The Cancer Scams That Foreshadowed MAHA

In 1986, Gilda Radner, one of “Saturday Night Live” ’s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer, at the age of forty. She underwent a hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, entered remission, and became the public face of a support group for cancer patients called the Wellness Community, which focussed on positive thinking. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine with the headline “Gilda Radner’s Answer to Cancer: Healing the Body with Mind and Heart.” Then she learned that her cancer had spread.

Overwhelmed by fear and despair, Radner, who had a history of eating disorders, was drawn to members of the Wellness Community who followed a strict macrobiotic diet. “They seemed the least nervous and most in control of their lives,” she observes in her memoir, “It’s Always Something.” A beautiful woman with lymphoma made macrobiotic meals for Radner and told her that the diet has “cured a lot of people.” Radner hired a live-in macrobiotic chef, who fed her rice cream, miso soup, bean curd, and puréed vegetables, and instructed her to walk in her “stocking feet on the stones in the driveway” to help her intestines. She began to spend more time alone; her friends “asked too many questions about macrobiotics.”

Soon, Radner writes, “I was in outer space—feeling pure, chewing my food, blessed by God, sure that I had cancer under control and that it was disappearing from my body.” In fact, her blood levels of CA-125—an antigen that can be measured to detect ovarian cancer—had tripled, and her weight had dropped to ninety-three pounds. When she re-started chemotherapy, she was severely underweight, dehydrated, and required blood transfusions. Radner died in May, 1989, and it’s possible that her macrobiotic experiment hastened her death.

Of course, conventional medicine, too, was often outmatched by Radner’s illness. Before her cancer was even detected, she had spent ten months going to various doctors with symptoms of fatigue and worsening pain. (An internist thought she had Epstein-Barr; a gastroenterologist wondered if her “problems were emotional.”) Nutrition gave Radner a sense of mastery and self-determination, and her memoir is affecting for how clearly she sees the odd dichotomy of her macrobiotic crusade: it’s at once “bonko, completely nutty” and provides a necessary channel for rerouting her dread and helplessness. “I had been in such desperate straits that this became the panacea,” she writes. “I could get up in the morning. I could live.”

I thought of Radner often while watching the new Netflix miniseries “Apple Cider Vinegar,” which is based on the wretched saga of Belle Gibson (played by Kaitlyn Dever), an Australian wellness influencer. Gibson’s miraculous tale of healing a malignant brain tumor through healthy eating turned out to be a hoax: she never had cancer at all. The series triangulates her lucrative flimflam with the stories of Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), an influencer in Gibson’s orbit who treats her rare form of cancer with juicing and enemas, and a barista with cancer named Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who has reached the same valley of panicked dejection that Radner did before she climbed into macrobiotics. We watch in horror as Lucy is ensorcelled by Gibson’s fraudulent account of snuffing out her disease with lemon-infused water and goji berries.

Like so many Netflix products, “Apple Cider Vinegar” is three times as long as it needs to be and built on the tacit assumption that the viewer will wander in and out of the room at will. And yet its braided narratives generate a compelling case study in how a smart and sensible person could end up where Radner did, barefoot on her driveway to help her intestines, lightheaded from hunger, missing her friends, and yet feeling confident, empowered, “in control” of her deadly illness—and how easy it would be for a grifter to lead her to that place.

Gibson began building an audience on Instagram in 2013, posting radiant, glossy-lip selfies alongside recipes for protein-infused smoothies and colorful salads. The palette was grapefruit pinks and dark, leafy greens as refracted through a glass of sparkling water; the presentation was as carefully carefree as her silky blowouts. Gibson was young, white, and pretty, with a dainty nose ring, a photogenic child, and an incredible story. Years earlier, she told her followers, physicians had informed her that she had “a severe and malignant brain cancer,” and just weeks or months to live. She abandoned chemotherapy and radiation, even though her “doctors freaked out,” and devised her own treatment plan of clean eating and holistic medicine.

Within a few years of purportedly receiving a death sentence, Gibson had given birth to her son, acquired a robust following on social media, and started a wildly successful healthy-eating app, The Whole Pantry, which featured recipes free of gluten, dairy products, and refined sugar. In 2014, Australia’s Cosmopolitan gave Gibson its “Fun Fearless Female” award, Penguin Books Australia published Gibson’s first cookbook, and Apple selected The Whole Pantry as one of the apps that would come preloaded on its forthcoming Apple Watch.

Gibson might have hummed along indefinitely as a wellness demi-guru, unvetted and unbothered, had she been able to resist the urge to top herself. In the summer of 2014, she announced that her cancer had spread to her blood, spleen, uterus, and liver. (“Please don’t carry my pain,” she begged her followers. “I’ve got this.”) A predictable outpouring of support followed online, but skepticism bubbled up as well. Commenters pointed out that brain cancer tends not to spread beyond the nervous system and that Gibson’s relentless travel schedule did not square with her account of debilitating illness. The journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano began looking into Gibson’s medical history and charitable donations, and, in 2015, exposed her lies in the Melbourne-based daily The Age. (“Apple Cider Vinegar” is based on their 2017 book “The Woman Who Fooled the World.”)

When observers acknowledged the obvious—that Gibson did not look or behave like a person whose body was riddled with cancer—she lashed out, writing, “I have been really unsupported this whole entire time and now that I have my fucking hair back, aren’t poisoning myself with chemo, have a job and do ‘alive people things’ I’m suddenly okay and my limited support is entitled to disregard my emotions, needs and situation even more? Total bullshit.” Nevertheless, Apple soon dumped the app, Simon & Schuster pulped the U.S. print run of her cookbook, and, in 2017, an Australian federal court fined Gibson more than four hundred thousand Australian dollars for violations of consumer law—including a hundred and fifty thousand for breaking a promise to donate a portion of her app’s sales to the family of a boy with terminal brain cancer.

Dever’s performance in “Apple Cider Vinegar” strikes a smart balance between cartoon villainy and untreated personality disorder; her Belle is a pitiable and scary void, a human salad spinner of other people’s desperation, hope, and good faith. But it’s Milla, Belle’s rival influencer, who is the series’ most psychologically fascinating character. Both of these women have a predatory stake in quackery, but it’s Milla who has actually staked her life on it.

Milla is closely based on Jessica Ainscough, a prominent Australian influencer who billed herself as the Wellness Warrior. When she was twenty-two, Ainscough was diagnosed with a rare form of skin cancer, and doctors eventually recommended the amputation of her arm at the shoulder. Ainscough decided instead to pursue an alt-treatment known as Gerson therapy, in which the cancer patient “detoxifies” her body by drinking fresh-pressed juice and undergoing coffee enemas. “The way I saw it I had two choices,” Ainscough explained in a 2010 op-ed. “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.”

This ethos had affinities with that of Louise Hay, a best-selling New Age author who ran support groups in the nineteen-eighties and nineties for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and who argued for the power of positive thinking, verbal affirmation, and unusual diets in overcoming disease. Hay blamed her own cervical cancer on the bitterness she still felt for abuse she had suffered in childhood, and she claimed that therapy, forgiveness, colonic irrigation, and eating two ounces of puréed asparagus three times a day had “resulted in dissolving the cancer naturally.” (In Todd Haynes’s 1995 film, “Safe,” about a woman suffering from a mysterious environmental illness, a wellness guru partly inspired by Hay tells his acolytes that the “only person who can make you sick is you.”)

Ainscough embraced a similar outlook of self-rescue. “I saved my own life,” she declared. It was a mantra of sorts, but not, in the end, a statement of fact. Her mother, who followed the Gerson method after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, died in 2013, two and a half years after her diagnosis, and Ainscough died in 2015, at the age of twenty-nine.

In 2011, the sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the term “conspirituality” to define a belief system that fuses New Age spirituality with a conspiracy-theory mind-set. They seemed to foretell Gibson and Ainscough’s formula of positivity, “natural” remedies, and deep distrust of the medical establishment. Like the wellness warriors of today, Gibson fearmongered about fluoridated water and the H.P.V. vaccine—she claimed, without evidence, that Gardasil had caused her brain tumor. Ainscough, who told her followers that cancer is symptomatic of a “toxic diet, toxic mind and toxic environment,” believed that corporations and Big Pharma were incentivized to maintain a status quo of toxicity. “I don’t believe they will ever find a cure, and if they do would they make it public knowledge? Not unless another bread-winning disease breaks out to replace cancer,” Ainscough wrote in her 2010 op-ed. She went on, “It’s too big to cure.”

Conspirituality metastasized during the COVID pandemic and is most vividly embodied today in the coterie that surrounds Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; his anti-vaccine and anti-Big Food nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, where Kennedy served as the chairman and chief litigation counsel from 2015 until 2023; and the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, where paleo-swole paranoiacs hawk vitamin supplements to mermaid-coiffed warrior moms who warn of lethal food additives in children’s snacks. (Kennedy shares Gibson’s aversion to both water fluoridation and Gardasil; he has referred hundreds of personal-injury lawsuits related to the latter, which he has called “very, very closely connected with severe depression and with suicidal behavior.” Merck, Gardasil’s manufacturer, denies his claims and maintains that its vaccine is safe.)

The so-called MAHA moms, some of whom recently showed up at the Senate to support Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, are “the mothers of children with autism, allergies, and ADHD,” the Free Press, a heterodox online outlet, explained. “Many are former Democrats, but they feel like their cause transcends party lines—shouldn’t everyone want clean water, fresh air, and healthy foods?” These parents have often experienced a radicalizing moment that broke their faith in the medical establishment: a doctor who didn’t listen when they reported a pregnancy or postpartum complication, or who brushed off symptoms of serious illness. Or they may simply feel an anguished need to account for their child’s disease or disability. Kennedy, for one, seems eager to serve this need. In conversations with the journalist Ryan D’Agostino, whose six-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia in 2016, Kennedy strongly implied that the boy’s cancer was caused by the polio and M.M.R. vaccines. (The only person who can make you sick is you—or your parents, if they had you vaccinated.)

In the MAHA swirl, “clean eating,” vaccine skepticism, and even alternative cancer treatments can all become tools for “eliminating toxic exposure,” which is the avowed goal of Children’s Health Defense. This collapse of discrete phenomena is, in part, a consequence of the appeal-to-nature fallacy that dominates the wellness world—the notion that whatever is deemed to be “natural” is superior to the biologically synthetic. What isn’t “natural” is, to borrow one of Kennedy’s favorite words, “poison.” This fallacy is evident, for example, in the writings of Ty Bollinger, one of the under-credentialled experts whom Ainscough cited to support her nutrition plan. Bollinger is now a textbook conspiritualist and Trump supporter whose Web site, the Truth About Cancer, had a mutually beneficial affiliate-marketing relationship with Children’s Health Defense for a time. His wife, Charlene, told the far-right activist Laura Loomer last year, “Cancer is just an imbalance. Your body is out of balance. Something happened and the tumor is actually a blessing.” In November, Charlene claimed to be working with President Trump’s transition team “to put together something beautiful so that Bobby Kennedy can roll out his vision.”

On the HBO series “Succession,” a pair of billionaire brothers hand the Presidential election to a fascist-lite provocateur, whose victory speech is a paean to nationalist hygiene that Mussolini might have admired: “Don’t we long, sometimes, for something clean, once, in this polluted land? That’s what I hope to bring. Not something grubby with compromise. Something clean and true and refreshing. Something proud and pure.” President Trump is famously attracted to such imagery. He has called his political opponents “vermin”; he has proposed, of postwar Gaza, that “we just clean out that whole thing”; he has said, of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” They are the bacteria that need to be colonically irrigated, the liver toxin that needs to be juice-cleansed.

Trump would seem to share few of the habits or preoccupations of the wellness influencers, and yet their project is in synch with his own. It is apt for affiliates of the party of personal responsibility to suggest that a cancer patient may be culpable for her suffering if she happens to make unnatural choices. This suggestion may even offer some solace to the patient, as at least it offers the illusion of control. And it is apt for a revanchist movement to aspire after an unattainable form of cleanliness and purity in both its customs and its demographics. Alas, neither a body nor a body politic can ever be finished cleaning all the shit out of its system.

In “It’s Always Something,” Radner remembers waking up from surgery with her husband, Gene Wilder, at her bedside. “They got it all,” he tells her. “They got everything they could see. They got you clean.” When Radner’s cancer recurs, she is not only frightened and devastated; after becoming “a symbol of getting well,” she writes, she is revealed as “just a fraud.” By becoming ill, Radner is somehow compromised, corrupt. She was “clean” and now she’s dirty. One might wonder if she felt like more of a fake for having cancer than Belle Gibson ever did for not having it.

When Radner writes about the woman with lymphoma who introduced her to macrobiotics, she emphasizes how gorgeous and ethereal she was. She “had golden red curly hair, and when light shone through it she glowed,” Radner writes. She starts calling her the Angel of Life. An angel doesn’t have a body, certainly not a fallible one full of viscera and waste and gore. Her insides wouldn’t run with blood. One imagines some kind of burbling stream, clean and pure, flowing with bone broth or mint-ginger water, sunshine glinting off its surface, and the air so fresh. ♦