This piece was originally written before Belle Gibson’s interview went to air, and has since been updated.
Did you watch the 60 Minutes interview with Belle Gibson over the weekend?
Plenty of Australians did. More than 1 million of us, according to data from OzTAM.
I tuned it. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to watch her attempt to tell the truth, to see how she could possibly find an excuse for not only faking brain cancer, but then also claiming she’d cured it with her self-created wellness credentials, and profiting from the experience.
But this interview didn’t turn out “to be the whole truth” that Gibson promised at the start of her conversation with Tara Brown. It was disappointing and painful to watch and, as Brown noted herself, would have almost been funny if it wasn’t so serious. Gibson continued to claim she believed she had a brain tumour, despite feeling well. She was diagnosed by a “box with a machine with lights on the front” that was, apparently, German technology. She claimed she believed she was having legitimate cancer treatment. “When he gave me medication, I was told that it was oral chemotherapy and I believed it,” she said. This story was different to what she described in her book, claiming that a doctor had diagnosed her with cancer and that she walked away from conventional treatment.
Last night, Gibson had an opportunity to make some efforts at redeeming herself — although any kind of redemption would have been certainly difficult. She didn’t do that. She didn’t attempt to tell the truth. And social media, unsurprisingly, went nuts — the very,very good majority of it extremely negative.
So at what point do we say enough is enough of the public shamining Belle Gibson will endure? Is there ever enough? What if she eventually, someday, concedes that she’s a pathological liar and opens up about the truth?
This week, Monica Lewinsky delivered a keynote address at the Cannes Lions conference where she described herself as “patient zero” of online shaming.
Of course, Lewinsky’s experience of public shaming is very, very different to that of Belle Gibson’s — for one, it’s hard to justify Lewinsky deserving anything that she received. Gibson also seems determined to stay in the public spotlight, by agreeing to interviews with major media outlets and even accepting payments for doing so.
Delivering a keynote address in Cannes, Lewinsky called for advertising and branding leaders to end the marketplace for public humiliation. “Public shaming as a blood sport must stop,” she said according to Page Six. “It’s time for an intervention on the Internet and in culture. We need a return to compassion, online has a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.”
Following up from her popular 2014 TedX talk, Lewinsky revealed more about how she’s finally found “a purpose to my past”.
“Like me, at 22, a few of you may also have taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss … Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn’t the president of the United States of America.”
That was in 1998, when Lewinsky’s “improbable romance” became public knowledge, and she went from a completely private figure to being one at the centre of a “political, legal and media maelstrom” of a magnitude the world had never before seen. “I was branded as a tart, slut, whore, bimbo, floozy and of course ‘that woman,’ I was seen by many but truly known by few … It was hard to remember ‘that woman’ had a soul and was once unbroken,” Lewinsky said.
It was a scandal, she said, brought to the world via the digital revolution. She became the first major target of online shaming and bullying that would later become all too common. The digital revolution has since claimed many victims of shaming — from nude photo scandals, to hastily written and unfunny tweets — and even led some to suicide.
Almost twenty years since she became “that women”, Lewinsky said she’s still reminded of the mistake daily, and experienced many moments when suicide seemed like the only option for ending the ridicule.
But Lewinsky’s turned her life experience into a global mission, calling on the public shaming and cyberbullying to stop — especially the part that’s supported by the advertising and media industries. “Violation of others is raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit,” she said according to AdAge. “Whether tallied in dollars, clicks, likes, or just the perverse thrill of exposure, a marketplace has emerged where shame is a commodity, and public humiliation an industry.”
She said clicks make money, and shame creates clicks. The more we click, the more numb we become to what we see. “This is not an indictment of advertising dollars,” she said. “But I believe we can also agree there are boundaries where profit halts and social responsibility steps in.”
She called on the “creative engines” in the room to drive a new culture of compassion. “Will you help me?” she asked.
The scandal has stayed with Lewinsky for life. She recalled being asked in a job interview a couple of years back, “If you were a a brand, what brand would you be?” “When you’re Monica Lewinsky, that’s a loaded fucking question,” she said.
Lewinsky has found a brand, a compassionate and successful one. She’s a social activist, writer and and ambassador to anti-bullying organisation Bystander.
Could Belle Gibson ever become a brand for good? Possibly, but it will have to be far, far away from the public spotlight. No more performances. No more paid interviews. No more lies.