Chanelle McAuliffe helped bring down Belle Gibson. This is what she really thinks of Apple Cider Vinegar.

Chanelle McAuliffe wasn't originally planning on watching Apple Cider Vinegar, the Netflix show about her former friend Belle Gibson, featuring a character based on herself.

She felt really gross about it. That it even existed in the first place.

"I did have to force myself to watch it. Overall, I'm not entirely a huge fan of the show for a number of reasons," she told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

"I'm not entirely comfortable with the dramatisation and sensationalisation of the story, [and] the show has distorted the truth a little bit as well.

"I'm [also] not comfortable with the capitalisation of the harm that was caused to people with cancer. I've been thinking a lot about the ethics of this kind of storytelling," she said.

Listen to Chanelle McAuliffe chatting to True Crime Conversations. Post continues below.

McAuliffe met Gibson at the launch of her healthy recipe app The Whole Pantry in August 2013, which was an instant success, downloaded 200,000 times in its first month.

By then, Gibson had a dedicated audience on social media who were following along on her journey 'healing terminal brain cancer' with alternative remedies and healthy food.

McAuliffe was doing an internship for a Melbourne publication at the time, and they'd asked her to interview the entrepreneur for an article. The two became friends, with McAuliffe finding the single-mum and cancer survivor to be warm and charismatic.

"She actually had a way of making you feel really special. Looking back, I think this was quite calculated on her behalf, because she had to deflect from herself so much.

"She had a way of really making the attention about the other person, so you always felt really kind of special and important in her presence," she told True Crime Conversations.

In hindsight, McAuliffe can also see the friendship Gibson formed with her then-partner — who had a traumatic brain injury — for what it was.

She is confident Gibson was borrowing and learning his symptoms to take them on for herself, which is a tactic we saw her fictionalised character doing in the show on several occasions.

In Apple Cider Vinegar, the character of Chanelle is played by Aisha Dee, who becomes Gibson's manager and that of fellow wellness influencer Milla Blake (which was inspired by Jessica Ainscough, who really did have cancer and died in 2015).

In real life, McAuliffe wasn't either woman's manager, and while she knew Ainscough, they weren't close friends.

But she was the whistle-blower in Belle Gibson's story.

Milla Blake (left) and Chanelle (right) in Apple Cider Vinegar. Image: Netflix.

McAuliffe was "pleasantly surprised" by how her character was portrayed, but she hated the way the show depicted Gibson and Blake's relationship.

"They've pitted these two women against each other in the show, which didn't occur in real life. I think it's quite a cliche, unoriginal, stereotypical narrative to kind of pit women against each other competitively as rivals…[and as being] bitchy, gossipy."

How Chanelle discovered Belle Gibson's lies.

For McAuliffe her suspicions started with small observations.

For starters, Gibson was very 'well' for someone living with stage four cancer.

"She never appeared sick. She was the epitome of wellness. She had this beautiful long, lush hair. She was glowing, active and happy," she told True Crime Conversations.

She was also doing things that seemed to be in direct opposition to the 'strict' wellness protocol she was selling online; things like excessive alcohol consumption and dabbling in solarium use.

Belle Gibson created a huge following online claiming she was healing brain cancer with healthy eating. It was all a lie. Image: Instagram.

But it was Gibson's 'seizure' at her four-year-old son's birthday party in mid-2014 that was a proper red flag for McAuliffe.

"Something about it just seemed really performative to me, and that day I left that party and I just knew in my gut something was wrong," she said.

Gibson had also recently announced that her cancer had spread to her brain, spleen, uterus and blood — and McAuliffe had found out alongside everyone else on Instagram.

"[I thought] that was quite odd…that's such a serious diagnosis. It's basically a death sentence and most of her close friends found out by seeing it on Instagram. It wasn't something she shared with anyone really directly…it was kind of a press announcement."

In real life, McAuliffe approached a male mutual friend and shared her suspicions that Gibson might be faking her cancer. When he agreed that something was off, they turned up to her Melbourne home together, and confronted her.

Even though the Netflix show depicts McAuliffe confronting Gibson alone, the scene was pretty accurately portrayed.

"I found that scene to be really compelling, and I think it's really important for me for the world to see that I did urge Belle to come forward and tell the truth.

"I never set out to expose Belle, to have Belle cancelled…I actually went to her as a friend and said 'if you come forward and tell the truth, I'll help you. I'll support you.' She refused," she told True Crime Conversations.

WATCH: Where is Belle Gibson now? Chanelle comments. Post continues below.

That night dragged on for hours in real-life in early 2015, with Gibson not only calling her publisher Julie Gibbs during the confrontation (which we see on the show), but calling and asking her acupuncturist to come over and 'prove' her cancer to her friends.

"I just straight out asked her if she had cancer," said McAuliffe. "She was acting kind of defensive, saying I was interrogating her".

When McAuliffe asked for proof — medical records, scans — anything, Gibson replied "I don't like keeping those documents because it's negative energy in my house".

She then told McAuliffe that she hadn't received her diagnosis from a major hospital, but a "Dr. Phil" in the "suburbs." When pressed, she admitted that "possibly" her diagnosis was questionable because "Dr. Phil's gone missing".

When McAuliffe asked Gibson's acupuncturist, "How do you know she has cancer?" he replied, "because she told me," which only further confirmed her doubts.

McAuliffe also confronted Gibson's partner, Clive Rothwell, and he told her "she will destroy anyone that tries to expose her," adding that he needed to protect her [Gibson's] little boy.

Read more: The real Chanelle on how the moment she confronted Belle EXACTLY went down. 

A few weeks later, Gibson was up on stage launching her book The Whole Pantry, while McAuliffe stood seething in the crowd.

She wanted Gibson to know, "there's someone here that knows, and is going to hold you accountable".

'I never heard back.' The reality of being a whistle-blower.

Exposing Gibson's lies wasn't easy.

McAuliffe went to the police first, but they told her she didn't have any evidence.

Next she went to a high-profile lawyer, and he "accused me of defamation and slander," she told True Crime Conversations.

"He was telling me that he can't even fathom the thought of someone going around accusing someone of lying and faking cancer…he made me feel very uncomfortable."

While neither of these attempts were shown in Apple Cider Vinegar, McAuliffe's frustration at trying to get journalists to break the story was. She spent months trying to get people to listen to her about Gibson.

Chanelle McAuliffe was the original whistle-blower in the Belle Gibson story. Image: Supplied.

"I went to Australia's top investigative journalist at the time, I never heard back from him. I was talking to people I knew, I was trying to leverage my network….it took quite a long time and I started to feel very powerless and realised how challenging and difficult it is to be a whistle-blower."

Eventually, her former boss linked her in with Beau Donnelly and Nick Toscano from The Age, and they found McAuliffe's story to be credible from the start and began an investigation.

Like in the show, the first angle they were able to publish was about Gibson de-frauding charities she had promised fundraising to.

It was actually Richard Guilliatt at The Australian, whose wife had cancer, and who was looking into Gibson as well, who first published that her cancer was a lie.

He'd met with her, and like she'd told McAuliffe, Gibson had admitted to Guilliatt that her diagnosis was "questionable".

In Apple Cider Vinegar, the journalist character of 'Justin' works at The Age, and has a wife living with breast cancer — again, a fictionalised amalgamation of a few of the real characters in Gibson's story.

From there, the unravelling of Gibson's lies happened very quickly, both on the show and in real-life, with the now infamous 60 Minutes interview with Tara Brown almost copied word for word by Netflix.

An interaction that wasn't included in Apple Cider Vinegar, was the message McAuliffe sent Gibson as her lies started to crumble.

"Belle had this saying, for example, she'd say 'I've now got stage four cancer, but don't worry — I've got this.'

So I sent her a text message the day the first story broke saying 'You should check the news, but you've got this right?' she told True Crime Conversations.

"It was a bit of a jab," she added. "[But] I was so frustrated and really angry that it took so long for the truth to come out. So that's why I sent the text…I was just at my wits' end with it all."

Kaitlyn Dever as Belle Gibson in Apple Cider Vinegar, re-recreating the infamous 60 Minutes interview with Tara Brown. Image: Netflix.

In any other environment — corporate, government, political — McAuliffe could have found herself prosecuted for being a 'whistle-blower' and her experience with Gibson has made her a passionate advocate for increased protection for those trying to tell the truth.

"I think there's a lot of work that can be done in this space to protect people coming forward. It's a very scary thing to take on," she told True Crime Conversations.

As for Gibson, nothing she does surprises or shocks McAuliffe anymore.

While she doesn't love the Netflix show, she's hopeful the attention will implore Gibson to make amends, so that the victims of her scam can get closure.

The disgraced con-woman still hasn't paid a Federal Court fine of $410,000 that was demanded of her in 2017.

"I hope that the core messages that are really important about this story, about the harm caused to people, about how we can easily be misled or consume misinformation online….I hope they aren't lost through the glamourisation of the show," McAuliffe told True Crime Conversations.

Feature image: Supplied/Netflix.

Read More:

• A brutally honest review of Apple Cider Vinegar, Netflix's new Belle Gibson series.

• Belle Gibson and Jess Ainscough's story played out in Apple Cider Vinegar, but their real relationship was more complicated.

• The most confusing part of Apple Cider Vinegar isn't Belle's cancer lies. It's her relationship with Clive.