For whom the Belle tolls...

I'm a little bit angry right now.

Most of you have probably heard by now of a young woman named Belle Gibson, who had built a very successful business on a web of lies.

If you haven't heard of her - where have you been hiding?


Granted. I had never heard of her before her spectacular fall from grace, but when it happened, it was big.

So in case you've been mushrooming, here's the low down on Ms Belle Gibson.

She's 23 years old, has a young son, and several years ago she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, which later spread to several major organs, she also underwent multiple heart surgeries.  All this happening since 2009.

At some point for some reason, she decided to forgo traditional cancer treatment and go it alone.

By go it alone I mean utilise holistic type therapies.

Because obviously the specialist doctors who have gone to uni for years and years, and trained at med school for more years and years and then trained even further in their area of expertise, have no idea on how best to treat cancer.

So she started to eat 'whole foods', you know that lovely modern term referring to what many of us know simply as 'food'  fresh, organic etc you get the picture, and was miraculously CURED of the terminal brain cancer!

OMG!  What's that?  You have cancer?  Here, have an organic salad!  WHY HAS NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE!!!

So she jumped on social media and created a slew of accounts to share her discovery with the world, thus The Whole Pantry was born.

She met with other cancer survivors, was interviewed several times for various tv shows, and promised faithfully to donate the profits from her book and app sales to charity.

And that is precisely where she came undone. When the people she had promised the money to began asking where it was, it came out that she had never given anyone a cent.

She had hundreds of thousands of followers across various platforms who hung off every word she uttered, who sadly, believed every word she fed them, who bought her book, who paid for her app, who followed her FB account, who subscribed to her blog, who possibly decided against treatment, and who were devastated when she was revealed to be a fraud.

Once the cat was out of the bag, she disappeared remarkably quickly from the public eye, and from social media, deleting most of her accounts, and all the pictures she could.  The closest she came to explaining herself was to say that perhaps she had been misdiagnosed in the first place.

Until now.

A major Aussie publication has an article in which she explains herself, and actually admits to the whole thing being one big arsed lie.  But then she justifies her abhorrent behavior with the oh so tired excuse of  'I had a troubled childhood', and her Mum was mean to her!

Well boo-bloody-hoo.

Now she would have us believe that from the age of 5 years old she was running a household and raising other children.  At 5.  Yeah right.  Pull the other one.

You may have picked up on a slight lack of sympathy for her... and you'd be right.  I have none for people like her.  Not a speck.  And the current trend of enabling people like her to continue with their crapfest by saying things like 'oh, she must have a mental illness' or 'the poor thing obviously needs help' or 'it's a cry for attention'.

Give me a fricking break!

The woman has defrauded people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars - at the very least!  Over the course of several years she has lied her arse off about having heart surgeries, terminal brain cancer, secondary tumors... and then used those lies to get money from people.

She is a liar, and a cheat.  That's it.  Cut and dried.  Simple.

But why do I have no sympathy or empathy for her?

Two reasons.

Firstly because I have no time for people that don't take responsibility for their own lives, that continue to indulge themselves in certain behaviours because they had a shitty childhood.  As far as I'm concerned, once you get past 20 then you are fully responsible for the choices you make, and you don't get to blame your shitty childhood.  My childhood wasn't all fairytales and unicorns farting glitter, and my Mum like most mums wasn't Mother Teresa , but I have never used it as an excuse to be a con-artist in adulthood.

Secondly, my mother has fought breast cancer twice and won.  Hers were both very aggressive types and the first one was reasonably well advanced when it was found, the second was diagnosed exactly two years after the first one.  Without prompt treatment she would have been dead within 6 months, it's been more than 10 years and we still have her with us.

Then there's my friend Tracey, who after several years of ignoring gynecological issues was diagnosed with uterine cancer.  She had successful surgery & treatment and was healthy for a few years.  But the cancer came back with a vengeance in the form of dozens of inoperable brain tumors, and we lost her only a couple of months after her second diagnosis.  Her last few weeks were torture for everyone. Her deterioration was so very rapid, but at the same time, agonizingly slow...

It's only because of chemo and radiation that my mum is still here.  It's only because of chemo and radiation that we had Tracey as long as we did.

So for this piece of garbage to do what she has done, and have people feel sorry for her is beyond my ability to comprehend!  She is getting off scot-free - the police are not charging her with anything - the only punishment she faces is embarrassment, and I'm not even sure she'll feel that.

She's not mentally ill.

She's a con-woman.

She is despicable.