A woman who faked having cancer to get a job? It sounds like a plotline on Grey’s Anatomy, but that is actually what one writer on Grey’s Anatomy did.
The story of Elisabeth Finch, the former Grey’s Anatomy staff writer who lied about her diagnosis, comes to Peacock on Oct. 15 in a documentary series, Anatomy of Lies. Based on journalist Evgenia Peretz’s 2022 Vanity Fair exposé on Finch, which made headlines for detailing her rise and fall and tracing her many lies about battling cancer, the series uncovers how Finch’s lies were discovered and who they affected.
Over three episodes that adapt the article—directed and executive produced by Peretz and David Schisgall—people who were close to Finch and her former colleagues in the Grey’s Anatomy writers room look back at all the red flags they missed.
Finch was not interviewed for Anatomy of Lies, but screenshots of her social media posts are interspersed in the series. Her voice also appears throughout, via snippets from video and audio interviews that she gave over the years. The sound bytes are ironic and quite revealing: “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel like an imposter” and “I pride myself on not being the liar” and “if you’re heading into risky territory, keep going.”
Rise to fame
Finch, the series makes clear, was always been drawn to writing about trauma. The series starts off by talking about a play she wrote in high school about a father who abused his daughter, leaving her own mother in tears.
She studied screenwriting at the University of Southern California, then worked on the HBO series True Blood. But she always had her eyes set on Grey’s Anatomy. “I was super obsessed with Grey’s and I had every episode memorized in my head,” she said on a 2019 episode of The Writers Panel podcast, which is excerpted in the documentary.
She landed a job in its writer’s room in 2014 after writing a viral Elle story about being diagnosed with a rare bone cancer called chondrosarcoma in 2012.
On Grey’s, Finch became a go-to authority on writing any cancer-related plotlines, and colleagues saw her nibbling on saltines and taking breaks throughout the day, as she was physically sick from what they thought were cancer treatments.
During her career in the Grey’s Anatomy writer’s room, she wrote 13 episodes and produced 172. Finch wrote about the cancer she claimed to have in the 2018 episode “Anybody Have a Map?”, in which the surgeon Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen) learns she has chondrosarcoma and weighs the risks of a surgery that could leave her a quadriplegic.
Anatomy of Lies spends a lot of time with people who say Finch hurt them at various points in life. A college friend recalls Finch snapping at her when she showed up at the Mayo Clinic to pick her up from what she thought was cancer treatment.
Grey’s was the perfect place for Finch to focus on writing out traumatic plots—but even there, she could cross the line when it came to her colleagues. Former Grey’s Anatomy writer Kiley Donovan says in the series that she told Finch that her father was her mother’s rapist, and how Finch went on to write one of the most famous Grey’s Anatomy episodes about sexual assault. In “Silent All These Years,” the doctor Jo (Camilla Luddington) is triggered by a sexual assault patient and has flashbacks to her own mother telling her that she had been conceived in rape.
Due to the stress of writing that episode, Finch took a leave from work and checked into a mental health treatment facility in Arizona.
How Finch got caught
At the facility, Finch met Jen Beyer, a nurse and mother from Kansas recovering from an abusive marriage. They became fast friends. Over time, their friendship grew romantic, and they married in Feb. 2020.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown happened, and it strained their relationship. In the documentary, Beyer’s teenage daughter Maya reveals that she didn’t go to school for a year—even when schools reopened—because Finch was afraid she’d bring home Covid and kill her.
It was Beyer who uncovered Finch’s lies.
Finch would say she suffered from PTSD from cleaning up her friend’s remains after the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. But one day, Beyer looked at her Facebook page and saw that Finch had posted photos of herself from that time, not in Pittsburgh, but partying somewhere.
During her web sleuthing, she noticed a photo of Finch with a bandage on her chest where a chemotherapy port was supposed to be. But Beyer never saw a scar in that area, and that’s when she realized that Finch never had cancer.
Beyer says that when she confronted Finch about it, Finch admitted that she had been untruthful, totally stoic. When Beyer asked her if she knew anyone at the Tree of Life synagogue, Finch said she did not.
When it was clear that Finch was not going to come clean to everyone, Beyer wrote an email to Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes.
Donovan says that show employees nicknamed Finch the “trauma vampire.” She resigned in March 2022.
As Beyer explained why took that step in the docu-series, “She needs to stop having the platform to continue to hurt people over and over again.” Beyer thinks Finch latched onto her, a nurse, because surely a nurse would know whether or not she really had cancer.
Why Elisabeth Finch lied so much
“I think it is an unquenchable thirst for attention,” Peretz tells TIME.
And Finch has said as much. In a Dec. 2022 interview with the Ankler, Finch admitted that what she did was “f***ed up” and traces the lying back to a 2007 knee replacement surgery. She loved the attention she got from friends during that recovery period.
“What ended up happening is that everyone was so amazing and so wonderful leading up to all the surgeries. They were so supportive. And then I got my knee replacement. It was one hell of a recovery period and then it was dead quiet because everyone naturally was like ‘Yay! You’re healed.’ But it was dead quiet. And I had no support and went back to my old maladaptive coping mechanism—I lied and made something up because I needed support and attention and that’s the way I went after it.”
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