Disgraced blogger Belle Gibson created The Whole Pantry app. In documents tendered to the courts as part of legal action against Ms Gibson, Apple said the public relations strategy was implemented almost immediately after The Whole Pantry app went live in August 2013. "Once Apple saw the app," the company told the Federal Court of Australia, "it was decided that Apple Australia would make an effort to introduce the developer (Annabelle Gibson) to the Australian media." Emails back and forth between senior Apple staff and Ms Gibson speak volumes about how closely she had been embraced by the company. They begin with "Hello darling one" or "Lovely" or "Sweetest", and sign off with kisses.

In the acknowledgements section of her book, Ms Gibson singles out three Apple staff, describing Luke Bevans, the Apple App Store manager for Australia and New Zealand, as her mentor. Even after the first news stories began exposing Gibson's lies, in March 2015, copies of private messages seen by Fairfax Media reveal Apple staff were unwavering in their support of Ms Gibson. When The Age exposed Gibson for failing to hand over thousands of dollars promised to charity and deleting social media posts questioning her miracle cancer-recovery story, one message from an Apple staffer who worked intimately with Gibson described the news coverage as "unfortunate". "[The] unfortunate article focused on highlighting startup entrepreneurial issues of competing and conflicting goals, dismissive of great work already done or to be done. Worst of all, it compromises the latter," the message said. "Spoke with Belle earlier and she is pragmatic about this unpleasantness and determined to take forward steps continuing in the work instead of drawing interest to this kind of blind-sightedness."

When the The Australian published explosive comments from Gibson herself, in which she conceded it was possible she had been misdiagnosed, staff at Apple appeared unperturbed. One of the company's top public relations managers in Australia, Jesse James, emailed Gibson the same morning that the article appeared on the front page of The Australian to approve smart watch promotional material for Ms Gibson's app, The Whole Pantry. "Hope you're feeling a bit better today lady," Ms James signed off. Internal emails from the tech giant reveal she had a particularly close relationship with one Apple staffer, whom sources have described as her "handler" in Australia. Ms Gibson shot to international acclaim in 2014, in large part due to her lucrative partnership with Apple, which handpicked her "health and wellness" app from more than 2 million apps available for download that year.

With the success of her app and book deals with publishers on three continents, Ms Gibson earned almost half a million dollars in just 18 months. A week after the news of Ms Gibson's con broke - and it was clear she had become a liability - a flurry of panicked correspondence was exchanged between Apple's Australian offices and its US headquarters in California. The scandal broke on the eve of Apple's smart watch launch in 2015, which was to have featured The Whole Pantry as one of its central apps. Ms Gibson had been working with Apple in secret on the smart watch version of her app. Apple's senior PR manager in America, Ted Miller, and Matt Fischer, vice-president of the App Store, were notified of the scandal and plans to sever ties with Ms Gibson. "Last week the story started breaking via Fairfax Media," an email from an Australian executive said. "And so the backlash started, and snowballed over the last week, with front-page headlines, resulting in the book deal being scrapped and our removal from featuring today.

"Belle is waiting for this to blow over and is taking legal advice, but this morning that may have changed. When we hear from her we'll let you know. The story is now a full national news story, and our removal of featuring will be commented on." By the following morning, March 17, The Whole Pantry app had been dumped from all Apple platforms, and its online promotions were wiped from the Apple website. It was also removed from Apple Watch publicity, where Gibson's company logo had been featured prominently next to Nike and Pinterest. Penguin Publishing was penalised $30,000 for failing to fact-check Ms Gibson's book in which she claimed to have cured herself with a healthy lifestyle. The publisher also agreed to include a "prominent warning notice" on all future books that contain claims about natural therapies. Ms Gibson was recently found guilty of deceptive and misleading conduct in the Federal Court of Australia and was fined $410,000. Apple has repeatedly refused to speak publicly about its connection to Ms Gibson.

"In relation to your story," said Fiona Martin, Apple's director of communications, "we have nothing further to add." The revelations are contained in a new book about Ms Gibson's cancer con, The Woman Who Fooled The World, published by Scribe.