Original subtitles

[violin music playing]

[police sirens wailing in the distance]

I was sitting at my desk at The Australian and I'm sure

my jaw dropped open when I found it.

And that's when I realized if it's a scam,

it's a really big scam.

She had hundreds of thousands of followers all around the world.

This girl has this deadly brain cancer and she's healing herself.

She was curing her cancer using natural foods and a natural lifestyle.

The Whole Pantry is the world's first health, wellness and lifestyle app.

She found herself suddenly the author of probably the most successful app

that the country had produced.

[Clair] Belle got a book deal.

Penguin knew this book was going to be a huge success

so they were going to launch it worldwide.

What was it about her?

She just had this presence, had this way of writing that really drew you in.

Wow. I don't know if I want to be this woman or be this woman's best friend.

She was going to turn the world onto this natural way of living.

The growth of her fame and followers was just huge.

-Belle Gibson. -The courageous Belle Gibson.

-Belle Gibson. -Belle.

-Belle. -Belle.

-Belle. -Belle.

At no point did anybody go, "But hang on is the story true?"

The story just set off a firestorm.

Belle is my baby sister.

If she did have cancer, why wasn't I informed about it?

The things that I knew about her were just all crumbling.

I was gobsmacked.

[Clair] People were appalled and people hated her.

Every journalist in the country was hot on this story.

Isn't it about time that the truth came out?

I started to suspect that she was committing charity fraud.

How can we believe anything you say now?

What happened? How did she get there? What's in her world that made her do it?

There is no reason for me to lie.

I think she hurt a lot of people a lot of families.

And some of them want you to go to jail.

Did people die?

Belle Gibson has broken down in tears while being grilled in court.

They couldn't really care what she was telling the truth about,

what she wasn't telling the truth about,

and the whole story, it didn't add up.

There were so many holes.

But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

He said to me that I had a stage 4 brain tumor

and that I had approximately four months to live.

Nobody wants to live with the fear of a terminal illness or dying.

My name is Richard Guilliatt. I'm a journalist from Australia

and in 2014 I was a staff writer at The Australian newspaper.

My wife had been diagnosed with cancer

and we had experienced how bewildering and frightening that can be.

Once you went onto Google and started researching that stuff,

you ended up in this kind of bewildering conflicting information zone

and I just remember that time as being extremely confusing and confronting.

I kept researching and I stumbled upon a discussion online about Belle Gibson.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I hadn't heard of Belle Gibson.

I was not a regular Instagram user and I went onto her page

and she had a malignant brain tumor that she was said to have had for

about five years, maybe a bit longer.

And she was told that she had six weeks to live

and she had some chemotherapy and it had made her terribly sick

and she decided to abandon the treatment

and she'd adopted this wellness and natural living lifestyle.

So she was not only curing herself of cancer but she was actually

just a model of mental and physical well-being.

I just looked at this and was just completely intrigued because

a malignant brain tumor is… medically it's very very difficult to treat.

It's usually-- a highly malignant brain tumor is a death sentence.

[ominous music]

When I first discovered Healing Belle on Instagram,

she was talking about how she had had brain cancer and things like that and…

immediately I was like,

"Cancer? [scoffs]

I have cancer." [chuckles]

I didn't know any other 19-year-olds that had cancer and felt like they were dying

for most of their teenage years.

And the only people I really saw in the hospital were really, like, older people.

So I felt really isolated in my journey,

so I started to turn to social media to really find, like,

my community.

Or I guess I just wanted…

I wanted to be heard and I wanted support.

So I was just looking for someone to tell me what I was going through was normal.

I think that social media

can honestly be as addictive

as cocaine or crack

because I was just so sucked into Belle's life.

I just thought she was so courageous and inspiring and…

immediately was just like, wow. I don't know if I want to be this woman

or be this woman's best friend.

We had tapped into a really beautiful network of people on our

online social media communities and what we kept finding was

those in our community who were feeling very unsupported and uninspired as well

but I feel I need to be doing more, what can I be doing?

So in 2013, Belle Gibson was having a huge impact on audiences.

She understood really well how to build a personal brand.

She was ahead of the game when it comes to being able to productize an audience

and turn that into revenue for a business.

That was really rare back then

and she really did it on her own.

Belle Gibson blew up overnight. It was surreal.

It's not that different to someone that becomes a celebrity overnight.

Like, suddenly you've got

a million people watching a piece of content that you create.

Um, that's madness.

The Whole Pantry is the world's first health, wellness and lifestyle app.

We fuse together whole food recipe collection,

health, wellness and lifestyle guides.

[producer] And speak.

I probably signed up as one of the first.

It was probably the first time that there was something that was all in one place

I was in the dessert section where I was often going.

When they told me I had cancer it was, um…

It was a complete, complete shock

feeling like you've landed in a foreign land.

The cancer community, one that you'd never want a membership to be part of.

You never want an invite in but once you are it's just full of super generous,

kind, thoughtful people.

The Whole Pantry app, something to download to support a chick going

through terminal brain cancer. So we wanted to see her succeed.

I-- I didn't have much money at the time but I bought her app.

It was designed really beautifully and all the food looked amazing.

There was nothing like that before.

Very like greens and blues and browns really like earthy tones.

[laughs] Um, the food photos were beautiful.

So she actually forged a bit of a path, um,

and it would have been really challenging to do back then

to turn your media value on social into a product based business

uh, mind you a highly successful product based business

in the health and wellness space.

It was nicely done. It was a good app.

I'm really honest about my journey with my health

and that opened up everyone else's honesty and everyone else's stories.

[Bella] Seeing Belle Gibson looking so good and so happy and healthy.

I started really comparing my life with hers.

It really started to feed into my insecurities about the way I looked.

I was so devastated about my face and my body.

In the middle of the radiotherapy I started fake tanning.

It took so much energy to put fake tan on my body

but I was like I can't go to-- I can't go to the hospital without a fake tan.

I got hair extensions to try and cover all my baldness because I just…

I just didn't want anyone to know that I was that sick.

I guess there was kind of that ideology that it's the medicine

that makes you look sick.

And she's got cancer but she looks so good because she fuels her body

with this amazing food,

and I look like shit because I went down the modern medicine route.

I tried to discuss with my parents about letting go of

the conventional medicine side of things and exploring alternative medicine

and I used Belle Gibson as an example, I was like, "Look at this woman.

Look how healthy she is. She's got brain cancer."

So I started to just try and incorporate the alternative medicine side of things

into my life as much as I could.

Green smoothies, juices.

You know, organic superfoods, coconut water, like all that kind of stuff.

I totally changed my diet. Um, I started meditating.

I started doing yoga, acupuncture, anything, anything.

I wanted to be cured and I wanted to be healthy again.

I wanted to just be like… like she was, I guess.

I just put her on such a pedestal.

I… I just thought she was amazing.

[phones ringing]

[Richard] She had cultivated an enormous following.

I mean there were just thousands of people

primarily young women and they were kind of talking about her

in this most effusive way,

that she was this sort of angel who had come to earth

and that she was this brave fighter and heroic survivor of cancer.

I-- I just went into my editor and I said, "Have you heard of Belle Gibson?"

I-- I can't see how this story is-- is true.

I just cannot see how this can be possible

and I wanted to look into it.

-Do you want me to say the whole thing? -[producer] Yeah.

Okay. [laughs]

We were in similar circles of friends and acquaintances and

a friendship kind of just naturally-- just formed,

and Belle invited me to the formal launch of her app

which had already been out for a few months.

This event was also a fundraiser raising money for charities.

People were posting about it on social media.

Belle at the event was in this designer white dress.

She was barefoot.

She looked really well.

She seemed happy and engaging with everyone.

She seemed to always be able to find a way to…

to really understand other people's hardships

and connect with people on a deeper level.

[indistinct chatter]

This is so weird being on this side of the camera.

I'm Clair Weaver, I'm a journalist. I'm from Sydney.

I joined the Women's Weekly in around 2013.

I was writing features about all kinds of things.

An incredible story, this girl has this deadly brain cancer

and she's healing herself.

Belle had come up with this Whole Pantry app.

She would donate proceeds or profit to chosen charities

whether it was a family with a child with brain cancer,

or people in Africa or whatever the chosen charity was.

We really believed that we're changing people's lives

and we have a giving backend of the company as well with your app download

transfers into community donation.

So that's everything for funding,

medical support for children that are living with cancer to building schools in…

in Sierra Leone.

We're really committed to the overall picture

rather than just a segmented approach.

[Bella] The appeal for everyone was that it was about the community,

it wasn't about her profiting.

That helped her image as a philanthropist

as well as being this beautiful wellness warrior.

She was getting media interviews

and the growth of her fame and followers was just huge.

So, in what was probably natural progression, Belle got a book deal.

Penguin could see that Belle had this product, The Whole Pantry.

It was selling, it was resonating.

A cook book is obviously going to be successful.

She got an advance of $132,500, which is huge.

Especially for a first book by an unproven author.

And it was to write this book with an emphasis on wellness,

on avoiding allergens and embracing whole foods in your diet

with advice about how to live healthier.

Suddenly, Belle hit the mainstream.

It wasn't just the young wellness warrior types.

Suddenly, she was everywhere.

She was on national television.

Belle Gibson is a mother, a business woman and she's also living with brain cancer.

[Chanelle] Belle was living in a million dollar house on the beach,

in a quiet and affluent suburb in Melbourne.

She was flying first class on international trips

to Silicone Valley, working with Apple.

Belle was increasingly getting recognition.

Apple awarded The Whole Pantry the best Food and Drink App in 2013

so she was getting more followers, more popularity and more credibility

as she grew.

She really looked the picture of health.

In fact in one of the TV interviews she did, the interviewer says…

For a person living with brain cancer you look incredibly healthy.

[Clair] She was in women's magazines.

She had a presence and people had begun to hear about her story.

So she'd… she'd hit the big time.

It was five years ago I was diagnosed with terminal cancer

and…

we launched The Whole Pantry a year ago.

I remember Belle always being quite busy.

She was presenting a successful entrepreneur jet setting lifestyle.

But also she's battling this terminal illness at the same time.

Belle's son's birthday was inside Belle's house

and it was quite a close knit group that was there.

Just her inner-circle and her friends.

There was kids playing out on the patio.

The adults were mingling.

It was pretty cute.

[laughter]

The party was wrapping up. People were starting to leave

and…

Belle just fell to the ground flat and started convulsing.

There was saliva coming out of her mouth and she was having a seizure.

Belle's son was very aware his mother was on the ground

having a violent seizure.

I said, "We need to call an ambulance," and as soon as I said that,

Belle kind of came out of the seizure and said,

"No, no, I don't want Western medicine involved," 'cause

she was healing herself naturally.

I haven't witnessed someone have a seizure in front of me before

but my initial reaction was kind of confused.

Like she recovered quite quickly from something that was

happening so violently and aggressively to her body.

When I left the party I…

I felt really sick in my stomach

about what I had just seen.

This was the point where red flags really started to pop up for me.

[Clair] So then Belle shared devastating news with her followers.

[Bella] "With frustration and ache in my heart…"

[Clair] "…my beautiful game-changing community it hurts…"

[Chanelle] "…me to find space tonight to let you all know…"

[Bella] "…with love and strength that I've been diagnosed with a third…"

[Clair] "… and fourth cancer. One is secondary…"

"and the other is primary.

I have cancer in my blood…"

"…spleen, brain…"

"…uterus and liver."

"I'm hurting."

[Chanelle] "Please don't carry my pain."

I think I just was completely shocked.

[Bella] I guess everyone sort of felt like she was…

you know, dying now.

[Clair] I remember talking to one of her friends

and how devastated they all were

because up until that point they thought she'd been doing so well staving it off.

I do remember just feeling for her. My heart going out to her.

[Clair] She had an outpouring of love and support from her followers

who were really on this journey with her all the way.

Floods and floods of comments from people. Everyone was…

devastated.

[Chanelle] I was feeling really confused

feeling really conflicted about what I was feeling.

Kind of in my gut and in my intuition that something…

didn't feel right.

She announces to the world that her brain cancer has

progressed to stage 4 and it's now all through her body.

And I found out about this

through the post that she posted on Instagram.

So yeah, this time I was someone close to her and

this is how I learned of this new news.

At this point, I started to question everything.

I started to go over things in my mind,

different things she had told me.

Things I had witnessed.

She always looked so well and she never looked sick.

So, Belle was very passionate about wellness,

but then there would be times where

I noticed her and another friend went to a solarium

to do tanning and another time we went out to a night club and

she was ordering shots and lots of drinks and drinking quite excessively.

You know those weren't things that she shared with her online community.

Things just didn't add up for me.

-[Kate] You know out of Game of Thrones? -[producer] Yeah.

Yeah. They say I'm the mother of dragons. [laughs]

My name's Kate Drummond.

I'm the director of neurosurgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

I'm a neurosurgeon specializing in management of brain tumors.

There are hundreds of different kinds of brain tumors of various seriousness

either because of their position

or because of how fast they're growing or because they're cancerous.

The most common type of brain cancer is something called a glioblastoma.

That's what we call a grade 4 tumor. That's the worst grade of malignancy.

The fastest growing cancer.

The treatments are basically surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy,

and then sometimes there's some experimental or clinical trial options.

But although those--

those three treatments or four treatments certainly prolong a patient's life

none of them are curative.

All will eventually grow and be fatal.

[Chanelle] That night, I approached one of our mutual friends

and told them that I didn't believe Belle was telling the truth.

I didn't believe she was sick

and he started to make his own assumptions,

and we decided to drive to her house that night,

unannounced, and confront her.

When we arrived, she came to the door,

and she wasn't as warm as she usually was,

and Belle looked really confused.

I cut to the chase and just straight out said to her,

"Are you sick?"

She responded, "Of course I am."

She seemed really kind of bewildered as to why we were coming to her with this.

And I…

implored her to go get medical documents, papers, scans,

any type of medical evidence

that she would have in her house,

and she responded that she didn't like to hold on to any of that…

kind of paper work because it's negative energy.

I started to get pretty frustrated

and I said, "What hospital did you go to to get that diagnosis?"

She said that she didn't go to a hospital, that a doctor came to her house.

And I said, "What's the doctor's name?"

And she responded, "Doctor Phil."

And I said, "Where is Doctor Phil?"

And she said that he had gone to ground

and his colleagues didn't know where he had gone but

he had all of a sudden disappeared.

She was very defensive.

She said that I was interrogating her

and she then started to say she felt really sick.

When we left her place, she maintained that she had cancer.

She maintained everything was true.

The more she spoke, the more it confirmed it was all a lie.

I was angry and extremely frustrated.

Her book launch was the following night and that was it.

It was going to be on the shelves everywhere.

She was profiting…

from a web of lies that she was spinning by targeting vulnerable people

and sick people.

And…

it just made my blood boil and it all added up at that point.

In my opinion, it was just strategy.

It was just a fucking business strategy.

I guess, um, when you know Belle started rising to fame,

it was something that we were all really proud of,

because she'd been a part of our community and now the whole world knows her.

When the book first came out a while lot of us we went out and bought the book

I've always loved cooking and I think I really leaned into

this idea of like, you know, healing yourself through whole raw foods and…

During my treatment, one the things that I taught myself to love doing [laughs wryly]

was, uh, green juices.

Um, so through treatment I would have probably a green juice every day.

The cashew cheese is good too [laughs].

Cashew cheese.

[producer] What's cashew cheese?

It's like a cheese made out of cashews but it actually tastes like cheese

Oh, I used to make beetroot soup.

This is one that I made.

"Beetroot soup cleanses your liver,

purifying your blood and major organs from environmental toxins.

It reduces inflammation and improves skin and muscle health."

It also says here, "For those who don't drink alcohol, like me."

This is where brand Belle Gibson goes global.

Penguin knew this book was going to be a huge success

so they weren't just launching it in Australia.

They were going to launch it worldwide, it was going to go to the UK, the US.

It was going to be a huge deal,

and so here's Belle who started out just with her little blog suddenly

about to hit the big time worldwide.

[Richard] The book contained little bits of information about her past

and I had the picture that she'd built up in the media

but I really had nothing concrete about who her friends were,

or any biographical information about her

like who which school she went to, who her parents were.

You couldn't find any of that, really.

And her own interviews about it were kind of vague, you know.

And so I thought I've got to meet this woman and record her account of herself.

And also, if possible,

fill in some of the missing backstory about

who her parents were, or where she was from.

All of which was kind of quite mysterious.

[Chanelle] I went to her book launch.

It was really hard to be there and see everyone praising her,

in awe of her,

and I felt like she was misleading people in such a serious nature

that they were making decisions about life threatening illnesses,

to stop seeking chemo or radiation,

to eat fruit and vegetables.

I said to her like, "Are you ready to come forward?"

And she basically…

got really aggressive with me. Basically told me to fuck off.

Uh, there's an acknowledgment in the back…

uh, to me.

It says, "You were there from the beginning and I'll always remember that.

Go chase your dreams now. It's time for me to have your back."

But…

[producer] What do you think she meant by that?

I don't know. Maybe…

she was hoping I would have hers…

but I didn't.

At that point that's where the friendship ended.

I had to see how I could unravel what she was doing.

People were incredibly caught up in the idea that this--

this beautiful, sensitive young woman who had a small child

was battling these terrible illnesses.

But at the same time was spreading this gospel of wellness

and was telling people that there were these alternatives to cancer,

you know, the illness that nearly all of us fear the most.

She looked fantastic, you know?

Like, the honey blonde hair and the perfect teeth

and the sculpted brows and, you know,

everything I knew about particularly a malignant brain tumor

told you that this was just-- it was just not possible.

First thing I did was ring around a bunch of cancer specialists

and I just outlined the scenario, you know, what do you think of this?

[Emily] "I have been healing a severe malignant brain cancer

for the past few years

with natural medicine, Gerson therapy, and food.

It's working for me and I am grateful to be here

sharing this journey with over 70,000 people worldwide."

Well, nothing's impossible. It's extremely unlikely.

I've never-- I've never seen it happen.

[Bella] "I've been diagnosed with a third and fourth cancer.

One is secondary. The other is primary.

I have cancer in my blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver.

I'm hurting."

It's extremely, extremely uncommon.

And the-- the patient would be moribund.

Like… So…

There are case reports where brain cancer gets out and--

and goes to other parts of the body.

As in it is so rare that someone writes it in a journal somewhere.

But…

I haven't-- I've never seen brain cancer in the spleen.

That-- that's an unusual place for cancer to go in the first place, um…

Uterus, never seen it.

Um, it just doesn't make any sense.

But if a patient had brain cancer that was that widespread,

they are not walking and talking.

[Richard] She had a little bit of conventional treatment at the beginning

and all she's done since then is drink juices and give herself enemas,

and eat organic food and they all said--

Healthy food doesn't cure cancer.

I've got to sort of dig into this. If this is a scam,

she had a deal with Apple computers. She had a deal with Penguin books

and she had a massive following which she was monetizing online,

and so if it was a scam it was, like, a big scam.

But I just thought I need to get her on tape saying what she's claiming,

and so I contacted her and tried to get an interview.

I just didn't hear anything back. You know there was just this silence.

But it turns out that Belle Gibson was overseas

We've been working here in total secrecy for the last 3 or 4 weeks,

and it's been a whirlwind, and that's also, you know,

we're really emotional and proud about it and…

I have a feeling now that Australia's waking up that… they're spotting it.

The text messages and, and the Instagram comments,

and the tweets are coming in saying, "Did we just spot your icon

on the new Apple Watch?"

And you did and it's exciting.

Apple invited her in for a meeting and they proposed that her app

should become one of the first apps on the soon to be released Apple Watch.

We have one more thing.

[crowd cheers]

So The Whole Pantry was to be preloaded onto the Apple Watch.

So this is huge, this is worldwide.

[Belle] It was daunting but if there was any company we were going to jump for,

it was going to be Apple because they've supported us for so long

We had the support of the best engineers and designers

in the world at our fingertips and they've done a very great job.

It just shows how successful she was becoming.

Cosmo Magazine gave her the Fun Fearless Female award.

Belle's winning awards. Her star is continuing to rise.

Her business is growing.

The more time she has to spread misinformation

the more people that are reached, that are potentially vulnerable

and making life changing decisions based on her story.

I started to look for other ways to see what steps I could take to intervene

in the lies that she was spreading so I went to

a journalist, a lawyer, the police, with this story,

and I explained who Belle was and that she was faking cancer

and essentially running a fraud.

And they all told me I was making very serious allegations of slander

and defamation against this poor, young, sick woman,

who's a single mom.

At this point I was feeling like I had exhausted a lot of options.

You know, I'd gone to so many different avenues to try and

stop her and people won't believe me.

[Richard] There was this difficulty getting in touch with her and

this sort of reluctance to meet me face to face, you know.

So in mid-February 2015, she finally agrees to meet me

and she says, let's meet at this café called Pillar of Salt,

which I look back on and think, you know it was a strange choice because

it's named after a woman who has offended God and was struck down.

I went to this café.

I got there early and I was waiting for her to turn up and…

I was not going to challenge her.

I was going to get her on the record about her story and about her cancer claims.

That was my primary objective.

I'm waiting. She's late and so, you know, there was a sort of thing of, like,

is she going to turn up?

She did turn up and she was very flustered and she explained that--

[Belle] I'm good. I'm just a bit shaken up by the fact that I just had an accident.

-So I'm a bit all over the place. -[Richard] Right.

-[Belle] Sorry. -I… I could tell

it was going to be very difficult to pin her down to specifics once we got to

the nitty gritty of the interview.

But I was kind of prepared to just roll with that.

At a certain point I asked her about the… the brain tumor

and I said look, now as I understand it,

you know, you were diagnosed about five years ago by a doctor in Perth.

[Belle] I'd been given a prognosis of four months.

She confirmed all of that and said that--

[Belle] I've been on a rollercoaster of a journey.

I know that it's time to figure out exactly where I stand.

I'm sort of thinking like, where's this going, you-- you know?

Like what-- what's-- it was like she was leading to something that I did…

I just couldn't work out where she was going with this but I sort of just let it…

let it flow.

[Belle] I've gone through some difficult relationships with doctors my whole life.

You know, there are people in my family just that-- just are angry

at that team that…

-had lead me astray. -[Richard] Yeah.

Well, and-- and it was at this point that she…

she started to really obfuscate.

I mean, it just became very slippery.

[Richard] So from what you're saying, it seems that they lead you astray?

[Belle] No. I still… for the main person that was leading this team,

I still respect.

[Richard] Um, I think I'd read that you also were diagnosed

with other secondary cancers elsewhere then, or…?

[Belle] That is what this highly recommended doctor

had diagnosed me with and then disappeared.

The doctor who'd…

diagnosed those cancers

had kind of abandoned her and…

she hadn't been able to contact him for quite some time.

[Belle] It's hard. It's hard to respect someone who does something that

-has no moral or ethic backbone to it. -[Richard] Right.

[Belle] And he's not entirely incorrect but I know that he's not

entirely correct either. I'm still waiting

-to know where I stand. -[Richard] Right. Right.

Are you saying that you now have doubts about the diagnosis

of these four cancers?

[Belle] I would say that it was more of a… a misdiagnosis than completely

uh, fictional.

Christ Almighty, Belle. You're kidding, you know. Like, what?

You actually don't have cancer?

This was just the last thing I expected.

After I left the interview I got in my car and I just called my editor straight away

and I said, like, "You are not going to believe this.

But, like, Belle Gibson just recanted on-- on the record."

She's basically saying she can't back up her cancer claims.

I was halfway or maybe three quarters of the way through writing this article

and suddenly this story appeared in a rival newspaper The Age down in Melbourne

and it said that Belle Gibson had held these charity fundraising events

and the charities had not received the money.

[Chanelle] Finally, a journalist from The Age phoned me and…

began telling him everything that I knew. The little details that didn't add up.

We don't have any evidence, especially medical evidence

stating that she doesn't have cancer, but

the journalists, they started to suspect that her charity claims

were also fraudulent.

They then confirmed with the other charities that

they had not received any donations either so then we knew we had the story

and we knew once that broke that the rest would unravel.

It was spreading really quickly. It became a news story.

Just as it was published I sent a text message to Belle

and…

I wrote, "You should check the news.

Dot dot dot. But you've got this, right?"

And…

was just kind of my last fuck you to her.

Belle responded by letting the journalist know

she was really busy and that she just had cash flow problems,

so she started to pay some of these charities a bit of money,

and she claimed it was a misunderstanding.

I messaged Belle once I heard that the news had broke because if it's not true,

then I want to be a place that she can get support, you know?

And have someone that's on her side.

[Clair] Belle had developed this tribe of people who were really loyal to her

and they stood by her. They were like, you know, who are these journalists

trying to take her down?

You know, they were very protective and they defended her and so

it seemed, you know, that she was going to continue in a way,

it wasn't going to be this-- this big problem.

[Richard] For me, it meant that,

hell, there's another journalist who's sniffing around this story

and I've got to get my story out right now like there's no more delays.

We just have to publish tomorrow.

I kind of laid out what I had.

So I had her saying, on the record,

that she may have been misdiagnosed and that she now had a new medical team

who were trying to work out whether her cancers were malignant or not,

which completely contradicted everything she had been saying up to that point.

So I decided to do some deep dives into Google to try and find

her pre Whole Pantry history.

That's when I found stuff that just floored me.

That's when I realized that there was a whole history to this person

that had been sort of buried.

My jaw dropped open when I found it.

So my story ran on the front page of The Australian the next day.

Her house of cards was about to come crashing down.

She was public enemy number one.

You're 23, right? Well, actually, how old are you?

Belle is my baby sister.

If she did have cancer, why wasn't I informed about it?

The things that I knew about her had all of a sudden were just all crumbling.

There's a fundamental problem here with her and the truth.

Will you accept that your reality does not actually match reality?

I will always love her but I will never forgive her.

Would you accept that you're a pathological liar?

No.

[closing theme playing]