NZ Skeptics Articles

Issues logical and lexical: A scavenger hunt through Jessica Ainscough's digital detritus

Bronwyn Rideout - 18 February 2025

Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV from here on in) is described in its press release, and in the opening scenes of each episode, as inspired by a true story, with certain characters and events being fictionalised or created. Standard stuff for this type of ripped-from-the-headlines, true crime docudrama. However, with the ongoing defamation lawsuit around another Netflix property, Baby Reindeer, we can forgive the producers and writers for wanting to preserve their creative license.

But, when it came to the character of Milla Blake… I think they should have gone back to driver’s ed class.

Let me explain.

In a recent article by Vulture, ACV creator Samatha Strauss claimed that:

“Milla’s an amalgamation of a few wellness influencers, but also someone who was created in the writers’ room. I wanted this to be a story about young women and who had all the love in the world that Belle felt like she didn’t have but who was also so hard on herself. I was interested in how that intersects with orthorexia; in Milla’s case, she believes she gave herself cancer because she ate too many cheeseburgers and had too many tequila shots.”

When pressed about the likeness to Ainscough, Strauss had this to say:

“It’s similar, but there are other wellness influencers that inspired us. We left room to really create that character in conjunction with Alycia Debnam-Carey, who plays her.”

Debnam-Carey told ABC that she did spend time researching Ainscough, but agreed that it was an amalgamation of other influencers at the time.

However, when the media talks about Milla, they automatically connect Milla to Ainscough - no other influencers are mentioned. There are a couple of very strong reasons for this, neither of which are explored in ACV and which, in my opinion, borders on being misleading. First, Gibson’s fraud was exposed not long after Ainscough’s death, and comparisons between the two were rife in 2015. Take this excerpt from Caroline Marcus’ article from the March 22, 2015 edition of the Courier Mail:

“Gibson’s story is reminiscent of another celebrity blogger, Jessica Ainscough aka The Wellness Warrior, who tragically (yet predictably) died of cancer on February 26 after building a lucrative business on the falsehood she had “cured” herself by rejecting conventional medicine for the Gerson regimen, which involved drinking countless raw juices and having five coffee enemas a day.

It’s impossible to know just how many cancer patients Ainscough misled to early graves, though we do know Ainscough’s own mother Sharyn passed away from breast cancer in late 2013 after following her daughter’s lead and snubbing oncology in favour of quackery.”

Second, Ainscough was well-known in Australia. Before the cancer diagnosis, she was the online editor for Dolly, a now-defunct teen magazine, and moved within those media circles. These connections may have been valuable in helping Ainscough secure features and guest writing gigs post-diagnosis in specialty, alt-med publications like Holistic Bliss and mainstream outlets like The Morning Show and Sunrise.

Gibson and Ainscough were operating at the same time I was living in New Zealand, and neither came across my radar. However, the more I learnt about the nuances in Ainscough’s actual story, the more I became curious about the discourse about these two in the early 2010s. Was anyone calling either of them out at this time? Was one more of a target of disdain than the other?

To my skeptical glee, there were people doing the good work, at least when it came to Ainscough. In 2013, Susan Snowdon included Ainscough’s promotion of Gerson in a submission made to the NSW parliament on the promotion of misleading health practices. Dr. Adam Gorski, Rosalie Hilleman, and various internet sleuths were critiquing Ainscough throughout 2014, grimly monitoring the worsening condition of her arm. In the year leading up to her death, critics were vocal in their suspicion that Ainscough’s cancer was worsening, citing the appearance of staged images where Ainscough’s left arm was obscured or covered.

Picture of Jess Ainscough posted December 6 2013. See comments on the right side bar.

Ainscough was still in the public eye and on speaking tours, fuelling accusations that she was misleading her followers into believing that she was healthy while her symptoms were visibly worsening. The vibe you would get from ACV is that this didn’t happen until closer to the end of Jess’ life. I guess this isn’t technically untrue, relative to the timeline of Ainscough’s death in early 2015. Still, it demonstrates a far steadier and prolonged opposition to Ainscough’s actions and claims than we are presented through Milla’s story.

The past is forever a foreign country. Access to news articles, videos, and blogs from 10-15 years ago is hard to come by if you don’t know the right databases, and if nobody has the foresight to use the Wayback Machine. Both Gibson’s and most of Ainscough’s social media presence have been wiped from the website or set to private, making it difficult to confirm and dispute claims made against Ainscough.

But anytime I’m told that something can’t be found, I’m like, “Bet”.

Self-portrait of the author

So, with the right combination of keystrokes and mouse clicks, I found an archived version of Ainscough’s official website. Bless the person who tried to archive Ainscough’s Instagram; it didn’t work. If you are interested in searching through the weeds of this, I offer you the archive of The Wellness Warrior and Jessainscough.com.

I can appreciate the attempts to distance the character of Milla from the human that was Ainscough as a sensible way of protecting oneself legally. Having casually made my way through the portions of Ainscough’s website that I could access, truth truly was stranger and sadder than fiction.

The similarities between Milla and Ainscough are numerous enough to make one vacillate between interpreting Milla as a mirror image of Ainscough, and as a poorly drawn caricature. As Katrina and other commentaries will note, both:

Some events and actions in ACV are twists of what happened in real life.

Cafe Upset

Included in the series was a scene in Episode 4. The narrative at this point explored Milla’s spiral after her mother’s death. There is also the competition between Milla and Belle, as Milla’s speaking tours at local tramping clubs draw fewer people than before, while the latter is on the ascendant. In the scene, Milla has an outburst at a restaurant over its false advertising of having fully organic food - somehow, she could determine by taste that the burger is not made from organic ingredients.

S1 E4 Mama Aya

This outburst isn’t without consequence, as Milla was recorded by onlookers and shared online. In the next episode, Milla watches on in horror as her bandaged hand is highlighted. Milla is finally forced to confront the reality of her situation.

S1 E5 Casseroles

While this scene is presented as happening after the death of Milla’s mother in 2014, something similar did happen to Ainscough in June 2013, albeit far less explosively.

In a blog titled, Beware of organic cafes that lie to us, Ainscough named and shamed the Manna Haven restaurant in Byron Bay. According to her, Manna promoted itself as vegan, raw, and organic. She had ordered a veggie burger which had the following description: “This burger is cancer fighting rather than cancer causing.” Unlike Milla, she was impressed and raved about it on her Instagram until someone left a comment that they didn’t think all the food at that venue was organic. So, Ainscough called them up and was told that not all the ingredients in the burger she had was organic and that they didn’t have anything on their menu that was completely organic in the first place. Maybe what Ainscough writes next sounds familiar:

“I felt dirty. I felt cheated. I felt like I needed to give my insides about 10 showers. I was tricked! I was so shocked that I just hung up the phone, but I wish I’d told her that her since her “cancer fighting” burger contains pesticides it is actually cancer causing.

Ever since that incident, I’ve been hearing about other respected organic cafes who aren’t always totally organic. If they can’t source an organic ingredient, they will just replace it with a conventional one. This is so wrong. If a cafe claims to be organic and charge prices that reflect this, we should be able to trust that what they’re serving us is just that. Otherwise, it’s false advertising and on par with green washing. I understand that not everyone eats 100% organic, but many people do. Many people have to, and it’s exciting when we have the opportunity to eat out and feel safe doing so. I definitely wouldn’t have eaten at Manna Haven if I’d known that what I was eating wasn’t organic. “Organic” isn’t just a pretty word – it means something, and that meaning really needs to be lived up to. Luckily, there are amazing cafes who won’t compromise.”

Salve-ation through clay

It is at this point in ACV that Milla finally throws away the black salve she was using topically on her tumours. From what I saw of Ainscough’s blog, black salve was not mentioned by her. Given that she had filmed videos on how to prepare and administer a coffee enema, I don’t think she would have hesitated to promote black salve.

On the other hand, black salve is not part of Gerson Therapy, and Jess followed that protocol strictly for 2 years. However, she did promote eating bentonite clay, and the Gerson Institute promotes using clay internally (as a drink) or externally (as a paste applied to a cloth bandage) to help remove toxins. Ainscough claimed she ate some clay every day to remove the heavy metal toxins from her chemotherapy treatment that she believed still contaminated her body four years later.

Belle Gibson

So, this twist is a bit dubious. Given the timing of Gibson’s downfall so soon after Ainscough’s death, there was a scramble to see if there was more than just cancer that tied them together. In 2017 after the publication of The Woman Who Fooled The World, Ainscough’s manager, Yvette Luciano, recalled the two met in person twice. The first time was when Ainscough spoke at a conference Gibson attended; as “depicted” in ACV, Gibson tried to promote her app. The second time, in 2014, Gibson attended one of Jessica’s book signings. In the same article Tallon Pamenter, Ainscough’s partner and (possibly) COO of the Wellness Warrior business, said that while he knew Belle from social media, the first time they met was at Jessica’s funeral.

But on September 20, 2013 there is the following blog post on Ainscough’s website:

The post is attributed to Jess Ainscough, and the comments are overwhelmingly gushing for Belle. Foodie Friday was a regular feature on Ainscough’s blog for years, but this was the only time that I saw Gibson mentioned. Other Foodie Friday subjects were sometimes profiled at other points in the blog’s history, and at other times guest-wrote posts.

So, why do I say this twist is dubious? After many years on the internet, one-woman shows are hardly one-woman shows once they reach the levels of popularity that Ainscough and Gibson reached. It is possible that this interaction was done entirely by correspondence between managers, interns, or the PR team, without any input between Jess and Belle required.

But I do mourn for the alternate universe version of ACV where Chanelle had to negotiate this one!

The Ainscough problem

There is a clear difference between Milla and Jessica: Real life Jessica was an entrepreneurial dynamo. Maybe there’s a bit of pretty privilege playing into it, but Jessica was able to leverage her story into several different hustles. There was the blog that allowed sponsorships and advertising (albeit a source of criticism for her brand); she appeared in advertising for other companies. Ainscough also partnered with other wellness influencers like Nat Kringoudis to produce a short-lived health and wellness show called HealthTALKS. There were also books, ticketed speaking engagements, a Spring retreat, a lifestyle guide with monthly group coaching calls that cost $579 AUD, and an 8-week “B-School” course with Marie Forleo that was $879 AUD. Jessica claimed to have made bank, earning 6-figures within a year of completing the course with Forleo and doubling her income yearly. This income growth enabled her to pay her father back for covering the cost of doing Gerson, as well as buy a house and go travelling.

Conversely, fictional Milla’s failure to translate her Instagram fame into profit allows ACV to give her a slight moral high ground. You know, she’s rich in the ways that truly matter: Friends, family (kinda), love etc etc. From a docudrama standpoint, the speedrun from the death of Milla’s mother to the death of Milla herself sufficiently conveys the character’s fears, regrets, and waning influence that the audience’s feelings of catharsis are more firmly grounded in compassion. We are not given too much space to consider whether Milla’s story compelled anyone other than Belle to make questionable decisions.

Jessica, on the other hand, is a real person. She made real choices that had impacts on the real world, and for other real people. As in the cult world, the same is true with pseudoscience and CAM: victims are always at risk of becoming perpetrators themselves. We can be compassionate for Jessica the cancer patient, but should also want accountability from Jessica the Wellness Warrior. In the decade since Jessica’s passing, there has been much time to consider her influence.

What came first: Gerson or woo?

Ainscough’s blog doesn’t help answer whether Gerson was Ainscough’s gateway into CAM-type beliefs, or if it entrenched them. Like Milla, Ainscough was a party girl until cancer (or Gerson) made her quit cold turkey.

Ainscough made no bones about her feelings when it came to the conventional cancer treatment she received in 2008. In both her blog and the media, she describes the treatment plan she was initially offered as the “…slash, poison and burn method”. She did receive chemotherapy, as shown on ACV, but she also had a couple of lymph nodes removed. As a consequence of these treatments, she was left with permanent deformity, pain, and poor function in her left arm, the most prominent sign being her bent middle finger. Her frustration and upset, particularly in the face of her cancer having returned within a year, is understandable. Over the years, there were intermittent jabs about not letting doctors attack you with a scalpel sprinkled throughout her blog. However, some of her written rants sound like other worms got into her ear, not just Gerson practitioners. Like this piece for the ABC in 2010, written before she started Gerson:

“I believe it’s the major drug companies and the many ‘powers that be’ that the cancer industry so lucratively supports. Profit-driven conglomerates have no interest in finding a cure for cancer, it would be extremely bad for them if one was found. Think about all the money that has gone into the search: With all the cell research, microbiological information, nano-technology, genomic testing and countless case studies you would think that a cure for cancer would have been found by now. 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. It’s too big to cure”

Much of the 2011 era of the blog sounds like the rant above. There are references to Joseph Mercola and Natural News, and plenty of posts that question conventional preventative practices. In one post, she wrote that mammograms may increase the risk of causing and spreading cancer, due to the force used to squeeze the breast. She also recommended not using sunscreen, because it inhibits your body’s ability to produce vitamin D. Amidst all the weird blogs from this period, one of the most problematic for me involved Greg Schreeuwer. Schreeuwer is a chiropractor, human behavioural coach, and certified NeuroEmotional Technique kinesiologist. Ainscough sadly reveals that she believed her cancer manifested when she was 16, due to her eating and drinking behaviours. After chatting with Schreeuwer, she realised that she had a penchant for not taking care of herself:

“Dr Schreeuwer reiterated what Louise Hay also says about the left side of the body being the “feminine” side, and about the left hand and arm being linked to “giving”. We concluded that my cancer may have manifested in this area to send me a message to stop giving so much of myself away, and to start taking or giving myself what I need. Drilling deeper down into my situation, Dr Schreeuwer found it fascinating that my only treatment option in the eyes of conventional medicine was to have my arm amputated. It was kind of like my body was giving me a very simple ultimatum – stop giving so much of yourself away, or you will lose your arm and physically won’t be able to continue giving”

After two years of following the Gerson diet, Jessica stepped down to a less restrictive programme, but the damage had long been done. She had pretty much rejected conventional medicine at this point:

“I don’t plan to have any scans, partly because I don’t want to subject my body to the poison and radiation, but also because prior to my diagnosis scans were not detecting that I had cancer. Only a biopsy did this, so I don’t really see the point.

However, I did recently have some non-invasive diagnostics done, which I plan to continue along with my regular complete blood tests that I send to my Gerson doctor in Mexico. I had live blood analysis, iridology, and have been analysed via a very clever and thorough machine called Indigo. What we’ve discovered is that I have so much nerve damage in my arm from the incredible amount of chemotherapy drugs that was pumped into it way back in the beginning, almost four years ago. I also have heavy metals (from chemo), fungus (from chemo), and my lymphatic system is having a hard time removing the toxins (from chemo and surgery). So now I am detoxing the heavy metals from my body, I am removing the fungus from my body, and I am working on stimulating my lymph system. Stay tuned for future posts about how I am doing all of this.

I really don’t like looking back and saying I regret decisions I made in the past, because they were the right decisions for me with the knowledge I had at the time, but I would love for someone to build me a time machine so that I can go back and say no to having chemotherapy and surgery. And maybe we could stop off in Thailand again on the way. I had a blast while I was there in 2009. I have absolutely no doubt that healing would occur much easier and faster if I wasn’t dealing with the collateral damage caused by those harsh conventional treatments.”

What did Ainscough know about her cancer?

I’d argue that Ainscough’s knowledge about cancer was incredibly poor. I won’t argue about her understanding of the rates of survival with and without conventional intervention - assessing quality and quantity of life in the face of an aggressive or terminal illness is incredibly personal.

However, I will comment on how Ainscough reported on the progress of her Gerson treatment.

While completing the Gerson protocols in Australia, she would send blood work back to the Gerson doctors for analysis. Ainscough describes their communication thusly (January 18, 2011):

“My Gerson docs are really happy with my progress. I have blood work analysed by them every three months now and each of the results are coming back just peachy. Everything is looking in tip-top shape. They are saying that the tumours are either really localised to my arm still or they are gone altogether. I’m banking on the latter. I still have some lumps on my arm, but I believe that they are just scar tissue waiting to be broken down. I had a healing reaction a few weeks ago where my arm swelled up similar to how it did when I was in hospital having chemo on it. When the swelling finally went down I noticed that it had taken a couple of my lumps with it. Our bodies are freaking amazing!”

I could not find a reference in Ainscough’s blog as to whether they were meeting over Skype or other video-conferencing software so that someone would at least see her arm. In his post-mortem on Ainscough, Dr. Gorski suggested that the swelling reported was lymphedema caused by obstruction from the Cancer. However in Gerson-speak this was a “flare-up”. Flare-ups were signs of detoxification and healing; they could be related to the body’s efforts to rid itself of diseased and dead tissues and eliminate toxins. These flare-ups occurred repeatedly for both Jessica and her mother. Gorski pointed out a particular flare-up that should have been treated more seriously than it was:

“The left boob (the one with cancer) has what mum calls a string of pearls at about 12 o’clock high, a row of three or four small palpable lumps. She can feel action in this boob.

The right boob has also flared up, which was frightening at first before we realised that is was a healing reaction. Mum says it feels like a thickening with a swollen gland under the arm. She had a benign lump taken out of this boob about 15 years ago, so it is very likely that this is flaring up again as she heals.”

On April 13th, 2011, the situation with Jessica’s arm started to sound gnarly:

“All this life changing talk is well and good, but you’re probably wondering how my tumours are doing. I am so excited to be able to say that they are healing themselves. It has been the most fascinating process to watch. Some of them have just completely disappeared while others that are closer to the surface are getting really red, flattening out and then forming scabs. One of them, probably the biggest one, formed a scab and now it actually looks like the tumour is coming out through the skin. It’s a little hard to explain and it looks kind of gross, but every day it changes and is getting smaller. My pH reading is out of this world proving that my body is a cancer-fighting alkaline environment (before going to Gerson I was acidic) and my blood work is all looking glorious. I have never doubted the healing ability of my body but it is so exciting to be able to see the results of all our hard work.”

Without images of the lumps at this time, it is difficult to determine whether Jessica unknowingly described an ulcerating or fungating tumour. As noted in the last section, Jessica never got scans to confirm the remission, stabilisation, or progress of her disease. She was assessed on the power of blood work and prolonged periods between seeing her Gerson doctors in person (that we know of). It wasn’t until her last blog post on December 16th, 2014 that she finally revealed that her situation had drastically changed. After years of believing that her disease was stabilised, her condition had worsened dramatically after her mother died in October 2013. At an undefined point, after 10 months of non-stop bleeding from her armpit, Ainscough finally had scans that revealed that cancer had remained in her arm and shoulder with a fungating mass in the same shoulder. In the final six weeks of her life, Ainscough commenced a course of targeted radiation. Radiation was successful in shrinking the tumour, but complications led to Jessica’s death in late February 2015. Tallon Pamenter recently made these comments to the Australian:

“She was always open about exploring all types of conventional and holistic medicine. In fact, she actually passed due to complications from conventional radiation therapy – not from her cancer spreading, or taking action too late as depicted in the media and in the series.”

The Truth and Nothing But, or Something in Between

The deteriorating condition of her arm, alongside an extended hiatus from her website, led to some accusations being made against Ainscough near the end of her life. To sum up: 1) She misled people with her claims that she had cured herself of cancer using Gerson, and continued to mislead them despite her worsening health and 2) Ainscough or her team had scrubbed any mention of such claims from her post.

There are answers but also justifications and rationalisations to both questions.

Whether Ainscough claimed to have cured her cancer is a heady debate of lexical and logical semantics. There is a clear difference between what was printed earlier in Ainscough’s career and what came afterwards. Rosalie Hilleman had multiple examples of Ainscough stating directly, or being quoted as saying, that she was cured or was beating cancer. Some examples are stronger than others, but Ainscough used a lot of gerunds which give just enough plausibility to some of her statements. Unfortunately, most of the links don’t work any more, and I can’t verify them personally.

Jess wrote a post in 2014 claiming that she wasn’t cancer-free, in remission, or cured. Rather, these statements were a misquote or conclusion made by the author, and she would continue to thrive and heal for the rest of her life. She additionally stated that she wasn’t anti-doctors or conventional medicine; in fact, her team consisted of integrative doctors, a naturopath who specialised in cancer, a medical intuitive, and a conventional surgeon she had been seeing from the start of her cancer journey. Without access to audio from all these interviews Hilleman cites, Jessica’s refutation boils it down to a “she said” - ”they said”. Hilleman has some examples that can’t be ignored, but at the same time there could be some doubt about whether it was Jess at the computer when these posts were made.

Having looked through a large part of Ainscough’s blog, my feeling was that she was honest with her audience about what was happening with her body. Maybe not in the way that you would expect from someone going through conventional cancer treatment, but the tenets of Gerson therapy prevented her from being honest with herself. Until she started to become really unwell, I think (until proven otherwise) she truly thought she was healing and would live a long life with cancer:

“I didn’t have my arm amputated, I didn’t go down the route of endless poison and drugs, and I didn’t for one minute buy into my doctor’s presumptions that I would be dead within five years. I made the conscious decision to do absolutely everything in my power to take control of my situation and save my own life. In that moment, I became a cancer survivor.

Now, I’m thriving – with or without cancer, I’m not too sure. I don’t have scans because none of them were able to diagnose me in the first place, plus I have 100% faith that my body knows how to heal, and I sure as heck have been giving it everything it needs to do so. Some call me crazy, but this has been the right path for me, and over the years I’ve become more and more confident in my ability to know what’s best for my body. I’ve been living the Gerson Therapy lifestyle for just over three years, and I plan on keeping it as my guidelines forever.”

However, I agree that edits were made to at least two of Jessica’s blog entries. The image below is a selection from a post originally posted on April 24th, 2013. The link I used above was cached on May 4th, 2013. Here is a version that was cached on July 9th, 2014 with the references to Gerson and scans removed:

Similar changes are made to Ainscough’s post about her two-year anniversary.

Here is a selection of the post (excerpted in another section) first published on April 16th, 2012 and first cached on the Wayback Machine on April 20th, 2012:

Here is the same selection, cached in the Wayback Machine on August 9, 2014:

So far, the buzz about ACV remains on Belle, her fraud, and how influencer culture has changed over the years. It would be amazing if ACV actually could create a similar level of attention to the story the writers avoided telling with Milla, that there is a health and wellness industry that bolstered both Gibson and Ainscough. This is an essential opportunity for skeptics to have a very big and very public discussion about the harms, dangers and risks of these health practices at a time when the world is watching and listening.