‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ and the dangerous allure of hope
The Netflix series about influencer Belle Gibson offers a nuanced depiction of the lengths desperate people will go – and what they’re willing to believe – to get better. But all of us have the capacity, perhaps even the need, to believe in things bigger than ourselves
By Ben Jhoty
This story contains spoilers
THERE’S A SCENE in the new Netflix series, Apple Cider Vinegar, when cancer sufferer, Milla Blake (Alicia Debnam-Carey), is attempting to remove obstructions from the bowel of her sick mother (Susie Porter).
Milla, who is loosely based on the influencer Jessica Ainscough, has been using alternative remedies, such as Gerson therapy, juicing, coffee enemas and black salve, a dangerous and debunked herbal compound, to treat a sarcoma on her arm. The attractive influencer believes that together, these remedies have helped her body heal and driven her cancer into remission.
Milla’s father, Joe (Matt Nable), pleads with his daughter to take his wife to the hospital but Milla won’t listen. Emboldened by what she perceives to be the success of these alternative remedies in treating her cancer, she believes – with every fibre of her being – in their power to heal.
Milla’s storyline runs alongside that of the series’ central protagonist, influencer Belle Gibson (played by American actress Kaitlyn Dever, deploying a faultless Aussie accent), who falsely claimed to have brain cancer, amassing millions of followers and subscribers to her app, The Whole Pantry. In the series, one of those followers is breast cancer sufferer, Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who after a chance meeting with Belle, starts pursuing alternative treatments against the wishes of her partner Justin, an investigative journalist at The Age.
Gibson is the show’s rogue, cancerous cell, offering false hope to people like Lucy. In real life, the influencer was eventually ordered by the federal court to pay a $410,000 fine, plus $30,000 in legal costs, for misleading and deceptive conduct, a debt that remains outstanding.
Watching Apple Cider Vinegar is an emotionally charged experience. It makes you angry that people in desperate situations can be so easily manipulated by the likes of Gibson. You can also find yourself infuriated by someone like Milla, who is willing to put her and her mother’s lives at risk by blindly adhering to what appear to be crackpot remedies. It makes you feel pity for those who find themselves in desperate situations and are willing to do almost anything to feel better. You feel enraged by enablers, like the initially opportunistic Chanelle (Aisha Dee) and Clive (Ashley Zukerman), Gibson’s feeble boyfriend and source of financial support, who are, by their actions, complicit in her behaviour. But perhaps most of all, you feel sympathy for loved ones, like Joe, who is forced to face the fact that no amount of reasoning and rationality can get through to a person who has become a believer, guided by fear and a warped sense of intuition, but perhaps most forcefully, by hope.
From the comfort of the couch, it’s easy to make snap armchair judgments about the show’s characters (I certainly did); their gullibility, their stupidity, their ignorance. But the truth is, all of us have the capacity, the desire, perhaps even the innate need to want to believe in things outside or bigger than ourselves. And all of us, if given the stark choice, would likely pursue hope in the face of fear.
If you’re not convinced you could be so easily governed by primal emotional responses, it’s worth looking at the more benign ways hope and the desire to believe in larger-than-life figures and ideas, manifest in our own lives.
Let’s start with religion. The uncertainty surrounding the origins of our species and what happens when we die, leads many of us to believe either in organised religion or a higher power. Similarly, some of us are beholden to superstitions or are open to supernatural explanations for unexplainable phenomena.
On the other hand, many of us, myself included, who would claim to be cooly rational about most things in life, desperately want to believe in the existence of aliens. While it could be argued that finding extraterrestrial intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is a logical supposition that may one day be scientifically proven, at present, the absence of evidence puts it in the realm of belief, or for me, hope. It’s that hope that perhaps explains why I’ve found myself encouraged by the increased focus on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) by the US government in recent times and the prospect of ‘disclosure’, which armies of TikTok users believe to be imminent – if we’re not struck by an asteroid first.
Here on earth, the promise of hope has been used throughout history by authoritarian leaders to persuade and manipulate citizens to their own ends, either by force or by force of personality. This is true, even in Western democracies, as we’ve seen in the re-election of Donald Trump, who on face value is a megalomaniac, but one who offers his ‘followers’ hope that he can right wrongs, restore American pride and make their lives better. On the left, Barack Obama was heralded as a similarly messianic figure, a saint even by some back in 2008, capable of saving us from tyranny, but more importantly offering us hope that better times were ahead. Obama famously argued that hope was audacious; perhaps it is in some contexts, but it’s also the flip side of fear.
The allure of hope can also show up in more trivial pursuits. On the sporting field, we want our heroes to be capable of superhuman deeds, to transcend the normal bounds of athletic achievement. We’re inevitably disappointed when the next Michael Jordan or Shane Warne falls short. The few who do manage to meet these rarefied levels of athletic excellence are then asked that they be infallible off the field as well. Again, we feel aggrieved when they let us down, whether it’s Sam Kerr’s drunken posturing in a London police station, Jordan’s gambling misdemeanours, or numerous (mostly male) athletes’ stories of infidelity or domestic violence.
So, the seeds of blind belief, sometimes called faith, but perhaps best characterised as a weakness for hope, are present within most of us. This is to be expected – we are an unlikely, vulnerable, intelligent species occupying a remote chunk of rock in a seemingly desolate universe. It’s not surprising, perhaps even inevitable, that when we find ourselves in a desperate or life-threatening situation, we are susceptible to magical thinking and thus vulnerable to exploitation. That’s when alternative remedies and exotic treatments can morph into miracle cures, particularly if conventional medicine has failed. Who among us, in that situation, wouldn’t be inclined to try something, anything, to get better?
As Apple Cider Vinegar so skilfully shows, it’s in those moments, when we’re at our most vulnerable, that the Belle Gibsons of the world can mutate before our eyes, from rapacious influencers driven by their own demons, into something perhaps even more dangerous: avatars of hope.
Who is Belle Gibson?
Belle Gibson entered the public spotlight in August 2013, when she launched her wellness app, The Whole Pantry, a collection of healthy recipes and a guide to positive thinking and the supposed impact it can have on a person’s wellbeing.
Gibson claimed to have suffered from brain cancer in 2009 and to have successfully recovered. She signed a publishing deal with Penguin for a cookbook in 2014, and The Whole Pantry tabletop book was released later that year.
Gibson claimed she had donated 25 per cent of her company’s profits, and purported to have given $300,000 to various charities. In reality, Gibson donated less than $10,000 from approximate earnings of $420,000. In 2017, she was ordered by the Federal court to repay the debt, which she is yet to do so.
In April 2015, Gibson admitted that she did not and had never had cancer.
Where is Belle Gibson now?
In January 2020, Gibson’s home was raided by Victoria’s Sheriff’s Office on a “search and sale” warrant.
A day after the raid was reported, footage emerged on social media of Gibson attending an event for Ethiopia’s Oromo community in Melbourne while wearing a headscarf and using a different name.
Gibson’s home in Northcote, Melbourne was raided for a second time in May 2021, in another attempt to seize items to sell in order to repay her outstanding debts.
Is Milla Blake in Apple Cider Vinegar a real person?
Milla Blake is not a real person but a fictional character created for the series. Show creator Samantha Strauss has said that in creating the character she was focused on “looking at a whole tapestry of people across the wellness and medical spaces. I’d say Milla is a portrait of influencers at the time . . . She’s someone who is desperately trying to save her own life and becomes blind to the truth because of it.”
Who Is Jessica Ainscough?
Jessica Ainscough was a sufferer of Epithelioid Sarcoma and blogger, who shares many parallels with the character of Milla Blake in Apple Cider Vinegar.
Following her diagnosis of a rare cancer in 2008, doctors concluded that they would need to amputate Ainscough’s left arm. Ainscough declined the surgery and instead decided to take a natural approach to her healing journey, which involved dietary interventions such as an raw juices and daily coffee enemas. Jessica’s approach is known as Gerson therapy (and draws parallels to the ‘Hirsch Therapy’ that Milla underwent in the series).
Jessica was formerly the online editor of the teen publication, DOLLY. In the show Blake works at girlfriend.
Ainscough passed away on February 26, 2015, at just 30 years of age.
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