Smith’s integrity issues have extended to his personal life, as well.

He told an artist ex-girlfriend at her gallery opening that he was dying of a mystery illness and maintained the story for over a year.

“He would repeatedly tell her that any level of stress could kill him,” says a former VICE employee. “He kept using the phrase ‘doctor’s order’ to excuse whatever he was doing, like taking phone calls, or spending time with her would kill him. In reality, he was messing around.”

Reached for comment, the ex-girlfriend, who asked not to be named, confirmed the story and said that she eventually found out through social media that Smith was seeing other women when he said he was going to the doctor’s office.

Smith told Charlie Rose that he ran away from home at age 13 — instead, he moved in with his father after getting into a fight with his step dad, say longtime friends who knew him at the time. He also told Rose that his father “built an electric car that won the first—one of the first electric car races,” but that, too, wasn’t true. The first electric car races were decades earlier and in the United States, not Smith’s native Canada.

A Canadian journalist, who also asked not to be identified, described Smith telling her that he had been in a gang in his teenage years, which she later discovered from interviewing family and friends, was “bogus.” The piece she was working on was published, but didn’t include anything about Smith’s childhood.

Childhood friend Bannister describes Smith as prone to “exaggeration.”

“He is the type of guy, you will do something together and he will be telling someone a story about what you guys did. It will always sound far more exciting than what actually happened,” said Bannister in an interview with TheDC.

“It’s not that he’s making things up. He’s a great storyteller,” Bannister said. “The mystique is built into his character.”

VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes, who declined to be interviewed for this article, once referred to his ex-partner as “Bullshitter Shane.” The two split over “creative differences” in 2004 and some perceived racially-insensitive comments from McInnes which appeared in the New York Times.

Smith often exaggerates about the size and success of VICE, according to former employees.

When the first of the company’s profile pieces came out saying how much money VICE was making, Smith was worried that the employees — many of whom work below market rate — would be upset, said a former employee. “He told us that there’s always a difference between perception and reality and that that was important to help VICE grow,” the employee said.

Smith has routinely inflated the number of people who work for him internationally. He boasted to the Financial Times in December that the network has over “800 employees in 34 countries” and, according to one former VICE employee, “this figure is ridiculously false.” VICE told the Globe and Mail in May that it has “more than 1,100 employees across the globe.”