- Bella Johnston started experiencing symptoms of her illness at age 15. Due to her extreme weight loss, the doctors treated her for anorexia.
- Nearly five years later, she was finally diagnosed with cancer. At that time, she followed fraudster Belle Gibson on social media and even bought her app, The Whole Pantry.
- At the end of 2014, Johnston finished her cancer treatment, and Gibson’s scam and false cancer diagnosis were exposed months later. After years of silence, Johnston started speaking out about her experience under Gibson’s influence.
Bella Johnston had reason to reject traditional medicine, though ultimately that was what saved her life. In many ways, given all that she lost due to years of misdiagnoses, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Australian cancer survivor still didn’t trust hospital doctors.
However looking back, Johnston, now 30, blames a larger landscape of misinformation for so much of what she went through. In the mid-2010s — around when Johnston was finally treated for cancer that had been eating away at her body for years — she was inundated with alternative health advice sprouted by a number of influencers online.
Among these voices was Belle Gibson, the health and wellness influencer who fell from grace after she was exposed as a fraud and was recently portrayed in Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar. The single mom built an empire claiming she’d cured her malignant brain tumor by eating a healthy diet and adopting holistic treatments. The falsity of her philanthropy, backstory and cancer diagnosis came to light in 2015.
Johnston found Gibson while scrolling social media during the height of the con artist’s fame, which intersected with one of the most desperate, debilitating points in Johnston’s life. She’d been sick for years: at age 15, she developed a chronic cough so violent that she tore muscles in her ribs and popped blood vessels in her eyes. She vomited multiple times a day, every day. Her blood pressure was abnormally low, and she dropped weight rapidly.
“I don’t know who suggested it, I guess a doctor just was like, ‘Oh, it sounds like you have an eating disorder,’ even though I was exhibiting such horrific physical symptoms as well,” Johnston recalls to PEOPLE exclusively. “So I went through treatment for anorexia.”
The diagnosis never truly made sense to then-teenage Johnston. She didn’t experience the psychological symptoms of anorexia, at least not to their full extent.
“The doctors would say things like, ‘What’s the voice saying to you today?’ Because a lot of the time people with eating disorders have a voice in their head that manifests and things like that. And I was like, ‘I don’t have one,'” she explains.
Her other issues — low blood pressure, an unrelenting cough, the retching — were waived as psychosomatic. Today, Johnston has a lot of empathy for her parents, who “were doing everything they absolutely could to navigate what was already a complex situation,” she says. Back then, all she could feel was anger.
“I was a pretty rebellious teen as is, but this just drove me further and further into isolation from my family,” Johnston adds. “And they were just doing everything the doctors said, but the doctors weren’t really saying much either.”
After finishing high school, Johnston swore she would never return to an eating disorder clinic. She was completely done with doctors. She didn’t trust them or anyone else — not even herself, despite that continued nagging instinct that something deeper was wrong.
Between the ages of 18 and 19, she avoided hospital care and tried to take control. She partied through her anger and ultimately dropped out of university, and through it all, she endured extreme pain.
“I wasn’t eating, I couldn’t eat, and it just got worse and worse. And I didn’t like to talk to my parents. I was just further isolating myself,” says Johnston. “Then when I was 19, I found Belle Gibson.”
Generally, Johnston isn’t against alternative medicine. Her uncle was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, though he’s been able to manage it by overhauling his diet in conjunction with regular chemotherapy rounds. After following his doctor’s advice and eating well, his tumor shrunk, and though his cancer remains, Johnston’s uncle is still alive today.
“It wasn’t outrageous for me to look at what Belle Gibson was saying and be like, ‘Oh, she’s just saying the things that I already am aware of.’ She’s fine,” Johnston shares.
When she found Gibson in early 2014, Johnston had already started seeing a naturopath recommended by her cousin. Her tumor was in her neck, protruding as a large lump near on glands. The doctors chalked it up to glandular fever, while the alternative health specialist “diagnosed” Johnston with a blocked gland, claiming that her lymphatic system wasn’t draining properly, likely because Johnston has tattoos.
She was following the naturopaths treatment plan, regularly bathing in Epsom salt and drinking bone broths. Finding Gibson’s advice — what the influencer claimed worked for her illness — made perfect sense to Johnston.
“It all fit into the life that I was already trying to live,” says Johnston.
A few months after learning about Gibson, medical professionals discovered what Johnston had already suspected, a conclusion online symptom searches had long since turned up. In August 2014, doctors sat Johnston down and told her, “You have cancer.” As hard as it was to hear, it was also a relief to know something — anything — with certainty.
“Me and my family were like, ‘Finally someone is actually giving us answers.’ When you have cancer, there’s things you can do. There’s a path, there’s a clear path and clear treatment plan you can take, and that just hadn’t been offered to me before,” says Johnston, who was 19 at the time of her cancer diagnosis.
“We were all really happy, and I do remember thinking, ‘Maybe I can reach out to Belle Gibson. Maybe we’ll become friends,'” she adds. “I had emailed a few influencers that I knew that had had cancer, and I actually had coffee with one of them. She was so lovely. But I never heard back from Belle.”
The doctor’s first course of action was surgery to remove the tumor. Initially, they told Johnston she’d be OK; it wouldn’t be that bad. The operation was meant to be about four hours long; it ended up taking over double that amount of time.
It was far worse than they thought. After nearly five years of freely ravaging her body, the illness had spread throughout the back of her neck. By the time they caught it, the cancer was sitting at the base of her skull.
“They said the tumor itself [was] slow growing, but the cancer was fast spreading. The tumor had been growing for four or five years, and then it finally turned cancerous at some point during that,” Johnston tells PEOPLE. Since the cancer was sitting beneath her head, her doctor was pretty sure it had spread upwards.
“If it was in my brain, there was nothing more they could actually really do for me, apart from just make me comfortable and try to extend my life for as long as they could,” she adds.
Johnston’s official diagnosis was a malignant paraganglioma that had spread through her lymph nodes. For weeks, she operated under a terminal prognosis.
“People are always like, ‘Wow, that must been so hard,’ but I was on so many painkillers, and I was so … naive because I was so young. I was just, ‘Oh my God, rock and roll, go out with a bang,'” Johnston reflects. “I also do think that had to do with Belle Gibson — terminal diagnosis, but look at this chick, she’s fine.”
With death supposedly looming ahead, Johnston dove down that rabbit hole of misinformation. She downloaded Gibson’s food and beverage app, The Whole Pantry. She started making the recipes, even though they didn’t exactly fit into her traditional medical treatment.
For example, the cancer had done so much damage to her esophagus that she was unable to consume food by mouth. They installed a feeding tube, which Johnston would load up with green smoothies. She was doing her best to follow Gibson’s advice, but it was difficult in such a genuinely dire state.
A radical change of plans occurred when the doctors discovered the cancer had not actually reached Johnston’s brain. Death wasn’t certain. She was beating her cancer, and she underwent eight weeks of the highest possible dosage of radiotherapy to “double down and make sure that everything was killed,” says Johnston.
By mid-October 2014, they were confident that she wasn’t going to die, but that further treatment was still necessary. There were times when Johnston was tempted by the alternative route Gibson touted, and she admits to considering stopping traditional treatment. Luckily, her father steered her away from such a willful error.
“I was 19, but I was very much a child,” Johnston recalls. “My dad was just like, ‘Don’t be stupid. We’re not doing that.’ He said, ‘You can do anything you want outside of doing what the doctors say.’
Even as she endured the pains of healing in a hospital, Johnston didn’t turn away from her social media feeds flooded with influencers spewing dieting tips and health advice. At her lowest, Gibson’s shining content confused the sick teen on the other side of the screen.
“I’d had a lot of facial paralysis, and my face had changed significantly. I was losing my hair, and I was putting on weight because I had to put on weight for treatment. I just felt so foreign in my body and so ugly and so defeated,” Johnston remembers. “And I was looking at [Gibson’s] Instagram and I was like, ‘How is she on a trip to Bali looking so good when technically her prognosis is far worse than mine?'”
But Johnston didn’t become skeptical then. Gibson’s posts still struck her as aspirational, especially since it was a particularly trying time for Johnston’s entire family. Though her disease was waning, her aunt Jennifer’s bowel cancer had come back in a brutal way.
“I was meant to die, and hers was meant to be mild. And then somewhere in the middle we just crossed over and she passed away a couple of weeks after I got the all clear,” Johnston tells PEOPLE through tears.
“It’s the one thing that really gets me, because I was sending her all Belle Gibson stuff and sharing it all with her,” she adds of her late relative. “She died trying her best to live, and she tried everything and she was the most healthy. She never smoked, she never drank.”
Johnston notes that Jennifer — who died at age 53 — didn’t have social media, so she wasn’t as receptive to Gibson’s advice as her niece. But Johnston still passed along what she learned and believed might work for both of them, even when the concepts were entirely outlandish in hindsight.
One distinct post stands out in Johnston’s memory. Gibson described a town in the Middle East that had no recorded cases of cancer.
“I remember the photo that she posted. It was of Apricot tree in the desert. It’s burned in my memory,” says Johnston. “[Gibson said] they’d never had a case of cancer, and that was because everyone in that town harvested apricots and ate apricot kernels. That was why no one had ever had cancer.”
According to WebMD, apricot seeds contain the compound amygdalin, which was once sold as an anti-cancer treatment called laetrile in the 1940s. The doctor who patented it was convicted of illegally selling laetrile, and the FDA banned the drug in the ’70s. The site states that there is no scientific evidence to support apricot seeds as an alternative cancer treatment; in fact, the cyanide naturally found in such seeds could cause harm.
But under the influence of Gibson, Johnston did start eating apricots and keeping the seeds inside. She tried smashing them, but fortunately, she decided there was no easy way to open them up. And given the fact that she couldn’t really swallow at that point, she never successfully attempted the false treatment.
“I actually just didn’t get it, so I didn’t do it,” Johnston concedes. “But I remember sending that to my auntie and being like, ‘Apparently this is a cure.'”
Though Johnston never met Gibson in person or heard back over email, they did interact in the influencer’s comments section. She often replied to Johnston’s notes left under posts.
“We had a parasocial, very surface level, but I think she was very surface level with everyone,” Johnston explains of her relationship with the content creator. “I had reached out quite a lot and never heard back. But I guess now that I understand the timeline, I think when I was reaching out, that was when things were starting to spiral for her.”
Johnston spent her 20th birthday in the hospital that October, and on Dec. 4, 2014, Johnston finished treatment. Her aunt Jennifer died on Dec. 11. Belle Gibson was exposed in early 2015.
Shortly after Gibson’s downfall, Johnston penned an article about the scandal for an online publication. After that, she largely put her feelings about Gibson to rest; it was inextricable from the pain of her own sickness and the death of her aunt.
However, that 2015 article put Johnston on the radar when Netflix decided to revisit Gibson’s story in its 2023 documentary The Search for Instagram’s Worst Con Artist. Johnston agreed to participate in the production, which marked the first time she’d ever spoken publicly about it all. It was “both therapeutic and re-traumatizing,” she tells PEOPLE.
“Two things can be true at once. I’ve had so many people reach out to me online and say, ‘This happened to my sister,’ or they had cancer,” says Johnston. “I feel so privileged that they feel safe enough to share these things with me. But at the same time, it’s so hard because this was literally the worst time of my life.”
Johnston has been discussing Gibson more than ever these days. Since the drop of Netflix’s new limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, Johnston has opened up about Gibson’s influence on her own social media pages and in a number of media interviews.
She says she never actually watched the documentary in full, but she did tune into all six episodes of Apple Cider Vinegar after it premiered on Feb. 6. She hesitated at first, but a friend watched with her to offer much-needed emotional support.
“I cried a lot because I think I saw elements of my own story in it as well. Not that I’m saying it was based on me, but I think they did a really good job of making characters,” says Johnston. “They did a really good job of highlighting what it is like to have cancer and that loss of safety in your body and that loss of yourself and the desperation to hold onto anything that gives you hope.”
Since she’s now associated with the story, Johnston has experienced some of the backlash aimed at those who were conned by Gibson.
“I’ve had death threats every day for a month and a half,” says Johnston. “People were just commenting on my videos saying I deserve to die for being so stupid. Every day.”
Since the release of Apple Cider Vinegar, Johnston has taken to TikTok and Instagram to question the ethics of such dramatizations of true crime. Despite some changed names and vague references, she challenges the series’ portrayals of real people and how that has unearthed trauma for many families.
The character Milla Blake is loosely based on Australian wellness entrepreneur Jessica Ainscough, who died of cancer in February 2015, and the character Chanelle appears to be inspired by both Ainscough’s manager and Gibson’s friend Chanelle McAuliffe, the latter of whom Johnston has a personal, close relationship with.
“Jess Ainscough’s family are being trolled online for something they had no say in, no part in,” says Johnston. “Chanelle … had no idea that she was going to be a character. They quite literally copied her resume and the way that she spells her name, which is really unique.”
As far as Johnston is concerned, not reaching out to those involved precludes any “ethical way” to portray them on screen.
“There just wasn’t much care given to the actual victims of what really happened and the people who lived through this, and we still live with it,” she explains. “I gave up a lot and I lost a lot to be here.”
Before Johnston was diagnosed, she was a professional singer. At age 15, she started playing gigs all around Australia, and she was working on her first album when she was diagnosed. As cancer ravaged her body, it rendered “permanent, horrible damage” to her vocal cords. The doctors inserted a plastic stent to help her talk, but she can no longer sing.
“If my cancer had been found at the beginning, I never would’ve had to give up my career,” Johnston tells PEOPLE. She hasn’t been able to get back into music in any capacity, really. Even though she played guitar too, it’s too painful to revisit that passion without her other key instrument.
“I miss singing so much,” adds Johnston. “I dream about it all the time.”
The permanent damage extends to her esophagus, arm, tongue, eye and ear. Her lips are paralyzed slightly, which affects the way she speaks. A few years ago, she lost all hearing in her right ear as a result of the cancer treatment she underwent at 19.
“I still have things crop up all the time. I really struggle with my relationship with my body because it’s not a safe place for me. It’s constant. I have chronic health issues as a result of everything that happened,” she explains. “I have digestion problems because of the nerve damage, an autoimmune disease. It never ended for me, really. The cancer was gone, but my health problems have just always been there.”
The misinformation she consumed during her teens remains in Johnston’s system too: the diet plans, the alternative treatments, the ingredients and remedies that promised a better body and a fuller life.
“I was following Belle because she was making these claims of being able to cure cancer. But it was also everybody online was making outrageous claims about the power of vegetables and the power of turmeric,” says Johnston. “It was an eating disorder era. It was 1200 calories, it was restriction, it was having a latte as a snack.”
She underscores the importance of fitting Gibson into the broader “culture at the time.” Johnston still struggles with the eating disorder that resulted from putting on weight after her cancer treatment.
“All through my 20s, it was just up and down, up and down. I do feel like I’ve found a good place now, but I do think that culture really did shape something in me,” she adds. “I’m not saying it’s Belle Gibson’s fault, but I do think that it definitely contributed to the way I felt.”
Despite it all, Johnston doesn’t fully identify with victimhood as it relates to Gibson’s offenses. Again, she feels more like “a victim of the time.”
“I definitely have appropriated the term for TikTok because that’s what people want to talk about,” she notes in regards to her relationship to Gibson. “If I was going to talk candidly with someone … I don’t feel comfortable saying I was scammed, but I was definitely a follower and a believer.”
Sharing on social media allows Johnston to build, educate and hopefully protect people like herself, both in her younger iteration and who she is today.
“When we talk about scams … and the wellness industry, they prey on the vulnerable. They prey on people that are desperate,” she tells PEOPLE. “I think maybe if people have a community to turn to that isn’t trying to get money out of them and isn’t trying to tell them that coffee enemas are going to cure their cancer, they’re a lot less likely to fall for these kinds of things.”
All the doubts she faced in her health journey taught Johnston the value of self-advocacy, but she knows how hard it is to validate your own feelings in isolation. She’s committed to encouraging community — to offset misinformation and to prevent destructive loneliness.
“I wish I had more of a community when I was sick. I felt so alone for so long. We didn’t have the kind of internet that exists right now,” says Johnston, who has over 35,000 followers between major social media platforms. “That’s why I do love my Instagram and my TikTok because I feel like I’ve built the community that I never really had back then.”
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