Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Netflix’s latest miniseries about a real life white blonde female scammer, Apple Cider Vinegar.
Apple Cider Vinegar: Miniseries
We live in the age of the narcissist. They rule over countries and tech conglomerates. They sneak into inboxes and algorithms. They run amok on dating apps and through friendship circles. In return, we desire to understand them. Preempt them. And, if need be, escape them. True crime has created its own entire subgenre for them which, when collided with our increasingly sceptical outlook on #girlboss feminism, has birthed a very specific type: the white blonde female scammer.
Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna was followed by Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, and is now joined by Kaitlyn Dever as Belle Gibson in Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar. All blonde, all white, all women, all lives built on deception. Gibson’s realm was wellness, specifically an app (and accompanying book) that claimed clean eating had beaten stage 4 brain cancer—except, as it turns out, she had fabricated the illness wholesale.
Apple Cider Vinegar, like all typical true crime stories, is heavily invested in its own shock and awe tactics: Britney Spears’s Toxic plays over a montage of Gibson’s stratospheric digital rise; we start with the headline revelation that she faked her cancer and work backwards; Dever impresses with a full-throated performance and perfected Australian accent.
Yet, showrunner and co-writer Samantha Strauss does balance out Gibson’s outrageousness by amplifying what was, in real-life, a fairly mild rivalry between her and wellness blogger Jessica Ainscough, here fictionalised as Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey). Milla actually has cancer. She also peddles the same dangerous ideas as Gibson. She’s both victim and perpetrator—and instantly more compelling as a character.
There’s also an amalgamated stand-in for Gibson’s followers, Tilda Cobham-Hervey’s Lucy. She comes to see clean eating as an escape from the endless rounds of chemotherapy. Through her and Milla, and to some degree Gibson, we start to build a picture of how messy and emotionally chaotic this space can be. Cancer treatment, even when successful, is a brutal experience. Milla is informed by her doctors that the only way to treat her soft tissue sarcoma is through amputation. Desperation becomes the fuel for delusion.
The psychology here is firmly pop. Gibson lovebombs Milla’s assistant Chanelle (Aisha Dee) to gain her loyalty; when confronted, she descends into hysterical, self-pitying tears; she collects other people’s pain and regurgitates it as her own. We find out that she’s the daughter of a narcissistic mother (Essie Davis, always electric), and that her transformation into a compulsive liar can be pinned down to a desire for attention and control.
Yet, Gibson isn’t the sole person to blame here. She’s not especially clever or maniacal, or as adept in falsehoods as Delvey—she simply latched herself onto a vulnerable community like a limpet, abetted by publishers and women’s magazines happy to overlook the red flags because a good narrative makes money, and there’s no better narrative than “I beat brain cancer”.
Apple Cider Vinegar is more nuanced than you might expect, but it’s also inevitably a Netflix true crime series aware its audience is waiting for their comeuppance with a feminist twist, meaning that Gibson is both humiliated and allowed to wrap up her narrative with a sly smirk into camera. She’s one of those “difficult women”, you see. Her unruliness, inevitably, has to be a small source of admiration. The show secretly wants her to win, despite the damage she’s done.
Yet, that tension, that awkward hypocrisy, is ironically what makes these kinds of stories feel oddly valuable. We’re watching pop culture wrestle with itself in real-time. There’s a scene, even, where a female journalist tries to berate her male colleagues prepping the Gibson story by pointing out it’s International Women’s Day. “Your smug is showing,” she declares. She thinks it’s checkmate. Then someone points out one of the journalists is Lucy’s husband (Mark Coles Smith).
Each episode starts with a character addressing the camera with the standard disclosure: “This is a true story based on a lie. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Belle Gibson has not been paid for the re-creation of her story.” I was struck by the inclusion of that final line, “not been paid”. I thought about when Anna Delvey competed in Dancing with the Stars in her ankle monitor, and wondered how Gibson herself will be impacted by the show, for better or worse. It’s telling that Apple Cider Vinegar is aware of the issue. Does it tackle it head on? No. But in even admitting it? The true crime shows are becoming self-aware.
