Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, review: sociopath or fame-hungry liar? Why Belle Gibson faked cancer

Belle Gibson leaves Melbourne’s Federal Court in 2019 – AAP Image/David Crosling/ITV

Everyone on Instagram is a con artist to some degree. All those curated images selling the lie of a perfect lifestyle. Sitting in a pizza restaurant in Rome recently, I watched a succession of women posing outside, smartphones held aloft to capture them at just the right angle, adopting an expression of happiness until the camera clicked. Then they would drop the smile as they fretted over the shots, and do retakes. It looked so miserable.

Why this spot? Well, there was an Insta-friendly wall of wisteria. And the restaurant is apparently a favourite of Gwyneth Paltrow’s, if you believe that Gwyneth Paltrow eats pizza.

Instagram’s Worst Con Artist (ITV1), though, took the artifice to a new level. Gob-smacking levels of fraud, in fact. Belle Gibson was an Australian blogger who claimed that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. A doctor had given her weeks to live, she said.

And yet here she was several years later, the picture of health, claiming that a diet of “wellness” had prolonged her life after she rejected medical treatment. Sign up to the app, buy the cookbook, and you too could reap these results. Gibson amassed a huge number of followers, many of them living with cancer and desperate for hope.

Corporations saw dollar signs: there were deals with Penguin and with Apple, the latter flying Gibson out to California and selecting her app, The Whole Pantry, for inclusion on the Apple Watch. But everything was a lie and it all unravelled in 2015, when journalists investigated the story.

Why a documentary nine years on? Well, it’s a chance to get stuck into a story of astonishing brazenness. Contributors include the reporters who investigated Gibson, former friends and estranged family members. The pièce de résistance, though, is a riveting interview conducted in 2015 – only extracts included here – in which Australian presenter Tara Brown takes Gibson apart. But neither that interview, nor this two-parter, explains Gibson’s motivation. Is she a sociopath, a cold-hearted con artist, mentally unwell? Or all three? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

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