Inside The Wellness Drama Coming To Netflix This Week

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Apple Cider Vinegar is based on a bafflingly true story

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Coming this week, Netflix describes its latest drama as ‘a true-ish story based on a lie’. Covering fraudsters and Instagrammers in the wellness sphere, here’s exactly what to expect from Apple Cider Vinegar, starring Kaitlyn Dever.

Apple Cider Vinegar: Plot, Cast, Release Date & More

Kaitlyn Dever as Belle in Apple Cider Vinegar

What Is It About?

Apple Cider Vinegar is set during Instagram’s early days when filters were thriving, pictures were square, stories didn’t yet exist and today’s idea of an influencer was only just emerging. We centre two women, Belle Gibson (Dever) and Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who both have life threatening illnesses. Taking to Instagram to chronicle their journeys to health, Milla champions the power of food to battle cancer, while Australian Belle claims she has cured her terminal brain cancer through health and wellness – garnering hundreds of thousands of engaged followers along the way.

Both eschew traditional medicine entirely in favour of alternative wellness – but only one of them is telling the truth. Belle isn’t curing her cancer with alternative therapies: she doesn’t have cancer at all. Instead, she lies to her legion of followers, generating cash through a recipe app and companion cookbook, both championing her holistic life ethos. That’s all before the truth comes to light and her life begins to unravel…

The Trailer

The Cast

Kaitlyn Dever as Belle Gibson
Alycia Debnam-Carey as Milla Blake
Aisha Dee as Chanelle, Milla’s friend who meets Belle at an event
Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Lucy, a woman struggling with cancer
Mark Coles Smith as Lucy’s husband
Ashley Zukerman
Susie Porter
Matt Nable
Phoenix Raei
Chai Hansen
Richard Davies
Essie Davis
Kieran Darcy-Smith
Catherine McClements

US star Dever performs a convincing Aussie accent in Apple Cider Vinegar, with the star claiming she ‘didn’t want to let Australia down’. ‘Jenny [accent coach] and I were seeing each other three times a week over Zoom and going over every single word that I say, kind of like I would a song, memorising those sounds,’ Dever tells Netflix. ‘I love accent work in general, but there’s something about this accent in particular and how it allowed me to dive deep into someone else. It was really helpful for me to separate myself from the character.’

Where Was It Filmed?

Apple Cider Vinegar was shot on location in Melbourne, beginning in December 2023. ‘We had so many locations that took us from far-flung parts of Melbourne one day to the Dandenong Ranges the next,’ says series creator Samantha Strauss. ‘We wanted to show Melbourne as an aspirational place to be.’

Aisha Dee as Chanelle, Alycia Debnam-Carey as Milla in Apple Cider Vinegar

Is Apple Cider Vinegar Based On A True Story?

Yes, Apple Cider Vinegar is loosely based on the real Australian former-influencer Belle Gibson, who fell from grace after her extreme yet inconsistent terminal cancer claims were debunked by journalists – but only after she had scammed charities and ordinary people out of their money. However, it’s worth noting that Apple Cider Vinegar is partially fictionalised, so don’t expect a true play-by-play of Belle’s scandalous story. (If that’s what you’re looking for, try ITV’s recent documentary Instagram’s Worst Con Artist instead, or Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s book that inspired both, The Woman Who Fooled the World: Belle Gibson’s Cancer Con, and the Darkness at the Heart of the Wellness Industry.)

One of Instagram’s earliest influencers, Belle was a huge proponent of wellness and alternative, natural medicine – claiming both were curing her multiple cancers – on her Instagram account, @healing_belle. In October 2014, she launched The Whole Pantry, a recipe app with a companion cookbook published by Lantern Books, an imprint of Penguin. Inside, wholefood recipes were accompanied by pseudoscience commentary as to the health benefits (and medicinal powers) of food.

Because Belle claimed to be so unwell, no one questioned her. In fact, she garnered a huge and loyal social media following, and only one of her closest friends started to notice fractures in her veneer. Chanelle McAuliffe spotted inconsistencies in Belle’s behaviour: how she posted on Instagram about new worrying diagnoses and yet seemed perfectly healthy in person; how she claimed to work hard on her book and app but holidayed constantly and hardly seemed to lift a finger. After confronting Belle, Chanelle uncovered the truth – but a lawyer, an investigative journalist and even the police refused to look into Belle’s stories on Chanelle’s word. Eventually, Chanelle convinced journalists at The Age that this story was worth investigating.

What began as a probe into Belle’s fraudulent charitable donation claims ultimately unravelled the entirety of her life. Belle had been using her business’ profit to splash the cash on an upmarket townhouse, a luxury car, designer clothes, international holidays and cosmetic dental procedures – not donating it to charity as she promised. Worst of all, however, Belle did not have any of the brain, blood, spleen, uterine, liver or kidney cancers she claimed to have. She was not treating cancer with a holistic lifestyle (her diet, fitness regime and consuming wholefoods) as she claimed online – she didn’t have cancer at all. Meanwhile, in posting her fake claims, she both convinced real cancer patients that traditional medicine was dangerous and also pushed anti-vaccine propaganda, claiming her own ‘cancer’ was caused by the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine.

In 2015, Belle gave two explosive interviews admitting the truth: one with Women’s Weekly, stating when asked if she had cancer, ‘No, none of it’s true’; and another with 60 Minutes, in which she talked in circles for a hefty fee of $75,000. In the end, Belle was sued by Consumer Affairs Victoria for breaking consumer laws, fined $410,000. Belle’s publisher Penguin was also culpable, and fined $30,000 AUD for publishing The Whole Pantry without fact checking it.

Aside from Belle, many of Apple Cider Vinegar’s characters are not based on real people. However, it’s possible Debnam-Carey’s character, Milla, is based on Jessica Ainscough, a real wellness influencer who died in February 2015 of untreated epithelioid sarcoma at the age of 29. A severe and rare diagnosis, Jessica initially underwent chemotherapy in 2008, but gave up on traditional medicine when, in 2009, she was told the only way to eradicate her cancer entirely was to amputate her arm. Instead, she turned to alternative wellness, including controversial Gerson Therapy, which Belle was also a proponent of. Of course, only one of these two women actually had cancer.

Instagram’s Worst Con Artist: Belle Gibson (centre) leaves the Federal Court in Melbourne, Thursday, June 20, 2019

Where Is Belle Gibson Now?

Belle is no longer in the public eye, though she occasionally crops up in the news over her failure (or refusal) to pay her fines. Despite her $75,000 windfall for her 60 Minutes interview, in 2017, Belle claimed to be $170,000 AUD in debt. In 2019, after avoiding paying her fines, she was ordered to face court or be imprisoned. Still claiming she had no money, Belle enraged the public by showing up in a new $200 dress and $370 designer sunglasses. In both 2020 and 2021, her home was raided with items seized in an attempt to recoup the unpaid fines.

Most bizarrely, a video emerged in early 2020 showing Belle wearing a headscarf, speaking in Oromo and claiming to have been adopted into the Ethiopian community, which she called a gift from Allah. In the video, she discussed Ethiopian politics and claimed to have been volunteering with Melbourne’s local Oromo community for four years. After the video surfaced, the president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria refuted her claims, saying she is not a community member, not a registered volunteer, and had only seen her at a few events, asking her to stop claiming to be part of the community.

When probed by Women’s Weekly in 2021, Belle asked to be given ‘time to grow and heal’.