Is Netflix’s ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Worm Scene Based On A Real Story?

(SPOILERS for Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar will be found below.)

A few years after the scammer-show extravaganza that took over streaming (those spaces have yielded to the spy-thriller resurrection), Apple Cider Vinegar is set to bring grifting back to Netflix. The series stars Kaitlyn Dever (Justified, No One Will Save You) and Alycia Debnam-Carey (The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, Fear The Walking Dead) as Australian “wellness” rivals who gathered substantial followings during Instagram’s early days.

Directed by Jeffrey Walker (The Artful Dodger, Modern Family) Apple Cider Vinegar chronicles the fiction woven by real-life figure Belle Gibson (Dever), whose falsehoods (particularly in peddling “cures” bolstered upon her false claims of a cancer diagnosis) ultimately led the Australian government to fine her for over $300,000 “for misleading her readers,” according to BBC.

Part of Gibson’s downfall involved a certain prime-time interview that exposed her many lies, including repeated name changes and insistence that she has always been “26” years old. She also admitted to that program that she “never had brain cancer” but denied that she is a pathological liar.

Is The Apple Cider Vinegar Worm Scene Based On A Real Story?

No, but this scene is based upon a false claim that Gibson truly made in real life. The situation has been dramatized by Netflix, as revealed in the below clip with arrives with this promise: “You’re not ready for this trainwreck of a story.” The clip not only makes reference to Gibson’s primetime meltdown but also visualizes her impossible claim (as portrayed in the series) of curing ringworm (which is a fungus) by guzzling a bottle of apple cider vinegar and then pulling a tapeworm (a parasite, obviously) out of her throat.

The answer to the above question, again, is no. Gibson did not cure herself of a worm with ACV, but this scene does tweak her real-life falsehood (this is so circular) as summarized by Sydney Morning Herald, in which Gibson claimed on social media to have expelled a large worm during an enema:

Gibson talks about having a colonic irrigation, and expelling a 15cm parasite, followed by “A HUGE ROPE WORM”, saying “it ruined my day almost not to be able to get this on video. Baha.’ “It was coiled around itself like a spiral about 5 or more times, and it took up the width of the tube, so based on this math, I’m guessing it was at least 60cm (at minimum!!). I felt such HUGE relief and was floating all day afterwards.”

Yikes. Perhaps producers decided that it was slightly less disgusting to have Kaitlyn Dever pull a worm out the front end rather than have it come out the other way? Thank goodness. The series synopsis declares, in part, “This is a true-ish story based on a lie, about the rise and fall of a wellness empire; the culture that built it up and the people who tore it down.”

Netflix‘s Apple Cider Vinegar is based upon is based upon The Woman Who Fooled the World (the 2017 book by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscanowill) and streams on February 6.