DISGRACED wellness blogger Belle Gibson has admitted she deceived her followers, friends and family about having cancer and curing her illness with healthy eating and natural therapies.

The 23-year-old was accused of fabricating her terminal brain cancer and making a profit from her story via her wellness app, The Whole Pantry.

Last month it was revealed Gibson failed to donate $300,000 from the sales of her app to charity as promised and her friends had started to question the legitimacy of her diagnosis. Earlier this month, Victoria Police said they would not pursue criminal charges against Gibson.

Speaking out about the controversy in an exclusive interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly, Gibson was asked outright if she has, or has ever had cancer.

“No. None of it’s true,” she confessed.

“I am still jumping between what I think I know and what is reality. I have lived it and I’m not really there yet,” she said.

The Weekly speculates that Gibson suffers from a psychological condition called factitious disorder or Munchausen syndrome (see below for an explainer) — where sufferers feign disease or illness to gain attention.

Gibson fails to explain in detail how and why she lied about her condition.

“I think my life has just got so many complexities around it and within it, that it’s just easier to assume [I’m lying],” she said.

“If I don’t have an answer, then I will sort of theorise it myself and come up with one. I think that’s an easy thing to often revert to if you don’t know what the answer is.”

Gibson believes her “troubled” childhood may have led her to lie about her condition.

The young mother — she has a 4-year-old son called Olivier — claims she was forced to take care of herself from the age of five.

media_camera Belle Gibson won Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Fun Fearless Female award for social media.

“When I started school, my mum went, ‘My daughter is grown up now’. All of a sudden I was walking to school on my own, making school lunches and cleaning the house every day.

“It was my responsibility to do grocery shopping, do the washing, arrange medical appointments and pick up my brother. I didn’t have any toys.” Gibson is now estranged from her mother and would not provide The Weekly with her first name or contact details.

Gibson is still with her partner Clive Rothwell, who declined to be interviewed by The Weekly. She says Rothwell is “supportive, but obviously very devastated” by her betrayal.

“He’s been very stern, along the lines of, ‘I just want you to acknowledge where you’ve f***ed up and try not to smooth over that,” she said.

The recent controversy has put Gibson in a difficult financial position. Penguin Australia has stopped supplying her book and Apple have dropped her app.

She has returned her rental car and will soon move out of her beachside home. Accountants have been instructed to give any leftover funds to the charities Gibson pledged money to.

Gibson says the public backlash against her has been “horrible”.

“In the last two years I have worked every single day living and raising up an online community of people who supported each other ... I understand the confusion and the suspicion, but I also know that people need to draw a line in the sand where they still treat someone with some level of respect or humility — and I have not been receiving that.”

But Gibson says she doesn’t want forgiveness.

media_camera Belle Gibson and partner Clive Rothwell and son Olivier outside their house in Elwood.Picture:Rob Leeson media_camera Police leave the townhouse where Whole Pentry founder, Belle Gibson, lives. Picture: Jay Town

“I just think [speaking out] was the responsible thing to do. Above anything, I would like people to say, ‘Okay, she’s human. She’s obviously had a big life. She’s respectfully come to the table and said what she’s needed to say, and now it’s time for her to grow and heal.’”

The interview with The Weekly was not paid. Two face-to-face interviews were conducted at the Melbourne offices of Bespoke Approach, a corporate advisory firm who agreed to take on Gibson’s case pro bono.

Gibson has been in hiding since her story began to unravel.

Appearing on Seven’s Sunrise last year, she looked host Samantha Armytage straight in the face and smiled as Armytage told her: “For a person living with brain cancer, might I add, you look incredibly healthy.”

Co-host Andrew O’Keefe told viewers Gibson had “turned her cancer diagnosis into a positive, believe it or not.”

WHAT IS FACTITIOUS DISORDER?

Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr Mitchell Byrne says while factitious disorder does exist — it’s listed in the DSM and affects less than 1 per cent of the population — Munchausen syndrome “doesn’t exist anymore.”

“[Sufferers] can convince themselves that they have a legitimate illness,” Dr Byrne told news.com.au.

But factitious disorder is not to be confused with other disorders — such as malingering, delusional disorder or borderline personality disorder. They are separate.

Dr Bryne says social media can exacerbate the condition.

“Factitious disorder is self driving and self perpetuating, maintained by the attention that people receive. Sufferers who use social media have a wider audience and therefore a greater propensity to receive the attention they are looking for by pretending to have the illness.”

media_camera The Weekly speculates that Gibson suffers from a psychological condition called factitious disorder or Munchausen syndrome.

media_camera The May issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly is out Thursday.

media_camera Belle Gibson reveals her ‘struggle with the truth’ in the magazine.

Originally published as Health blogger: ‘None of it is true’