Image: 60 Minutes Australia
New information about the life of disgraced wellness blogger Belle Gibson have come to light.
In their new book, The Woman Who Fooled The World, about the cancer faker, authors Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano claim Belle was so desperate to make everyone believe she was dying from a deadly brain tumor, that she faked a 40-minute seizure at her son’s fourth birthday party in 2014.
Although the assembled adults were horrified, the tome alleges that no one called an ambulance because Belle ‘didn’t like getting hospitals involved’.
It was, ‘No, no, no, this has happened before, everything’s going to be all right, she’ll get through it’,’ a friend said.
‘There’s no need for an ambulance. That was the consensus.’
The fit, witnessed by her son and other children, was just one more part of Gibson’s web of lies, but her friends believed at the time it was real.
‘It looked real. I believed it was real. And I was mortified. I cried driving all the way home… I actually don’t know how I got home,’ one of them recalled.
Another said: ‘It was scary. It was so violent, the adults were crying.’
And despite the fact her four-year-old son was present at the time of her ‘fit,’ the 25-year-old appeared not worry about him seeing her in such a terrifying state.
‘Oli was… I saw his face. He was petrified. The kids had to almost walk over the top of her to go upstairs. Oli had to look at his mum looking like she was almost dead on the floor,’ a friend said.
The social media personality later went on to con followers out of $578,000 claiming to cure her cancer with diet – even taking to Instagram to detail her supposed seizure.
I have seizures often as a result of my brain cancer, but nothing ever this long or intense,’ she wrote on Facebook.
‘Extremely grateful for my friends and family who were there to support me through this and my team who are looking for new answers.’
In September, Belle was fined $410,000 for defrauding thousands of people.
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