Netflix’s long-awaited six-episode crime drama Apple Cider Vinegar finally arrived on February 6, 2025. Starring Kaitlyn Dever and Alycia Debnam-Carey, the series follows Belle Gibson and best friend Milla Blake, who launch a wellness empire based on a lie. While their empire may have been founded on deception, Netflix has teased that the story of Apple Cider Vinegar itself is “true-ish.”

What Is Netflix’s ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ About?

Apple Cider Vinegar follows Belle (Kaitlyn) and Milla (Alycia), who use their social media platforms to try and cure people’s life-threatening illnesses with health and wellness advice. Belle claims that she cured her own terminal brain cancer this way — except that’s not true at all. She was never diagnosed with or cured of the brain tumor on which she built her empire.

“I was on a quest to heal myself naturally. I’ve learned to seek out what’s raw and honest,” Belle said in the November 2024 trailer as her Whole Pantry app showed healthy vegetables and meals. The trailer also teased the companion cookbook that Belle wrote.

However, Belle’s empire came crumbling down when her lie was exposed. “Start from when you first lied about having brain cancer,” a psychiatrist asked the fraudster in the teaser.

Is ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Based on a True Story?

While Apple Cider Vinegar is a work of fiction, it was inspired by the true story of the real Belle Gibson, a pseudoscience advocate from Australia. The show is based closely on the 2017 book The Woman Who Fooled the World, written by investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who uncovered Belle’s lies about having cancer in reporting for a Melbourne, Australia, newspaper called The Age.

“They wrote about the people who had been misled by Belle and how that had impacted them,” series creator Samantha Strauss said of the journalists in a February 2025 blog post on Netflix’s Tudum. “They created this beautiful tapestry that looked at how Western medicine lets us down emotionally and why people are drawn toward wellness.”

Samantha continued, “If the book had only been about a cancer scam, I don’t think I would have been that interested in adapting it for television. But I think we all desperately want to be well, and many of us live with chronic physical or mental conditions and are so vulnerable to being preyed on. Turning this book into a series felt like a way to have a powerful conversation about wellness and medicine — why we lie, and how we hope.”

While many characters, including Belle, her former boyfriend, her son, her mom and her husband, are portrayed in Apple Cider Vinegar using their real-life names, other characters are fictional and partly inspired by people in Belle’s life. One of these characters is Milla, who is an “amalgamation of wellness influences at the time,” Alycia told Today.com.

The characters Chanelle (played by Aisha Dee) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are also fictional.

The real-life Belle was not involved in the making of Apple Cider Vinegar.