Belle Gibson on 60 Minutes: no remorse and the lies kept coming | Australian television

Belle Gibson on 60 Minutes: no remorse and the lies kept coming

Despite Tara Brown’s tough questioning, disgraced wellness blogger refuses to confirm her age and claims finding out she’d never had cancer was ‘traumatising’

The disgraced wellness blogger Belle Gibson has insisted she did not try to “get away with anything”, despite having deceived thousands of online followers into believing she had terminal brain cancer.

In an interview with Tara Brown for 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Gibson, 23, claimed it was she who was the victim after her lies were exposed and her wellness empire fell apart.

Looking by turns blank and confused – though hardly remorseful – Gibson failed to give coherent responses to Brown about her age and her past throughout the interview, despite being confronted with irrefutable evidence of the facts.

“I didn’t trade in on my story or in other peoples lives,” Gibson insisted. “I’m not trying to get away with anything.”

Since the Australian revealed this year that Gibson had never had cancer, and Fairfax reported she had never delivered thousands of dollars worth of promised charity donations on the back of funds raised by her book and app, Gibson has been in hiding.

The only interview she granted in the wake of the scandal was with Women’s Weekly in April, which shed frustratingly little light on why she had lied about being sick.

People living with cancer and their relatives were angered at Gibson’s appearance on 60 Minutes and reports that she would be paid for the interview. 60 Minutes has refused to confirm whether that was the case.

But if Gibson expected a sympathetic ear in Brown, she was to be sorely disappointed. Brown consistently challenged Gibson throughout the interview to stop wavering and “just be honest”.

The program revealed that in 2011 Gibson underwent a brain scan at the Alfred hospital in Melbourne which showed she was perfectly healthy.

Gibson maintains she believed she had cancer until then – she claims she was wrongly diagnosed in 2009 by a German alternative medicine practitioner – but she did not come clean after receiving the results of the scan.

Instead, she went on two years later to launch The Whole Pantry mobile phone wellness app and a cookbook of the same name, in which she claimed she had successfully treated terminal brain cancer by shunning radiation and chemotherapy and turning to a healthy diet.

She also falsely claimed she had had two heart operations, her heart had stopped on the operating table, and she had had cancer of the blood, uterus and spleen.

Yet she told Brown she was as much of a victim as those who believed her. Discovering she did not have terminal brain cancer had been traumatic, she told Brown.

“Once I received the definite, ‘No, you do not have cancer,’ that was something I had to come to terms with and it was really traumatising and I was feeling a huge amount of grief,” she said.

“What, that you didn’t have cancer?” Brown asked.

“No, that I had been lied to, that I felt like I had been taken for a ride,” Gibson said.

She insisted that once she was “strong enough” she had planned to reveal to her large following that she was well and had never been sick. But the media had got to her first, she said.

Like the interview with Women’s Weekly, the 60 Minutes interview revealed little about Gibson’s past or what motivated her to lie. It was television at its most frustrating rather than compelling.

Throughout, Gibson claimed she had simply been living her truth. “I lived for years with the fear that I was dying and I’m still coming to terms with [the fact] I can take that off my shoulders now,” she told Brown.

Brown asked Gibson if she understood she may have been responsible for cancer patients shunning their medical treatment to instead follow her diet and wellness regime. “Some want you to go to jail,” Brown said.

“I’m on the receiving end of all that, Tara,” Gibson replied. “I was not an expert in anyone else’s health.”

Brown told Gibson she had appealed to “incredibly vulnerable” people and therefore had a responsibility to “make sure your story is right”.

“It’s not easy for me to be here,” Gibson responded.

At another point in the interview, she said she had “lost everything”.

Perhaps the extent of Gibson’s confused story was revealed most profoundly when Brown asked her a simple question; her age. Birth records show Gibson is 23.

“I’ve always been raised as being currently a 26-year-old,” Gibson said, adding that she had two birth certificates and had changed her name four times.

Brown responded: “This is a really, really simple question. How old are you?” to which Gibson replied: “That’s probably a question we’ll have to keep digging for.”

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