart) that needed to be drained or else my heart would’ve stopped pumping blood, and would’ve died. And I need to get a valve replaced, but can’t afford it yet.’ Gibson wrote about preparing for chemotherapy, more tests on her heart, rehabilitation after a ‘cardiac arrest’. She also claimed, in 2009, that she had a bad reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine, which resulted in headaches, blurred vision, slurred speech, and what she believed to be a stroke. Later, during a visit back to Brisbane, she would tell friends that her brain cancer was caused by the vaccine. By then there was a little shaved patch on the side of her head. But there was no scar.

It was on internet forums and chat rooms that the fantasy world which Belle Gibson created started to take hold. She had grown up in a generation that documents their lives online — a world where information and misinformation, real news and fake news, are sometimes impossible to distinguish — and the digital footprints she left behind cannot be erased. That said, tracing the real life of Gibson has not been easy. There are whole periods, many months at a time, where there is no record of her at all.

What is known is that Gibson was born in Launceston, Tasmania, on 8 October 1991. Her mother, Natalie Dal Bello, is a divorcee from Melbourne who moved around the south-eastern states of Australia before settling in Adelaide, and remarrying in 2012. Gibson’s father is unknown. Natalie has described him as a ‘sperm donor’. According to Gibson’s grandmother, he was a nice young man from Tasmania. Gibson has an older brother. She also has half-siblings, but all our attempts to talk to them have been met with silence.

Gibson did not inherit her father’s name. She was born Annabelle Smillie, after her mother’s side, before Natalie changed their surname by deed poll. Gibson’s maternal grandfather was a book buyer for a department store. Her great grandfather, a Scottish immigrant, was a senior constable in Victoria Police who, throughout his career, was commended for his courage and zeal. When Gibson was young, Natalie uprooted the family, and moved interstate. They had stints in Queensland, living in public housing in Strathpine, north of Brisbane, and on the coast, in Maroochydore, before finally settling in Wynnum when Gibson was 11 years old.

Since leaving Wynnum, Gibson has never stayed in one place for very long. She is estranged from her family, and has scant few long-term friends. But the ones she has kept are loyal to her. The father of Gibson’s child has remained silent, and her current partner, the few times he spoke to us, chose his words very carefully. When everything began to unravel, in March 2015, just two people came to Gibson’s defence. One, at first, believed in her. ‘She was an amazing friend to me when my younger brother passed away from cancer,’ the friend wrote to us. ‘She is one of the most authentic people I have ever met.’ When we contacted this person later, for this book, she told us she wanted nothing to do with it: ‘These comments [were] before everything came to a head.’ The other person who came out in defence of Gibson was an old school friend. She had known Gibson since they were 13 years old. ‘I can assure you, her credibility is strong,’ she said. ‘I have known her through her childbirth, cancer diagnosis, and treatment, and the birth of The Whole Pantry app. She has been dealt a rough hand and has since been able to change that potential victim energy into a positive healing message.’ She did not want to talk further.

Countless more people, however, came forward to describe Belle Gibson as a liar and a manipulator. Not a single member of Gibson’s family came to her defence. Most of the people who knew Belle Gibson as the cancer survivor and app developer refuse to talk about her. The one common thread among the people she grew up with, the entourage that followed her around when times were good, and the multinational companies that partnered with her, is that none of them now wants to be associated with her or The Whole Pantry in any way. In response to questions, they either said nothing at all, pleaded to be left out of the stories, or threatened legal action.

Most of the then glowing endorsements of Gibson from other young wellness entrepreneurs have vanished, now deleted from the internet. Even some of the uncritical media coverage has disappeared. Gibson herself scrubbed every one of her social-media profiles clean — purging thousands of personal and business-related posts, and even more comments — in a matter of days.

But some things cannot be so easily deleted. In her book, Gibson says she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in June 2009, when she was aged 20 (she was, in fact, only 17 years old in June 2009):

I had known for a while that something didn’t feel right, but when I saw the doctor, he told me to ignore what I was experiencing and to trial antidepressants. I tried them but they made no difference, so I went off them and went back to the doctor. I told him, ‘I’m having trouble reading and seeing; sometimes walking is hard and remembering has become difficult.’ All he said was, ‘You work too hard, you’re looking at a computer all day and you’re socially isolated. Let’s get your eyes tested and start that medication I gave you again.’ At this point I could have taken control of my own life and got a second opinion, but instead of listening to my body and trusting my intuition, I put my faith in one ‘professional.’ I felt like I had hit a brick wall.

Soon afterwards I had a stroke at work — I will never forget sitting alone in the doctor’s office three weeks later, waiting for my test results. He called me in and said ‘You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops.’ I remember a suffocating, choking feeling and then not much else.

Gibson later claimed that the doctor who diagnosed her in 2009 was a man named Mark Johns, whom she met at a film screening in Perth. She said he was a neurologist and immunologist from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, who treated her initially in her share house in Perth and then later, during 2010 and 2011, in Melbourne. She said she was tested with ‘electronic diagnosis equipment’, a machine she described as an ‘old-fashioned hard-drive with lights and metal sheets that you sat on’. She said the treatment, which she believed to be radiotherapy, was administered weekly at first, and then on a continuously intermittent basis for at least 18 months. She also claims that Mark gave her the oral chemotherapy drug Temodal. No supporting documentation proving Dr Mark Johns exists has ever been found. There is no record of him being employed by Peter Mac, or registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.

Soon after Gibson said she was diagnosed, she packed up and left Perth. She claimed she moved to Melbourne to be closer to her doctor. But her grandmother believes she went to Adelaide first, and her mother says she flew back across the country, east, to Port Macquarie, on the coast of New South Wales.

As she boarded her flight out of Perth, Gibson posted a photo online looking out through the window over the wing of the aircraft and into the clouds. ‘For all you pretty people missing my not so pretty face,’ Gibson wrote. Wherever she was going, what is certain is that, by late 2009, Gibson was 18 years old, pregnant, and a long way from home.