When Jessica Ainscough’s memorial was held nearly ten years ago, the church could barely contain the hundreds of mourners.
A sprinter at school and a dynamo in life, the 29-year-old, who’d spent seven years battling cancer, was known to the 1.5 million people who followed her on her blog and social media as the ‘Wellness Warrior’.
But to those who truly loved her, she was Jet.
When close family and friends retired to Jess’s home on Australia’s subtropical Sunshine Coast for the wake, they hoped for a private and intimate gathering to respectfully remember her.
So you can imagine their surprise when celebrity health influencer and fellow cancer sufferer Belle Gibson knocked on the door, having flown nearly 1,000 miles from her home in Melbourne for the service of a woman she had barely known.
But it’s what happened next that was truly alarming.
Once inside, Belle, then 23, began weeping hysterically. Initially she seemed distressed over Jess’s death.
But as she sat on the floor of the bedroom Jess had shared with her fiance, commercial property consultant Tallon Pamenter, it soon became clear to onlookers trying to comfort her that she wasn’t crying over the tragic loss of a beautiful young woman; she was upset about her own alleged diagnosis.
‘She was more concerned that she had a brain tumour and that she might not have a long time to live,’ recalls Melanie Elliott, who had been best friends with Jess since the beginning of high school in Queensland.
‘We were all comforting her. As strange as it was that she was even there, we were comforting her, believing this poor girl was dealing with an incredibly difficult prognosis.’
Belle even drew Tallon, still in shock at the death of the woman he had planned to marry that coming September, into a private conversation in the bedroom, sobbing on his shoulder.
While friends felt Belle’s outpourings were inappropriate, it was nothing compared to the bombshell that dropped just a few days later, when it emerged that the global wellness entrepreneur – one of Instagram’s first ‘super influencers’ – might not be what she seemed.
Belle had amassed more than 300,000 followers with her story of how, after being told she only had four months to live, she ‘cured’ her inoperable brain cancer through healthy eating, massages and alternative therapies.
She referenced oxygen therapy, herbal treatments and a diet free of gluten and refined sugar, and launched an app and wrote a cookbook off the back of this.
But her narrative of deceit quickly began to unravel as it was revealed that money she made from app and book sales (at least £220,000) which she had promised to donate to charities had never reached them.
With pressure mounting as more and more journalists began investigating her claims, Belle admitted in April 2015 that she had lied about having terminal brain cancer that had spread to her spleen, liver, blood and uterus, saying: ‘None of it is true.’
The so-called ‘queen bee of wellness’ was not an inspiration, but a heartless hoaxer who’d duped genuine cancer sufferers with her web of lies.
If Jess’s friends were furious to learn that Belle had deceived them during their time of grief, they’re equally concerned that the pair are again being linked in forthcoming Netflix drama Apple Cider Vinegar, starring Golden Globe nominee Kaitlyn Dever as Belle and Alycia Debnam-Carey as Milla, a character inspired by Jess.
Billed as a ‘true-ish story based on a lie’, it dramatises the birth of the influencer industry – in particular ‘two young women who set out to cure their life-threatening illnesses through health and wellness’. The issue? Only one of them had cancer.
The title refers to an ingredient that was lauded for being full of magical, anti-cancer properties, though this has been widely debunked.
Jess’s friends say that the woman they knew should not be tarnished with the same brush as conwoman Belle.
Indeed, Belle’s own brother Nick told me in a previous interview for this newspaper that she should be in prison.
In 2017, Belle was found guilty of five breaches of consumer law and fined £240,000 for misleading her readers about donating money to charity.
The actress playing Milla says: ‘It’s a heartbreaking story of the damage they both caused.’
But Jess’s story is as conflicting as it is traumatic. Though she was indeed a cancer sufferer, she also spread misinformation about healing herself with unproven methods.
To some she was simply another fraudster, a new-century influencer who turned her back on conventional medicine and peddled claims of holding her cancer at bay with coffee enemas, hourly juices and eating clay.
To others, she was a determined and curious young woman desperately trying to save her cancer-struck left arm, her life and her beloved mum Sharyn who, in the cruellest twist of fate, was also struck down with breast cancer.
Blonde, fit, talented and ambitious, Jess was one of those sunny-natured Australian girls who seemed destined for happiness and success when she graduated from university and quickly landed a prestigious job as an online editor for popular teen magazine Dolly.
The first sign that anything was wrong was her left hand seizing up. As Melanie, who was living with her in Sydney at the time, recalls, doctors originally thought she had arthritis.
But after further investigation revealed tumours in her arm, she was diagnosed in 2008 with epithelioid sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer which largely affects young adults.
As Jess would later explain, doctors initially advised amputation of her arm, but then came to her at the last minute recommending high doses of chemotherapy. Initially, it seemed to work, with scans showing she was clear of cancer.
But, less than a year after she went into remission, the chemo had stopped working and the tumours returned.
It was in 2010 that she opted out of conventional medicine and set about not only trying to heal herself with an unproven treatment known as Gerson therapy – which involves daily coffee enemas and a heavy regime of dietary supplements – but also building a following through her blog The Wellness Warrior.
‘I refused to follow the doctor’s orders,’ she wrote in an article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. ‘After being told by several doctors and surgeons at the top of their field that my only real chance of long-term survival would be to have my arm amputated at the shoulder I decided to seek an alternative.
‘I politely refused their offers of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and began searching for natural cancer treatments.
‘The way I saw it I had two choices: I could rely on the slash, poison and burn method offered to me by the medical profession and become stuck in the “cancer patient” category, or I could take responsibility for my illness and bring my body to optimum health so that it can heal itself.’
Our bodies, she said, quoting Plato, do not want to die. ‘I’m not going to let them cut my arm off,’ she declared, claiming doctors had only given her 50/50 odds that surgery would cure her of cancer.
And with that, Jess quit her job and headed to Mexico to learn Gerson therapy.
The controversial regime, which has been rejected by cancer institutes around the world, is so strict that Jess effectively became housebound when she returned to Australia: she drank 13 raw juices a day in hourly intervals, had five coffee enemas per day and ate only an organic, plant-based diet and supplements.
She wrote that she devoted her life to healing, trying everything from sea cucumbers to bovine cartilage, and even professing to eating clay to ‘detoxify’ herself.
If her glowing face and upbeat attitude gave hope to other cancer sufferers, Jess was also using her growing social media skills to build a wider audience and gain the attention of a publisher, who commissioned her book Make Peace With Your Plate, published in 2013.
Her success had also been noticed by young mum Belle Gibson, who had recently started her own Instagram page, @healing_belle, full of perfectly curated snapshots of her holistic lifestyle.
She soon eclipsed Jess and launched an app, The Whole Pantry, in 2013, which attracted 200,000 users in the first month.
It was voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of the year and, by the end of 2014, Belle’s story of healing her own brain cancer with healthy food and alternative therapies had bagged her a cookbook deal and Cosmopolitan magazine’s Fun Fearless Female award.
Belle and Jess first met in April 2013 when Jess was addressing a Self-Love And Sisterhood conference in Melbourne, a scene replicated in Apple Cider Vinegar.
While the pair commented on each other’s social media posts, both Jess’s former fiancé Tallon, now 39, and Melanie, her old school-friend, 40, are emphatic that they were never friends, as the show suggests.
‘Belle was of no relevance to Jess,’ says Melanie. ‘Jess was focused on her own journey with cancer. She wasn’t in competition with Belle.’
In any case, Jess was consumed with other challenges. In April 2011, as she continued to use alternative treatments to keep her cancer at bay, all the while building her own audience, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Like her daughter, she shunned conventional treatment. In a video uploaded on The Wellness Warrior blog, which is no longer available, Jess explained why Sharyn was refusing a lumpectomy, mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation, and instead opting for Gerson therapy.
Her mother had been inspired by ‘seeing how much the therapy helped me’, she said.
Sharyn died in October 2013. The cancer, wrote Jess, had ‘got ahead of her’. Her mum had chosen to see out the final months of her life in ‘a way that was exactly right for her’.
Her mother’s death naturally had a huge impact on Jess, and her own healthsuddenly went downhill.
Her mother’s death naturally had a huge impact on Jess, and her own health suddenly went downhill.
As Jess wrote to her followers: ‘When my mum became really ill, my cancer started to become aggressive again. After she died, things really started flaring up.’
She suffered through ten months of constant bleeding from tumours in her arm and shoulder, but Jess attributed becoming unwell to her mother’s death.
Eventually, however, her discomfort was so extreme that she finally sought treatment from an oncologist, who prescribed radiation treatment.
Her friends and family maintain, despite contradictory reports at the time, that in the end Jess died in February 2015 from complications from the radiation.
‘The cancer hadn’t travelled to her organs,’ insists Melanie. ‘She followed a well-researched regimen that successfully kept the cancer contained in her arm.
‘On the advice of her oncologist she underwent radiation treatment which led to complications, and she died in the hospital where she was being treated.
‘The narrative suggesting that Jess’s wellness approach caused her passing is completely false and the portrayal of her as naive or disregarding of medical advice is deeply hurtful to those who knew her bravery and diligence in exploring treatment options.’
But what if she’d had her arm amputated seven years earlier when she was first diagnosed, or when doctors suggested it later when her tumours returned? What if she had opted for further conventional treatment?
Her family, in a statement at the time of her death, said they’d consulted oncologists and refute the suggestion that her chances of survival would have increased.
It’s exactly this nuance which Apple Cider Vinegar creator Samantha Strauss has tried to capture.
‘What we’ve tried to do in this series is to show that none of these issues are entirely black and white – we wanted it to live in the grey zone,’ she says.
But as the show’s release coincides with the ten-year anniversary of Jess’s death, her loved ones are distraught that her memory is being sullied by association with Belle.
Melanie now lives in London and Tallon got married in 2023, last week welcoming a baby boy with his wife Tamsyn.
But both are just as protective of Jess as they ever were, and are in regular contact with her dad Col, 72, who lost his only child after only recently becoming a widower.
As they say, Jess passed away unaware that Belle was a fraud. ‘The fact that this new series would put a fake cancer fraudster like Belle Gibson – guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in a court of law – in the same storyline as a beautiful, honest person like our Jess is an absolute insult,’ they told the Mail.
‘Jess was a warrior in every essence of the word and we won’t let anything take aim at her character or her legacy.’
Apple Cider Vinegar is available to stream on Netflix from tomorrow.
