How was Joshua Schwarz involved in the Belle Gibson case? Details about The Search for Instagram's Worst Con Artist subject explored
Among the many people Belle Gibson scammed, the story of Joshua Schwarz is probably the most heartbreaking. He was a five-year-old boy with a rare type of disease, whom Belle Gibson sought out and claimed to be helping financially.
The Netflix series, The Search for Instagram's Worst Con Artist tells the story of the wellness scammer, Belle Gibson. She claimed that she ditched conventional cancer treatments and adopted some unconventional methods that cured her brain cancer.
However, it soon came to light that she was running an elaborate scam. Gibson never had cancer but she was creating misleading content claiming to have cured her illness and selling them to people, essentially scamming them of hundreds of dollars.
Who was Joshua Schwarz and how was he involved in the Belle Gibson case?
Joshua Schwarz was a five-year-old boy who was diagnosed with a rare incurable brain tumor in 2013. He was only the 16th person in the world who was known to have this condition, and his parents were initially told he had four months to live, as per a March 2015 report by Herald Sun.
In 2013, Belle Gibson was gaining a lot of popularity on social media as a blogger for her unconventional tips to cure cancer and she got in touch with Joshua's parents, Penne and Wolfgang, through social media. They became friends and Belle even arranged playdates for Joshua Schwarz and her son.
Gibson mentioned the Schwarz family in the acknowledgments section of her recipe book and even went so far as to call Joshua Schwarz "the second little man after my own heart." She posted a lot about him on social media and even claimed that the profits from her wellness app, The Whole Pantry, would go to him for the cause of his treatment and well-being.
However, the Schwarz family was not aware that Belle was claiming to be raising money for their son and they never received money from her. They also never gave any permission to Gibson to mention their son in her book. When Belle Gibson's scam was exposed in 2015, Joshua Schwarz's mother Penne told the Herald Sun:
“I feel humiliated and betrayed. I thought she was an inspiration. I feel like I don’t even know this person anymore.”
The Schwarz family was even heavily trolled online by people who accused them of lying about cancer and also of being involved in the scams with Belle Gibson. Joshua Schwarz passed away in January 2017.
Who is Belle Gibson in The Search for Instagram's Worst Con Artist and what did she do?
Belle Gibson is a former Australian social media influencer and blogger. She rose to fame by pretending to have brain cancer and curing her cancer through a variety of unconventional natural methods like lifestyle and diet changes.
She received an overwhelmingly positive response when she started out. Soon, she was inspired to launch her own app, The Whole Pantry, which is a collection of healthy recipes and lifestyle guides to cure cancer. She built a whole new brand around this which even included cookbook deals. Gibson managed to earn over half a million in less than two years from her ventures.
However, her rising fame was soon brought to a halt in 2015, when she was contacted by journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who had received a tip that Gibson was lying about her disease and wanted to interview her. Although the journalists did not have access to Gibson's medical records, they looked into her finances and began to question her claims of donating large portions of her profits to various charities.
It soon came to light that Gibson never had cancer and she was also not making the donations to charity that she claimed she would make. By March 2015, The Whole Pantry app was dropped, and she was ordered by the court to pay the fines for the claims she had made.
Catch the full story of Belle Gibson on The Search for Instagram's Worst Con Artist on Netflix.
