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Apple Cider Vinegar has landed on Netflix, telling the shocking true story of Belle Gibson. Even if you know everything about the case, when it comes to the ending, it’s best to leave expectations at the door.
In the 2010s, Gibson was flying high. A few years after moving to Melbourne and becoming a mom at age 18, she launched The Whole Pantry, an app that provided users with recipes, lifestyle guides, and wellness advice.
It was reportedly downloaded 200,000 times within its first month and got voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of 2013. Following this, Belle landed a massive book deal and worked with Apple, and all the while she was supposedly battling terminal brain cancer. But there was just one problem: it was all a lie.
Apple Cider Vinegar tracks the rise and fall of Gibson, played by Kaitlyn Dever, while also depicting the intertwining lives of those caught up in her lies. Warning: some may find this content distressing.
Apple Cider Vinegar finale recap
Below, you’ll find a recap of Episode 6, so be warned of spoilers ahead.
Tall tales and tapeworms
NetflixThe Apple Cider Vinegar finale is titled ‘Tapeworm’, and it wastes no time in demonstrating why. A few months prior to the present-day timeline, Hek – Belle’s PR wizard – is in an AA meeting, sharing with the group about one of the many lies she told him.
According to Belle, she had contracted a bad case of ringworm. Someone on the internet recommended apple cider vinegar, and so she necked a whole bottle, causing her to choke. She swore to Hek that all of a sudden, she pulled a two-foot-long tapeworm out of her throat.
The home remedy worked! The tapeworm was attracted the vinegar, and she was able to pull it out and flush it down the sink. Except, it’s just another one of her tall tales.
“Ringworm isn’t caused by tapeworm,” Hek (Phoenix Raei) tells the group. “Ringworm is a fungus, tapeworm comes out of your ass, not your mouth. But still, is that not magic? Drink a little bit of this stuff and you’re all cleansed, pure again. How hopeful is that?”
This scene symbolizes not only Belle’s manipulation, but Hek’s addiction and the cautionary tale at the center of the Netflix series. Ultimately, Belle promoted pseudoscience and alternative therapies for serious diseases, promising an easier, softer way.
But they were based on false truths, ones that would have dire consequences.
The lies are catching up
NetflixAs for Belle, the walls are closing in on her. In the present day, she’s being hounded by investigative journalists Sean (Richard Davies) and Justin (Mark Coles Smith), whose wife Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) has cancer, and has been resistant to further treatment after following Belle.
But rather than provide them with the medical records they need (because they don’t exist), she instead decides to head to the funeral of Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey).
Milla is a significant part of the story in Apple Cider Vinegar, having discovered in her early 20s that she had epithelioid sarcoma.
Although doctors recommended she have her arm amputated to prevent the cancer from spreading, she instead followed the Hirsch plan, an alternative therapy that involves intensive juicing and coffee enemas.
For some time, the therapy works and Milla builds a brand for herself as a wellness influencer and writer. She’s someone Belle tries to get in with prior to The Whole Pantry.
NetflixHowever, Milla’s mother is diagnosed with colon cancer, and she too forgoes traditional treatment and dies soon after. While Milla is dealing with this, her cancer comes back.
Milla again seeks alternative therapies, using a corrosive compound called black salve, which only makes it worse. In her dying days, she works with her best friend and Belle’s former business manager Chanelle (Aisha Dee) to get the truth about Belle’s lies out there.
NetflixSo, as you can tell, Belle isn’t particularly welcome at Milla’s funeral. After worming her way into the wake, Channelle confronts her, saying, “She hated you. She didn’t hate anyone, but she hated you. Why are you here?”
But Belle chooses to ignore her. Rather than leaving, she goes to get “ice,” but the walls continue to close in on her. While driving, she gets a call from Fiona Cross, the mom who Belle set up a GoFundMe for to pay for her dying son’s cancer surgery.
Belle promoted the seemingly good deed across her social media pages, raising the $60,000 needed for the life-changing surgery. There’s just one problem: the money is gone. After refusing to believe the rumors about Belle’s lies, Fiona realizes that she’s been duped.
The Age gets a win
NetflixEventually, Belle gets chucked out of the wake after Milla’s widower Arlo (Chai Hansen) tells her that she gave Milla the creeps.
She checks into a hotel, grabs a load of anti-Whole Pantry snacks (energy drinks, chips, and chocolate), opens her laptop and searches for herself alongside the publication The Age.
Sean and Justin weren’t able to publish the allegations that Belle had been lying about having cancer, so instead they wrote a feature on the missing charity funds she claimed to have donated online.
Chanelle, who’s been helping them with their story, isn’t too pleased, telling them Belle’s followers will defend her. Meanwhile, Belle desperately attempts to put together a statement discrediting their article.
NetflixInitially, her plan seems to work: droves of netizens jump in to defend Belle, so much as that #istandwithBelle starts trending. However, it doesn’t take long for that to change.
As the flurry of hate messages start rolling in accusing Belle of lies and deception, she starts to tailspin, experiencing one of her famous migraines (which seem to be one of her tactics for getting out of tricky situations).
For Justin, Sean, and Chanelle, they finally get a win in their fight for the truth.
The Whole Pantry is a whole mess
NetflixOver at Penguin, publisher Julie (Catherine McClements) is in deep sh*t. Essentially, she agreed to take on Belle and publish her Whole Pantry cookbook, despite never having seen her medical records.
Julie’s boss is in crisis mode, and in one of many scenes that were ripped straight from reality, he plays a video in which Belle was prepared for media interviews and asked a number of questions to expect from journalists.
One of the questions is whether she’s changed her cancer treatment. Belle explains that she’s started a “German medicine protocol” that is “respected throughout Europe” but hasn’t made it to Australia yet.
When asked how it works, Belle replies, “It’s a machine, an electronic pulse, and it pushes medicine into my cells when that machine is operating on a program. And where there is DNA damage in my cells… I’m going to need to do some more reading on this.”
This is nearly word-for-word the answer Belle gave in the real-life interview preparation, which was handed over as evidence for a court case in 2016.
In Apple Cider Vinegar, the clip is played in the conference room, sparking a proverbial facepalm among the Penguin team.
Julie proposes distancing themselves from the Whole Pantry brand and withdrawing the book, but after such a glaring lack of due diligence, it doesn’t look like she’ll be working there for much longer.
A lot can happen in 60 Minutes
NetflixBelle continues to spiral. Her followers have turned against her (and rightly so), she finds out her book’s being withdrawn and pulped, and she tries to get herself into Apple HQ, only to get rugby tackled by a security guard. Oh, and ringworm has broken out across her face.
Finally, she gives in and goes home to her partner Clive (Ashley Zukerman) and her son. Clive is an interesting character. Essentially, Belle seduced him and used him.
She took his credit card to fund the creation of The Whole Pantry app, and she took advantage of his love for her son, allowing Clive to take care of him as a second father without giving him any parental rights.
Soon enough, Clive found out Belle was lying about her illnesses, but he made the decision to stay with her.
In the Apple Cider Vinegar finale, it seems like he may stray and tell the truth to Sean and Justin. However, in the end, he stays loyal to Belle.
She confronts him, questioning why he’d want to stay. “Because you love him?” she asks, to which Clive replies, “I love both of you.” Yes, despite the lies and betrayal, Clive still loves Belle.
Later, while enjoying a bowl of (non-gluten-free) pasta, Belle proposes a “reset… somewhere where there’s an actual start-up culture.”
Three months later, the three of them have moved to California, and Belle’s preparing for her infamous interview with 60 Minutes. Before she starts, she demands the full $75,000 payment upfront.
Cut between clips of Belle dodging questions like a seasoned politician, we see the Cross family in a different interview, discussing how they were scammed by the wellness influencer.
Justin later visits Fiona, who tearfully tells him that her young son Hunter has decided to stop treatment. She opens up about the fact that when she was pregnant with Hunter, she had a bleed and nearly lost him.
“When he was diagnosed, I thought really hard about whether I would rather have lost him then, before I knew him, or now, and I decided I’d rather know him,” she says. “It’s love, isn’t it? It’s how you face it. You don’t get a choice. You just do it.”
Ending explained
Right at the end of Apple Cider Vinegar, Justin and Lucy are reunited. They had been apart after disagreeing about the Belle situation, but they get back together, and Lucy agrees to go with their doctor’s cancer treatment.
NetflixWe’re shown a montage of Lucy undergoing surgery and chemo, cut between sweet clips of Justin and Lucy taking ice baths, singing karaoke, hanging on the beach, and messing around in a yoga class.
In the final shot, text across the screen reads, “In 2017, the Federal Court of Australia found Belle Gibson guilty of misleading…,” but before the sentence finishes, Dever’s Belle jumps in to say, “You know what? You can Google it.”
Don’t worry, we’ve got the results for you: she was found guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to claims about her charitable donations made through the sale of her book and app.
The charities involved included One Girl, the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre, the Birthing Kit Foundation, and the Schwarz family, whose story was represented by the Cross family in the series. Later that year, she was fined 410,000 Australian dollars.
How accurate is it to real life?
As it reveals in each episode in various ways, Apple Cider Vinegar is a “mostly true story based on a lie,” names have been changed, and Belle wasn’t paid for her story.
Text across the screen also states, “The following is inspired by a true story. Certain characters have been created or fictionalized.”
Many of the moments in the series did happen or are dramatized versions of them. However, other characters are representative of events and movements at that time.
The Hirsch Institute where Milla attends for alternative cancer therapy appears to have been influenced by the controversial Gerson Therapy, which similarly involves a specific organic diet with nutritional supplements and enemas to treat cancer and other diseases.
As stated by Cancer Research, “There is no scientific evidence that it can treat cancer or its symptoms.”
As well as her own wellness concepts, Belle promoted other alternative medical practices on her now-deleted social media pages including Gerson and anti-vaccination.
In real life, Belle attended the funeral of a woman named Jessica Ainscough, another wellness influencer whose story unfolded in the same way as Milla’s.
At the age of 22, Jessica was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma and eventually underwent Gerson Therapy, which she promoted at her Wellness Warrior Events.
AmazonAs she said on her blog at the time, around a year into the therapy, her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she too underwent the Gerson protocol but died in 2013.
In 2014, after Jessica’s cancer returned, she underwent conventional medical care but lost her battle in 2015, at age 29.
Also true to real life, when Belle’s claims came into question, Apple, Penguin, and the media were criticized for their lack of due diligence in verifying her medical history.
In terms of her love life, Belle was believed to be in a relationship with a man called Clive Rothwell, who was said to be like a “stepfather” to her son. However, in 2023, he was pictured with another woman, who the Daily Mail confirmed he was living with.
Where is the real Belle Gibson now?
As of 2025, it’s believed Belle is living in Australia and keeping a low profile. Ahead of the release of Apple Cider Vinegar, a source told Yahoo Lifestyle that she is “keen to see what they have done with the story.”
YouTube: 60 MinutesHowever, another source, said to be a close friend of Belle’s, suggested she’s not too happy with the streaming service. “No one from Netflix had contacted Belle. Apple Cider Vinegar is being made with zero contact with Belle,” they said.
They went on to say she “has told me she will not be watching the series prior to it being screened”.
The last time Belle was seen in person was in a video that emerged in 2020, when she had infiltrated Melbourne’s Oromo community from Ethiopia.
Wearing a headscarf and requesting that people refer to her as Sabontu, Belle unpacked an event she had just attended discussing the political situation in Oromia and their community in Melbourne.
“My heart is deeply embedded in the Oromo people, I feel blessed to be adopted by you,” she said.
However, in ITV’s 2023 documentary, Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, journalist Richard Guilliatt revealed that she was rejected by the community after they learned about who she was.
“She’s been going to meetings and calling herself Sabontu and speaking in broken Ethiopian dialect,” he said. “They were shocked to find out who she is, and she ends up being rejected by that community.”
In 2019, Belle was questioned by a federal court in Melbourne about allegedly spending $91,000 between 2017 and 2019, despite claiming she was unable to pay the fine. As reported by ABC News, when presented with this sum, she said, “I don’t believe your figure is correct.”
Since then, her home has been raided twice – once in 2020 and again in 2021 – although it’s unclear whether any of her possessions were seized, or if she has paid off any of her debt since then.
Will there be a Season 2?
Apple Cider Vinegar is a limited series with a definitive ending, making a Season 2 unlikely. Belle’s rise and fall have been fully explored, and there’s little left to tell that wouldn’t feel like a retread.
Plus, the real Belle Gibson has faded from public view. One way the show could viably continue is if it decided to follow-up as an anthology and focus on a different scam, but for now Netflix hasn’t announced any plans.
Apple Cider Vinegar is streaming on Netflix now. You can also read about the true story behind 1923, the Myka and James Stauffer docu-series, and the most shocking docs on Netflix.
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