Video shows Penguin preparing her for media interviews by asking her a series of questions she could expect to be asked

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Footage of the disgraced wellness blogger Belle Gibson that emerged during a federal court case against her has attracted widespread condemnation, raising questions about why her publisher did not more rigorously fact check her cancer claims.

The video was submitted as evidence by Consumer Affairs Victoria and shows staff from her publisher, Penguin, preparing her for media interviews by asking her a series of questions she could expect to be asked by journalists.

Gibson’s wellness empire, which included a mobile phone app called The Whole Pantry and a website and recipe book of the same name, began to fall apart last year when it was revealed that thousands of dollars promised to charities off the back of money raised through her success did not materialise and that she did not actually have cancer.

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Gibson claimed to have cancer in her blood, spleen, uterus and brain, to be terminally ill and to be successfully keeping her cancer at bay by shunning conventional medicine and instead eating whole, natural foods and using untested European treatments.



In the video played to the federal court in Melbourne on Tuesday, Penguin staff ask her before the publishing of The Whole Pantry cookbook in 2014 about the unconventional treatments.

“Um, I don’t know how I’m going to talk about this,” Gibson replies. “I might have to do some reading on this. It’s a machine that is like an electronic pulse pushes into the cells and I take medicine when that machine is operating on a program.

“The program ... I ... the computer and machine that I’m on runs this program based on my biology and the way that my body operates through my sleep.

“I take medicine and this program’s opening my cells so the medicine can get into them.”

A staff member suggests telling journalists that she is “following a non-conventional European cancer protocol”.

Gibson, whose full name is Annabelle Natalie Gibson, is also asked during the 90- minute video: “Do you feel like you’re dying?”



Gibson replies: “Yeah. And I’m fine with that.”



She said she once saw a chemotherapy ward and was “baffled” that it existed.

“That’s just crazy, who does that to their body? For me, it was just not a logical decision. I went to the Royal Women’s [hospital] and I saw the chemotherapy ward there and I was just baffled that it exists.”

She said instead she used Chinese medicine, naturopathy and multiple other therapies unproven for treating cancer, which she described as “modalities”.

Later in the interview, she said: “It’s hard to understand how I coped through so much”.

Penguin admitted that it had failed to fact check Gibson’s story when the lies were first exposed. At one point, a staffer tells Gibson; “I really think you need to get your story straight.”

The evidence has infuriated people, including those with experiences of cancer, who went on social media to question why Penguin staff didn’t press her further.

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Gibson did not show up to the court and judge Debbie Mortimer ­reserved her decision on the case to a later date yet to be announced.

Chris Del Mar, a professor of public health at Bond University in Queensland, an evidence-based medicine specialist, said while people had been quick to attack Gibson, “the publisher’s role in all this has not been criticised perhaps as much as it should have”.

“The real answer here is in health literacy,” he said. “We need to, as a public, be better educated about how information is created and what it consists of, what knowledge is and how it’s tested and how to verify that things are true.

“It’s very easy to go after Gibson and the publisher. At the same time, we have a responsibility not to be duped ourselves and to learn about what is sensible and what isn’t. People have extraordinarily naive ideas about medical science and they believe things because they’ve been said by people they trust the face of.

“But we need to teach them to subject claims to scrutiny and we really do need to address this if we are ever to have a population of people capable of making sensible choices about health issues.”

It was also revealed in the court that Gibson made in excess of $420,000 from sales of her app and received a $132,500 book ­advance. Company records tendered to the court show she made payments for a BMW and spent money on overseas travel.