Teen faked brain tumour to charm One Direction & raise money to fund Disneyland trips but real reason was even darker

“THEIR work is totally inspiring and continually blows us away,” Louis Tomlinson told the audience at the charity Cinderella Ball at London’s Natural History Museum.

No one had any reason to disagree with the One ­Direction heartthrob as he gave a moving speech about teenager Megan Bhari and her mum Jean.

For three years the pair’s charity Believe In Magic had been granting wishes to seriously ill children — many of whom were in the audience that evening in 2015.

Believe In Magic gained the backing of One Direction and the PM.

People admired how hard Megan worked while publicly battling a brain tumour.

But the charity was hiding a dark secret.

A team of concerned parents found Jean and Megan were staying at a luxury Disney resort when they were raising money for the teen’s “life-saving treatment”.

They accused her of lying about her illness. But then Megan suddenly died.

As a journalist and author, I am only too familiar with scams.

But as I investigated this incredible tale of deception for my latest BBC podcast, Believe In Magic, even I was shocked by what I found.

Megan, who grew up around the South East of England, was only 16 when she launched the charity with her mum in 2012.

It was inspired by her own ill health.

Aged 13, she was diagnosed with a brain condition called idiopathic intracranial hypertension and shortly after revealed it was actually a brain tumour.

The teenager had a unique talent for PR, often using social media to charm celebrities. And it paid off.

After One Direction’s stint on The X Factor in 2010, Megan was invited to meet the lads. It led to them being snapped wearing the charity’s wristbands.

The band even raised £400,000 by auctioning off backstage passes.

Not only that, Harry Styles’ mum Anne Twist hiked Kilimanjaro in 2012, and Louis’ now late mum Johannah Deakin even hosted a fundraising ball — with magician Dynamo performing tricks on the night.

One year, a group of poorly youngsters were driven in Bentleys to Buckingham Palace, where they helped decorate a tree.

One parent recalls: “It was out of this world.”

The then-Prime Minister David Cameron praised Megan’s “extraordinary courage”.

But everything changed one day in 2015 when Jean announced Megan’s condition had deteriorated, and she needed £120,000 to pay for urgent life-saving treatment in the US. Within hours they had hit the target.

Mum-of-three Jo Ashcroft, from Wigan, watched the donations pour in — but thought something seemed off.

Jo herself had needed to raise £250,000 for life-saving treatment in the US for her son after the two-year-old was diagnosed with a neuroblastoma in 2011.

The language of Megan’s appeal was vague and lacking details, with no mention of which hospital Megan would be treated at.

Jo told me: “I don’t want people being ripped off, especially not in the cancer community.”

She set up a fake profile on Facebook and even posed as a journalist wanting to do a story on Megan in a bid to get answers, eventually confiding her concerns with other parents.

And when they spotted Megan and Jean were back in the US asking for more money the following year, it spurred them on further.

After some smart online research, the internet sleuths discovered that as Jean and Megan begged for more money to fund urgent care, they were in fact staying at a luxury lodge in Disney World, Florida.

And when the pair returned to the UK, Jo hired a private investigator to secretly take snaps of them disembarking the Queen Mary II liner.

Hooked up to oxygen

According to the investigator, they were laughing and chatting as they strolled past the porters — not at death’s door and hooked up to oxygen as Jean had claimed.

The concerned parents tried to warn the authorities — but when they shared their research online, most people refused to believe it.

Jo remained convinced the story did not add up. A year later, Megan was dead.

For me, the story started two years after Megan’s death.

My sharp-eyed BBC colleague Ruth Mayer was reading an article about Believe In Magic being shut down by the Charity Commission in 2020 when she spotted a cryptic line in the comments below: “The full truth is so much darker.”

Ruth contacted everyone involved in the hope we could find out the full truth. Darker was an understatement.

After multiple requests, Ruth and I were given special permission to listen to a recording of a 2018 coroner’s inquest held shortly after Megan passed away.

We heard Megan did not die of a brain tumour, but an abnormality of the rhythm of the heart — acute ­cardiac arrhythmia — due to fatty liver disease, likely related to Megan’s high body mass index.

Several doctors listed other details.

One doubted the validity of Megan’s medical history and noted her “opiate-seeking” behaviour.

There was an attempt to obtain morphine with a forged prescription.

Megan’s half-sister Kate recalls Megan was taking morphine every day at one point.

At the inquest, one doctor was worried she was taking a “higher dose of opiates than was required” and wonders if “that was part of the reason she was unwell.”

Megan repeatedly missed medical appointments and flitted from ­doctor to doctor.

Professor Marc Feldman, who has worked with patients who fake or exaggerate illness, commonly known as Munchausen Syndrome, told us: “I have seen many cases not at all dissimilar to this one.”

Some do it for money, he explained. Others want attention or have a desire to be cared for.

Kate thinks the charity was set up out of a desire to rub shoulders with celebrities — and especially One Direction, who Megan was reportedly obsessed with.

Professor Feldman says people faking illness to meet stars has become more common.

A serious condition, he explains, “allows someone to emerge out of the pack of people who are ­infatuated with this celebrity”.

He also studies Munchausen Syndrome by proxy — when a parent or caregiver fakes or exaggerates illness in their child. In the UK, this is now called Fabricated Or Induced Illness.

We will never know who exactly was driving this behaviour.

However, Kate, who is now estranged from Jean, told us how she got the sense Jean would have liked the “thrill” of one of her kids having an accident.

‘Absolutely sickening’

And when someone they knew was unwell, Jean would soon tell them that Megan had the same condition.

Kate says: “She [Jean] infantilised her — the Peter Pan effect. It was all things to keep her young.”

Based on our description of what we have discovered, Prof Feldman says Megan’s case “screams” of FII.

As we were nearing the end of our investigation, we discovered that Kingston Council in South West London had also been looking into Megan’s case.

Early this year, it published a rare safeguarding adults review into her death.

The names were all changed, but we have no doubt it is about Megan.

It concluded that, despite no formal diagnosis, “all involved . . .  think it was likely to have been FII.

The review did not suggest that FII caused Megan’s death, but explains how her case could have been missed because the health system is not set up to recognise it in adults.

A few weeks later we received an email from Megan’s mother, Jean.

For months we’d tried to contact her, even travelling to France and the south coast of England in the hope of asking her questions.

In her email Jean maintained that Megan had been diagnosed with a pituitary microadenoma, a type of non-cancerous brain tumour which, while not typically life-threatening, can be harmful.

She said: “I loved and cared for my daughter. Suggesting I might have harmed her in any way at all is absolutely sickening.”

We might never know the full truth. But according to one expert, Megan’s story could help medical professionals spot similar cases.

It might be too late for Megan. But maybe it is not too late for someone else.

•  The Believe In Magic podcast is ­available on BBC Sounds. Episodes will be released bi-weekly.