⚡️MINI: Tara Brown Reflects On Her Iconic Interview With Belle Gibson

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Having a great Monday afternoon. Woodrow, there's this. I mean,

(00:04):
I shouldn't be saying Netflix are about to get Channel
nine's leading journalist on. But Netflix have released this big
show Apple side of innegat which all the.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Kids are by Channel nines interviews, very good.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
It's all about Belle Gibson.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
So it's a dramatization about how she basically convinced the
world that she had multiple cancers, including brain cancer, and
then use holistic alternative medicines and exercise to heal herself.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
And she brought out an app. She was selling, an
app called Whole Pantry. These are the foods I ate
to get over brain cancer.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
So she makes a lot of money. She claims to
have donated a whole bunch of money. Turns out she
didn't really donate much money. But the really interesting thing
about this, and as you said before, is that she
sits down just afterwards with Tara Brown, who's you know,
sixty minutes leading person, and Tara absolutely bull dozes that
and just picks the eyes out of her. And it's

(00:54):
quite fascinating to hear some of the audio. So we're
going to talk to Tara in two seconds, but just
to give you a little bit of of a sense
if you missed the interview, if you haven't heard any
of it, it is once again and deservedly going absolutely
boned online. Here's just a little bit of Tara interviewing
Belle about the claims that she made about her cancer.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
You go on Instagram in twenty thirteen. I have been
healing a severe and malignant brain cancer for the past
four years with natural medicine, Gerson therapy in foods. It's
working for me.

Speaker 5 (01:27):
It is.

Speaker 4 (01:28):
And if any you didn't have brain cancer, No I didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Oh my god. Tara Brown joins us. Now welcome Tara.

Speaker 6 (01:37):
Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
Tara.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
My first question is how do you go about interviewing
someone that you know is consistently lying to your face.

Speaker 6 (01:48):
Well, I went into the interview believing that she wanted
to tell the truth and explain why she had been
loose with the truth which had sort of been exposed
by some breachjournalism at the age and through a whistleblower friend.
And she's done from Women's Weekly, and I thought she
was coming on to sort of stay sorry, to explain

(02:10):
what had happened. It was a misunderstanding, and so forth,
but it just became a very slippery slide into more
and more nonsense. To be honest, like just in Comport,
just some of the stuff that Belle was saying just
didn't kind of make sense and was clearly continued fantasy
in some ways, I guess to sidestep her accountability, her

(02:34):
responsibility for misleading really desperate people.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, and kind of funny at the start, Like you know,
when I ask my two year old if she's stolen
something or like eating something and she's got chocolate all
over her face and she's cool and she says no,
Like initially it's funny, but then you're like, we'll come on,
Like just for the sake of our relationship, we need
some sort of trust here, because I can't keep conversing
to if you're going to keep lying to me that

(02:58):
the level of her deception is almost to the point
where she can't even tell herself when she's telling the
truth anymore.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
I've got another bit of audio from the interview. Have listened.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
How old are you?

Speaker 5 (03:11):
I've always been raised as being currently a twenty six
year old?

Speaker 4 (03:18):
How old are you?

Speaker 5 (03:20):
Well? I live knowing as I've always known that I
would be twenty six.

Speaker 4 (03:24):
Okay, Bill, I've a really really simple question, how old
are you?

Speaker 5 (03:31):
I believe that I'm twenty six. I have two birth certificates,
and I've had my name change four times.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Oh my goodness, did you ever find out how old?

Speaker 4 (03:40):
She used?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Tara?

Speaker 6 (03:42):
No, And you know, by that stage, I think I
was long past care.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
She sounds like a sixteen year old out the front
of a nightclub.

Speaker 6 (03:52):
I know. I look, I'm not trying to mock her,
but I mean, I don't know. What are you meant
to do when you get that as an answer. She
had asked in the lead up to that question repeatedly
for medical her medical records, and because her big play
was that she had tried conventional medicine and had worked
for her so she found another way. And then after

(04:13):
the interview, she actually did supply some medical records from
the Alphorred which made it very clear that she knew
she did not have cancer or at that time she'd
gone there looking for multiple She thought she'd had multiple sclerosis,
which was something no multiple sclosis, which was something that
her mother in facts of it. When she went to
the doctor for tests, she was cleared of that. And

(04:36):
when I got hold of those medical records. I then
rang medical professionals to say, if if you're testing somebody
for multiple sclerosis and they have brain cancer or brain tumor,
will that come up in the scans that you've done.
And they said absolutely, And she did not have any
brain cancers according to those scans. She was given a

(04:58):
clean bill of health in a face to face meeting
with a doctor and it was in black and white.
And she knew that when she launched the app, and
she knew that when she launched the Whole Pantry cookbook,
and she knew that when she sat down for that interview.
And yet she maintained that she feared she'd had cancer
because that's what she'd been told.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, wild I just can't understand why she did this,
Like this was always going to come out as well.
You've sat there with her, You've had chats with the
you know what. I'm sure the cameras aren't rolling, the
mics aren't running. Do you have a view on why
she's done this?

Speaker 6 (05:29):
No, I don't, And I think it's too easy to
say she was young. However old she was at the time.
That's you know, because the consequences of what she was
broking were so dire for people who believed the image
that she was selling, and she was the embodiment of health,
and she was playing in a world where there are

(05:51):
very desperate people seeking answers, and for some people, the
potential for any person to leave the path of conventional
medicine for what Bell was selling could have been the
difference between life and deeds.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
That is very, very scary thing playing for ship stations,
isn't she? Do you know where she's at now?

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Because I'm sure there are justifiably a whole lot of
people who have either paid for a app or followed
her methods and made donations. As you pointed out before,
you know, even just so livid about the fact that
you know, maybe they have actually had someone who has

(06:31):
you know, that they've loved to has died from cancer,
who you know that was terrifying to them. And here
she is talking about going for a jog and getting
rid of it.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
What are you Where is she now?

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Because for me that I'm sure she's in hiding in
some sort well.

Speaker 6 (06:46):
I don't know whether it's officially in hiding. I think
the general consensus is she's keeping a very low profile
at the moment, but it's still in Melbourne somewhere. But
in terms of what she's doing for a job, well,
I have no idea. There was a fairly well publicized
turn where she had joined an Ethiopian community for some time,

(07:09):
and then that somehow went away. I think the community
once they've discovered who it was today.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
She changed her name a few times as well. Is
that right?

Speaker 6 (07:17):
When she was trying to explain why she didn't know
how old she was, she claimed that she'd had four
different identities and two birth certificates, and so I'm not
sure she might be.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Lying, Like you can't everything, even though the lies about lies,
you can't believe because that might be a lie.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure sure.

Speaker 6 (07:40):
It is very twisted and confusing and kind of sad
in a way. During the interview, at one point she
got very upset when we're talking about her brother and
her family, and she'd left the room, and then she
came back and did the interview again. At one point
we had a break where we were just beseeching her
to supply us with her medical records, you know, telling,

(08:02):
you know, really advising her. I'm happy for all my
questions to be wrong. If you can prove your position,
and medical records will do that. So that was sort
of a bit of the advice, really desperate advice to
they just show us and all this questioning goes away,
And ultimately she did, but it was the smoking gun

(08:23):
and showed that she in fact knew she had been
while she was claiming to be terminally ill, she had
a clean bill of health.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
So it's it's like, it's just.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
One of the producers has just written because you just
mentioned her brother, Tara, that apparently Belle's brother.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
She claims to be autistic, but he isn't.

Speaker 6 (08:50):
Well, he says he's not. He's on our special Tonight,
Dangerous Lives. He's he's included in that, and you know,
very it's clearly very sad because there's a lot of
dysfunction within that family and I think mourns for the
sister that he feels he lost. But yeah, she got

(09:14):
upset at that time is the interview, because she claimed
that about him. They didn't sit down expecting the responses
I got from Bell. It was like, oh, okay, really,
we don't know how old we are.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
There was just we don't know how we are.

Speaker 6 (09:32):
It kind of unraveled unexpectedly for me.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
If you want to watch that, The Unmasking of Belle
Gibson Dangerous Lies airs tonight nine to ten on Channel nine.
You can catch up, of course on nine now if
you'd have a chance to watch it tonight, you can
see really behind the scenes of just what happened with
this interview. That is, there's again resurfaced in the wake
of this Netflix show that's put even more heat on

(09:55):
Belle Gibson. But yeah, Tara Brown was really the one
who broke the story for Channel nine.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
It sounds wild.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Tara, thanks so much for giving some insight and well
as much insight as we can get into something that
we will just never understand.

Speaker 6 (10:08):
Uh, be happy to be confounded, I think, yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, great Tara around here
on willing Wody.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Thanks Tara, thank you so much.

Speaker 6 (10:17):
Appreciate your time.