Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Well, it turns out that when it comes to inventing a dire situation just for attention, the age-old
phrase couldn't be more wrong.
From miscarriages to cancer and alcoholism, these celebrities have all reportedly faked
a serious medical condition.
Belle Gibson's tragic cancer story captivated the Internet.
The Australian influencer was diagnosed with a brain tumor when she was just 20 years old
and given only four months to live.
According to The Guardian, she immediately overhauled her life; she ditched radiotherapy
and chemotherapy, changed her diet, and opted for alternative treatments like oxygen therapy
and colonics, and they miraculously worked, or so her thousands of followers thought.
In 2013, Gibson used her inspirational story to launch the popular wellness app, The Whole
Pantry.
She vowed to donate a third of the proceeds to charity, landed a cookbook contract with
Penguin, and Apple preinstalled her iPhone app on Apple Watches.
Not long after, she claimed cancer had returned with a vengeance all over her body, and she
lamented about the short time she had left with her son.
But then, the truth came out.
"You didn't have brain cancer."
"No, I didn't."
According to Who, the wellness app's proceeds never found their way to charity, and alleged
friends of the blogger voiced their suspicions loudly enough that two journalists from The
Sydney Morning Herald took on the case.
Gibson was eventually forced to admit that none of her story was true.
So, what happened in the aftermath?
According to ABC Australia, Consumer Affairs Victoria investigated the blogger and filed
a civil suit.
A judge reportedly ruled that Gibson may have had psychological or psychiatric delusions
but was, in fact, guilty of, quote, "misleading and deceptive conduct."
The BBC reports that Gibson was fined $322,000.
Even so, she continues talking around the true story.
Dan Mallory, who's best known by his pseudonym A.J.
Finn, has a life story just as intense as his best-selling thriller, 2018's The Woman
in the Window, probably because both tales are made up.
The novelist was forced to come clean after a profile in The New Yorker accused him of
a large swath of lies surrounding his career and medical history.
"It's incredible.
I pinched myself to the point of bruising."
According to the profile, Mallory repeatedly claimed to have brain cancer for many years,
including on a university application and to his colleagues at publishing houses worldwide.
The article also claimed that he lost his mother, who did actually suffer from cancer,
as well as his brother.
But according to The BBC, both of them are still very much alive.
A former colleague told the outlet,
"My God.
I knew I'd get this call.
I didn't know if it would be you or the F.B.I."
Mallory's lies, as he claimed, stemmed from his mother's battle with breast cancer throughout
his adolescent life.
He told The New Yorker,
"Throughout those dark times, and like many afflicted with severe bipolar 2 disorder,
I experienced crushing depressions, delusional thoughts, morbid obsessions, and memory problems.
I did or said or believed things I would never ordinarily say, or do, or believe, things
of which, in many instances, I have absolutely no recollection."
"We know the truth.
Brooks has cancer.
He's doing everything he can to fight the cancer.
Beyond that, I don't give a rat's ass what they're talking about."
Leave it to The Real Housewives of Orange County to craft a fake cancer storyline so
dramatic it rivals any daytime soap opera.
We still don't know if Vicki Gunvalson's ex-boyfriend Brooks Ayers actually had cancer or not, but
we do know he was caught in a barefaced lie about his alleged cancer treatment in 2015.
Ayers basically wrote the script for the subsequent Real Housewives of Beverly Hills plot, where
the bitter souls surrounding Yolanda Hadid [yo-LAHN-duh hah-DEED] accused her of faking
her well-documented struggle with chronic Lyme [like "lime"] disease.
According to People magazine, Ayers claimed to have been, quote, "diagnosed with stage
3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2013," and though he still makes this claim, he spent much of
the season dodging skepticism from his castmates.
Apparently, even Gunvalson doubted him, and, despite coming to his defense over the course
of many episodes, she had every reason to.
"He told me that he has cancer, not that he might have cancer."
In an attempt to prove himself, Ayers apparently showed E! News some documents, allegedly from
the City of Hope hospital, where he claimed he was a patient.
After the publication found a number of inaccuracies in his paperwork, the hospital confirmed to
People magazine that the star had never even been admitted.
"I printed that off for you to see, and to be able to see that we have absolutely everything
that I'm telling you that I have."
Ayers eventually admitted he forged the documents because he didn't want to reveal his real
medical records, telling E! News,
"Words cannot express the deep regret that I have in fabricating documents to 'prove'
to the world that I, in fact, have cancer.
What I did was wrong and inexcusable."
"I want this chapter in my life to be closed."
Kim Zolciak Biermann's shocking cancer scandal rocked The Real Housewives of Atlanta so much
that it's still a hot topic today.
Fans may remember Kim's epic fight with NeNe Leakes during the Season 1 reunion special,
where she briefly made it seem like she wore wigs because she had cancer.
At the time, the star tearfully claimed,
"There was a friend of mine who was a doctor.
He said, 'Kim, I got to be honest with you.
I mean you're, 90 percent sure you have cancer."
"I got very sick.
I lost 25 pounds, my hair was falling out."
This may have all been the truth, but when Andy Cohen asked the star bluntly if she had
cancer, she sidestepped the question and alleged that she did in fact lose her hair because
of chemotherapy, adding,
"I wouldn't choose to walk around with a hairpiece ever."
Despite the fact that she once said she wore wigs because they made her life easier, Kim
kept the ruse going long enough for Leakes to make a rare, sort-of apology, before Cohen
questioned her again, and she admitted that she didn't actually have cancer at all.
"Kim would tell you a lie and look you straight in your face and make you think that she is
telling you the truth."
In 2018, a full decade later, Leakes brought up the incident on the show.
According to Pop Culture, Leakes called the mom-slash-singer a "faker," and Kim was forced
to remind everyone, via Twitter, that she didn't technically lie, even though the whole
thing was totally shady.
"I could die tomorrow.
I'm gonna die wearing Dior."
Joe "Exotic" has seemingly become one of the world's most famous con men overnight.
If we're looking at Variety's interpretation of Rotten Tomatoes scores, Tiger King was
the most popular TV show in the U.S. the week after its release in 2020.
As time went on, Joe Exotic's wild rabbit hole of mullets, big cats, polygamy, and murder-for-hire
only went deeper.
According to In Touch, the star may have faked his own cancer diagnosis just as much as he
allegedly faked his own music career.
"I got a big mouth and a television station."
In Touch spoke exclusively with journalist Robert Moor, who spent a week following Exotic
for an in-depth report.
During that time, Exotic allegedly told Moor that he was, quote, "dying of bone marrow
cancer."
Moor told the tabloid,
"He said, 'If my doctor gives me two months to live, I'm going to Florida and I'm going
to kill Carole Baskin.'"
In a March 2020 tweet, Moor clarified that Exotic also claimed to have prostate cancer.
He reportedly told this to "everyone" and raised money from his Facebook fans for his
treatment.
But the real story turned out to be nothing nearly as dramatic.
Moor tweeted:
"I later learned he just had an infected prostate, dehydration, and a bad outbreak of herpes."
It's still unclear if Exotic was his own doctor in the way he was his own EMT, which could
explain the incorrect, or straight-up faked, diagnosis.
Teen Mom 2's Leah Messer certainly didn't have an easy go of things.
It's hard enough to be a pregnant teen, let alone give birth to twins and find out one
of them suffers from muscular dystrophy.
But things got even more difficult during Season 4 of the show when the reality star
found herself pregnant again.
Though we were told the pregnancy she shared with former husband Jeremy Calvert ended in
a miscarriage, that's not quite what happened off camera.
"Come on, come on with more of your lies, more of your bulls---, come on, keep coming."
In Messer's memoir Hope, Grace & Faith, the star revealed that she had actually undergone
a secret abortion, largely because she was conflicted about her relationship with Corey
Simms, her ex-husband, and the father of her two children.
Despite any misgivings at the time, Messer moved in with Calvert and got engaged.
Shortly after, she found out she was expecting.
She wrote,
"I was devastated.
Having a baby with Jeremy would be the end of any chance Corey and I had of making things
work for our family."
"I'm not willing to let go of you to go back to someone that really don't know about, know,
know what he wants in his life."
Perhaps in an effort to preserve her brand, or save face, Messer's rep concocted a plan
to play off her abortion as a miscarriage.
MTV sent over producers to film the emotional aftermath.
But it sounds like the real story was packing some serious drama.
Messer wrote in her book,
"It was the worst thing I had ever been through."
"My life has been crazy.
My life has been something out of a movie."
Courtney Stodden is pretty much famous for marrying a 50-something actor when she was
young enough to be his daughter.
And her relationship with Doug Hutchison made it clear why you generally shouldn't consent
to marriage at such a young age, especially when The Green Mile actor threw his teen bride
under the bus and claimed she faked her miscarriage.
"Really bad.
Like it was awful, all around."
In 2016, Stodden's manager told People magazine that she had suffered a miscarriage and was
taking time to grieve, but four years later, Hutchison claimed in his 2020 memoir Flushing
Hollywood: Fake News, Fake Boobs, that they faked the entire pregnancy in an attempt to
make a little extra cash, and that it was all Stodden's idea.
Hutchison told Fox News,
"I couldn't get a job to save my life in Hollywood anymore.
I was blacklisted.
We had burned through all of my savings.
I went bankrupt…We were that desperate."
Aspiring artist James Potok isn't famous for his work as a would-be rapper.
Rather, he has joined the leagues of other publicity-starved wannabe influencers who
became headline news for a horrible prank that ruined other people's lives.
According to Business Insider, Potok faked having the coronavirus on a WestJet flight
from Toronto to Jamaica in an attempt to achieve viral fame.
But all he really accomplished was forcing an entire plane with 243 passengers to turn
around, half way into the flight.
Potok admitted he was traveling to Jamaica to shoot a music video and pulled the prank,
hoping to post about it on Instagram.
Explaining how it went off, he told Toronto's City News,
"I looked around, I said 'can I get everybody's attention please' and…I said 'I just came
back from Hunan province, the capital of the coronavirus…I'm not feeling too well.
Thank you.'"
"It was really just to create a viral video."
His facts were clearly off, and the prank certainly wasn't funny.
According to The CBC, Potok was arrested and charged.
He told City News he didn't believe his actions were illegal, but…dude, couldn't you have
just licked an airplane toilet and not bothered anybody else?
Bradley Cooper is guilty of faking a devastating illness, but it turns out, it was all for
the art.
The actor went in deep while filming his directorial debut, A Star Is Born, where he also played
the alcoholic country legend, Jackson Maine.
Most of us remembers that gripping scene where Maine pees his pants live at the Grammy Awards.
It was a pivotal part of the movie, and to get in that headspace, the star couldn't leave
character, even when he had to jump onto the other side of the camera.
So, just how did he work it out?
The actor faked being drunk while directing, and everyone just pretty much went with it.
"I wanna know what this is.
You hiding love songs?"
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cooper admitted that he pretended to be drunk throughout the
filming of A Star Is Born, adopting a pretend version of the severe alcoholism that sent
his character to rehab.
He said,
"Thank God the actors were willing to allow me to direct them sort of in that state because
it was easier to stay in that space.
It just took me a little longer to communicate what I wanted."
"It's either gonna go two ways, you know what I mean?
It really is.
And we're just lucky it went the right way."
The schtick paid off and hopefully came without a fake hangover.
The film was nominated for eight Oscars and five Golden Globes, winning one of each for
the original song "Shallow."
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