With the release of Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, about convicted fraudster Belle Gibson, I recently went back and watched the interview Belle conducted with Tara Brown on 60 Minutes a decade ago and was just as bamboozled at the whole thing as I was at the time. Tara joined Nova 100‘s Jase and Lauren this morning to talk about the series, her own reflections on that interview and revealed that afterwards Belle handed her documentation from the doctor that she was completely well.
Lauren Phillips: Tara, how much is this thrown Belle Gibson back into the spotlight, this apple cider vinegar show on Netflix? Have you seen it?
Tara: I have seen it. I have been triggered. Yes.
Lauren: I bet!
Jase Hawkins: Does it seem accurate?
Tara: Oh, you know, accurate is not a word you can use in relation to anything to do with Belle Gibson, I’m as confused today as I was 10 years ago. Not to take away from the streaming service or the show itself, it’s terrific, and it’s so well acted, but it’s just so confounding to be able to follow Belle’s story, because it chops and changes. What seems feasible is completely not, and so it’s entertaining. That’s for sure.
Clint Stanaway goes on to ask what happened after the tapes stopped rolling:
Tara: The lies continued, and the whole point, we knew that she had been very loose with the truth in the lead up to that interview. And we believed that she was coming on to make an apology, to explain herself, but she just became more and more slippery, and it was confounding. And it was kind of like, at the end of it, I was going, did we get any clarity? I really don’t know. It was a long interview, and it was frustrating at times, because it often started with a pearl of truth and ended up somewhere else.
Lauren: Did you ever hear from her after that interview? Because it seemed like she had a way of then having an answer for everything and always coming back when she was criticised… did 60 Minutes ever hear from her again? Or was she just, after that interview was it just nothing?
Tara: Look, the most priceless bit of communication came very soon after that interview, and that was a letter from her doctor. It was addressed to her, but she shared it with us, which stated very clearly that she was completely well. And this was a letter that she had had well before the wellness app and the wellness warrior career took off. And so she knew very clearly, she’d had a face to face, a 45 minute face to face consultation with the doctor. She had a letter from the doctor saying that she was not unwell, and she actually supplied that to us. So during the interview her great claim was that she accepted she never had cancer, but she always believed she did, and this was telling the world that she knew she didn’t.
Apple Cider Vinegar is available now on Netflix. Jase & Lauren can be heard from 6am to 9am on Nova 100 in Melbourne or you can stream the show by downloading the Nova Player.