Details Emerge On How Disgraced ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Writer Used Her Fake Cancer To Terrorize Colleagues: “It Seems So Much Harder To Me Than Just Doing Your Job Well”
The disgraced fabulist and former Grey’s Anatomy writer, Elisabeth Finch, pulled one of the biggest cons in Hollywood history until Vanityfair outed her in 2022.
Finch gave a public apology just before Anatomy of Lies, a three-part docuseries by Peacock based on the VanityFair story, was released on October 15, 2024. The show exposed the harrowing details of the nightmare that family, friends, and former colleagues lived through because of Finch’s intricate web of lies and theatrics.
Finch’s lies started in 2012 when she wrote catchy essays on Elle about how she was diagnosed with Chondrosarcoma, a rare aggressive form of bone cancer. It was these essays that caught the eye of a Shondaland executive in 2014, paving her way into the Shonda Rhimes-led Grey’s Anatomy writers’ room.
“You have to move through eight years of interaction to wrap your head around it and I am not even sure that I fully have,” Finch’s former colleague, writer, and producer Andy Reaser said.
To keep the lie going, Finch shaved her head bald, donned a green scarf, and even strapped a fake chemo port to her chest, ensuring it was always visible under her tank tops. She even faked the most harrowing symptoms of chemo, including faking spells of serious illness. “This was like performance art. She was showing up to work with a shaved head and a greenish hue…She looked like she lived in a microwave,” Reaser continues.
Through her act, Finch became close with Shonda Rhimes and got the ear of the other executives, eventually becoming the writers’ room’s self-made expert on everything cancer. Despite there being two other cancer survivors in the writer’s room, Finch wouldn’t take anyone else’s opinion because she was the one “living with the disease.” Another former colleague said everyone in the room avoided questioning Finch whenever she spoke because they felt that everything she said could literally be her last words.
“She was eating these saltines (apparently the only food she could keep down), drinking ginger ale, and going to the bathroom to take puke breaks from her chemo… It is just so hard to imagine that someone could commit so strongly to that. It seems so much harder to me than just doing your job well” Andy Reaser continued.
“I think she saw her life as a TV series. You have to keep going big because that is how you keep your audience,” another one of Finch’s former colleagues summes up her lies in Anatomy of Lies.
Her cancer victim card and a string of made-up harrowing personal experiences still paid off big time as Finch became a highly regarded figure in the writer’s room. She ended up being credited for writing 13 episodes and co-producing a whopping 172 more. She even incorporated parts of her fake life story into the show’s plot, primarily, the story of Dr. Catherine Fox (Debbie Allen) who gets diagnosed with Chondrosarcoma in Season 15 and has to live with it just like Finch.
Unfortunately, Finch didn’t choose to stop while she was ahead and continued to weave more strings into her web of lies. One of her biggest lies came in 2018 when she claimed to have had to scrape the remains of her friend from the floor after the deadly shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. However, an investigation by The Ankler later revealed that Finch didn’t know any of the 11 victims of the massacre, and wasn’t even in Pittsburgh after the shooting. The time she claimed to have spent “collecting her friend’s remains” was actually spent at a Halloween party.
She made the Synagogue lie the subject of her request for time off from work to check into a treatment center in Tucson as she was apparently suffering from PTSD. It was at this treatment center that she met Jennifer Beyer, a mother of five and the survivor of an abusive marriage who checked into the center to treat her dissociative disorder.
The two fell in love and got married, and it was Beyer who, being a registered nurse, saw the cracks in Finch’s fibs and later exposed her amid their bitter divorce. Coincidentally, Shonda Rhimes got Beyer’s email while working on the release of Netflix’s Inventing Anna, another docuseries about a con artist.
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