Jackie Gillies And The Lucrative Liar’s Trade

Jackie Gillies was always the perfect choice to join the cast of Real Housewives, a reality franchise about women who are not housewives: she’s built an entire career on pretending to be something she’s not. Her ability to turn barefaced lies into money puts Canberra to shame. She’s conducted her life like a megalomaniacal dung beetle, her career a towering monument to herself, constructed of 100% bullshit.

Bullshit is, of course, the stock in trade of the entertainment industry, but Gillies is something special: she doesn’t just lie, she lies to the grieving and the vulnerable, she exploits tragedy to fill her pockets, she glorifies herself by feeding off death. She is a bottom-feeding misery leech whose every action and utterance gives charlatans a bad name.

Of course going on I’m A Celebrity gave her yet another fantastic chance to give a plug to her bespoke bullshit factory. She’s a businesswoman, why shouldn’t she drum up some business for herself, by showcasing just how good she is at clamping her slimy maw onto someone who seems fragile enough to tolerate her vicious mendacity and sucking for all she’s worth?

And so we have the spectacle of Jackie Gillies “channelling” Charlotte Dawson in the “jungle”, spinning a gossamer-fine web of excrement all around Simone Holtznagel, a close friend of Charlotte’s who still feels the pain of her impossibly sad passing, and who was therefore a prime target for the Gillies brand of personal exploitation.

We are supposed to believe that this was “moving” television, a moment of touching humanity in a weary world. Gillies, and the I’m A Celebrity publicity machine, would like us to swallow the line that here was a caring humanitarian using her gift to bring comfort to a troubled soul.

Fuck that.

Here was a cynical shyster using her gift — the gift of dazzling the gullible she’s been honing for many years — to use another person’s pain for her own material ends. Here was a conwoman lying with might and main to gather more customers for her scam, to usher more loose-walleted congregants into her church of make-believe to fill the collection plate that funds the haute couture she flounces around in while squawking at the other “housewives” in that other great televisual temple to vacuity and falseness that she helped build.

Charlotte Dawson was a real woman, loved by many in the real world, loved to this day, and desperately missed still. How dare this poison-tongued cardboard facsimile of empathy hijack people’s emotions to inflate her own delusions of grandeur? How dare she spit her diseased fantasies in our faces as if life and death only exist so that her parasitical fraud has a host body to bleed dry?

Jackie Gillies is a liar and a scammer. She does it for money, and she does it to people who are hurting and vulnerable. She is empty of feeling, devoid of regard for others, oblivious to the very idea of integrity. What she did to Charlotte and everyone who knew her on national TV, she’s done to countless others before.

We all know that Jackie Gillies is full of shit. Time to stop pretending we don’t. Time to call Jackie Gillies, and all her fellow con artists, exactly what they are.