African community 'rejects' disgraced cancer faker Belle Gibson
It seems cancer con woman Belle Gibson hasn’t been welcomed into the Melbourne Ethiopian community with open arms despite a video emerging of her speaking about the community.
The disgraced blogger claimed to have terminal cancer which was cured through healthy eating, diet and alternative therapies and made almost $500,000 profit from the sale of a cookbook and The Whole Pantry app.
In 2015, Gibson was exposed as having lied about her cancer before legal proceedings were launched, later finding her guilty in 2017.
A video posted on a Facebook page called Shabo Media in October run by an Ethiopian ethnic group surfaced this week showing Gibson speaking about issues facing the Oromo people.
She spoke about being embraced by the Melbourne Oromo community after she started volunteering with the group four years ago.
However, Australian Oromo Community Association president Tarekegn Chimdi told The Australian the group “hadn’t been aware of this woman” and had no knowledge of her crimes.
He added Gibson was not a registered volunteer, he had only seen her at one or two events and the group had only just learned of her “shameful history”.
In the video, in which Gibson speaks about the community in an interview, she says she feels “completely adopted” by the Oromo community.
“I see no difference in your struggle and the struggle that I have fighting for the liberation of Oromo.
“Your struggle is my struggle, when the struggle is shared it’s lifted from you.”
However, a Shabo Media spokesman told AAP the people interviewing Gibson in the clip didn’t know who she was at the time.
"She used to come to our meetings regularly and we loved how she showed interest in our people, but the community has pulled out from her after discovering her story," he said.
"It's weird, we interview different people at our events and we thought she was just an Australian girl hanging around. We didn't pick her for the video because she was somebody."
Victoria Sheriff’s officers raided her home in the inner Melbourne suburb of Northcote to seize her assets to recoup some of the debt on Wednesday.
With AAP
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