Brooke Bellamy has addressed the fallout of the plagiarism scandal she was engulfed in with RecipeTin Eats last year, saying she “didn’t invite [herself] into that narrative”.
The fiasco kicked off last April, when RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi publicly accused Bellamy, a popular food creator in her own right, of stealing two recipes to use in her book, Bake With Brooki.
Bellamy denied the allegations, saying she’d inherited the recipes from her family, but the controversy dominated headlines as celebrity chefs weighed in and new plagiarism accusations surfaced.
Now, almost a year on, Bellamy said she has made peace with the situation and has weathered the storm.
“I’ve come to peace with the terms that on the internet, people can say whatever they want about you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true,” Bellamy said on The Balance Theory podcast.
Reflecting on her response to the scandal — which saw her remain largely silent besides a statement denying the allegations and a few cryptic social media posts — Bellamy said she “very deliberately” avoided reacting, even though she was under scrutiny.
“Your integrity is everything that you have, so when someone questions that, you can really take it on board,” Bellamy said.
“But I am the sum of my actions, not of my words. So in that moment, I chose very deliberately not to react and not to add to this narrative of ‘she said, she said’ and pitting two women against each other,” she added.
As for how she was able to bite her tongue, Bellamy said she felt confident in the cooking community she’d built and her years of work in the industry.
“The only thing to gain out of adding to that noise is probably protecting your own ego,” Bellamy said. “Everyone around me knows me. Everyone in my community knows me. I’ve worked really hard to be here. So you just have to decide, am I adding any value by adding noise? Or am I just adding noise?”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Bellamy said she never wanted “to be a part of a narrative that I didn’t invite myself into”, and reflected on how the scandal helped her gain a new perspective on her business.
“As I keep building this global business, I am going to be open to more scrutiny,” she said.
The initial controversy revolved around two recipes — a caramel slice and baklava — that appeared in Bellamy’s book.
In a social media post, Maehashi said she was “shocked” to find the recipes were plagiarised “word-for-word”, claiming the similarities were “far too specific and detailed to be dismissed as coincidence”.
Bellamy and Penguin, the publisher behind her book, hit back with their own statements denying the allegations and claiming the recipes were the result of “countless hours” of baking experience.
The fallout involved everyone from Martha Stewart to US food author Sally McKeeney, but Bellamy’s recent comments might just put the cloche on the scandal once and for all.
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