A new Netflix miniseries tells the story of an Australian influencer who lied about having a terminal illness to promote alternative therapies. A decade on, it remains a warning.

Back in 2013, a remarkable, against-all-odds story of survival hit the headlines when a young woman launched what would become a best-selling wellness app with advice on how she had beaten cancer. Just four years earlier in 2009, Australian blogger Belle Gibson, then aged 20, had, by her own account, been diagnosed with a "malignant brain cancer" and been given "six weeks, four months tops" to live. However, she claimed that she had chosen to withdraw from chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, and had instead embarked on "a quest to heal myself naturally… through nutrition, patience, determination and love".

Amassing 200,000 fans online on Instagram – then in its early days – who avidly followed her wellness journey, she then launched a best-selling wellness and nutrition app, followed by a cookbook, called The Whole Pantry, crediting her diet for curing her of her terminal illness, and inspiring others to follow her in "empowering myself to save my own life". She was dubbed "the most inspiring woman you've met this year" by Elle Australia, while in 2014, Cosmopolitan gave her a "Fun, Fearless Female" award.

However, it was all a lie. Gibson had never been diagnosed with a brain cancer, nor the "cancer in my blood, spleen, brain, uterus, and liver" that she subsequently claimed she had also been diagnosed with in a 2014 Instagram post, when rumblings first began to surface in Australian media that she may have been a fraud. Finally, in April 2015, she admitted the truth in an interview with Women's Weekly. "No, none of it's true," she said, but refusing to take further responsibility, she added, opaquely: "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."

This obfuscation of reality – and the mental gymnastics of Gibson's "explanations" for her actions – are the backbone of Apple Cider Vinegar, a glossy and poppy Netflix miniseries dramatisation of the whole scandal, released this week. Showrunner Samantha Strauss leans into Gibson's shaky relationship with truth in the way she tells the story. From the chaotic timeline, which jumps between characters and events from pre-2009 through to 2015, through to the way it blends reported facts with fictionalised sequences – a campy montage where the lead characters lip-sync along to Britney Spears' Toxic; the appearance of a doctor character who Gibson claims treated her, but has never been proven to exist – the miniseries makes it purposely difficult ever to be able to grasp what really happened. That being said, how could a show based on a pathological liar ever be played fully straight?

Notably following the fallout from Baby Reindeer last year – Netflix is being sued by a woman who claims she was identified from the series, which stated "This is a true story" at the beginning of every episode – Apple Cider Vinegar also caveats the drama with a slightly different disclaimer each episode, such as: "This is a true-ish story based on a lie," and, "The following is inspired by a true story. Certain characters and events have been created or fictionalised."

Playful with the truth as this fictionalisation might be, it certainly makes for a compelling – and shocking – yarn. Following in the well-trodden footsteps of other scammer TV dramas, Apple Cider Vinegar positions itself – both in style and subject – alongside the likes of fellow Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, which focused on "fake heiress" Anna Delvey/Sorokin, convicted of attempted grand larceny and larceny in the second degree in 2019, and The Dropout (Hulu/Disney ), in which Amanda Seyfried played Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley fraudster who faked blood test diagnoses with her medi-tech company, Theranos, and in 2022 was convicted of four accounts of fraud; she is still serving her 11 years and three months sentence.

Like Sorokin and Holmes before her, Gibson – played with a charming, chilling duplicity by Dopesick's Kaitlyn Dever – is also depicted as embodying the endgame of hustle culture, where "fake it 'til you make it" ends up becoming a dangerous ideology, rather than a positive self-help mantra.

Gibson was one of the first in a new breed of scammers who used social media and apps to dupe people – see also

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