Stranger Than Fiction: Anatomy Of Lies

Anatomy Of Lies charts the rise and fall of Grey’s Anatomy star writer, Elisabeth Finch, and investigates her jaw-dropping lies that fooled Hollywood for years

We are connected by stories. Good ones, bad ones, great ones. The stories on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy oscillated between good and great, but this behind-the-scenes story from its writer’s room is completely bizarre. A story of deceit and impudence. The story of aspiring writer Elizabeth Finch, whose application to producer-screenwriter Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy writer’s room didn’t land her the job. But so desperate was she that she cooked up her own traumatic cancer story, published an essay about it in Elle magazine in 2012 and slithered into the writer’s room in 2014. She eventually rose to the rank of co-executive producer on the award-winning show.

When you realise you can get what you want by simply concocting a personal story and have people believe you, you probably chuckle at their idiocy and get bolder doing it. Why let ethics keep you on track when ambition drives your journey? That, in a nutshell, is Elizabeth Finch’s story. A writer I had never even heard of before the release of this docuseries.

Peacock's 'Anatomy of Lies' unpacks a bizarre story of deceit and impudence

Peacock TV’s three-part docuseries, Anatomy of Lies, pieces together Finch’s many fabricated personal tales, to arrive at the truth. The truth that Finch could go to any lengths to be seen, heard and revered. And for a while, her voice was highly regarded in the right circles, but she misused her clout for personal gains.

Across the years, Finch supported her fake stories not only with updates on her socials feed but also with a series of essays about her medical struggles in Elle, Shondaland.com and The Hollywood Reporter. She shared tales of her purported diagnosis with chondrosarcoma – a rare bone cancer, having an abortion while undergoing chemotherapy, losing a kidney, and undergoing a knee replacement surgery due to misdiagnosis. The publications did not verify her alleged stories, and the readers unquestioningly lapped it up.

Finch altered her appearance to appear sick at work, took puke breaks and sported a fake port on her chest to support her cancer story. She once broke down and walked out of the writer’s room and claimed that the doctor who consulted on the show had misdiagnosed her.

She used her medical diagnoses as an excuse to gain accommodations at work, such as deadline extensions, periods of absence and having teammates write her episodes. She also used these medical stories as plot lines on the show.

As if that wasn’t fodder enough for her writing, Finch brazenly stole fellow writer Kiley Donovan’s personal story of being a product of rape, for her episode named after a Tori Amos song, Silent All These Years in Season 15 of Grey’s Anatomy. The episode received accolades in Hollywood circles and won the Sentinel Award in late 2019. Finch never acknowledged the connection.

The Hollywood Reporter states that actor Camilla Luddington, who refused to be interviewed for the docuseries, had suggested the plot line for her character, Josephine “Jo” Wilson, to then-showrunner Krista Vernoff on the day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and that the series was already planning to introduce Jo’s biological mother who had abandoned her at a fire station. But this is not mentioned in the docuseries.

Finch didn’t just concoct stories about her medical history. In October 2018, she pretended to be emotionally invested in the horrific mass shootout at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where she supposedly lost a close friend. In a series of gut-wrenching tweets, she later claimed that she had to clear her friend’s remains from the site of the hate crime “from sunup to sundown”. And no one thought to question her involvement. Such was the trust she garnered.

Finch then claimed to suffer from PTSD because of the incident and proceeded to check into a treatment centre in Arizona. She forged a friendship with fellow resident, Jennifer Beyer, a nurse from Kansas who suffered domestic violence and almost lost custody of her five children to her ‘political activist’ husband and perpetrator. Finch interrogated Jennifer for stories of abuse, trauma and treatment, presented them as her own experience in the writer’s room, and used these to fuel plotlines for her episodes on the show.

Somewhere in between, at the peak of the #MeToo movement, Finch wrongfully accused an unnamed director of The Vampire Diaries of harassing her during her tenure on the show to gain traction. This incident should have been adequately explored in the docuseries.

She later accused her own brother, Eric, a doctor in Florida, of abuse and the cause of her PTSD, inspired by the story of Jennifer’s husband, Brendan. She imitated Jennifer’s symptoms to fake her way through a team of therapists and doctors.

Writer and executive producer of Anatomy of Lies, Evgenia Peretz reveals in Vanity Fair that in July 2019, when the two women were ready to leave the facility, the staff at the centre were trying to help Jennifer obtain a service dog, which she could not afford. Finch stepped up and solidified her friendship with Jennifer.

Los Angeles-based Finch kept in touch with Jennifer and slid her way back into her world when Brendan committed suicide. Jennifer introduced Finch to her children, who fell in love with her. She stayed with the family in Kansas and pretended she was missing the Emmy Awards, and that she was one of the nominees.

Parallelly Finch lied unrepentantly about Eric’s death, borrowing a plot point from the show to do it. She mailed her Grey’s team stating that her abusive brother had attempted suicide, unsuccessfully, went into a coma, and left her to finally pull the plug. With this fabricated story, she painted herself at once as a victim and a selfless hero. The Grey’s team later discovered that Eric lived and successfully practiced in Florida. He and his parents understandably refused to be interviewed for the docuseries.

In February 2020, Finch proposed to Jennifer, and they were married. She moved to Kansas to be with her wife and her children. When the pandemic hit, Finch’s façade began to unpeel, layer by layer. She began to distance herself from Jennifer and her children, claiming to be submerged in work.

During this time apart, Jennifer finally noticed the red flags she had been missing, the inconsistencies in Finch’s stories, and began to corroborate those with her social media feed. It unravelled Finch’s rampant dishonesty and left her reeling in shock.

Jennifer confronted Finch, who knew her time was up and reluctantly confessed to her wife, but without any remorse for having manipulated people to gain empathy and hurt them at so many levels. Jennifer urged Finch to come clean to her family, friends and colleagues, but she seemed reluctant and asked for a divorce instead. The estranged wife eventually raised her concerns in an email to Grey’s Anatomy creator-producer Shonda Rhimes and then-showrunner Krista Vernoff.

Finch was placed on administrative leave in March 2022, pending a legal and human resources investigation into the veracity of her claims by Disney Television Studios. Shondaland is said to have handled the situation with kid gloves. Finch refused to share her medical reports and opted for leave of absence.

In December 2022, The Ankler published Finch’s only post-scandal interview to date, where she finally admitted to having fabricated a string of traumatic personal stories. “I lied and there’s no excuse for it. But there’s context for it,” she said to author Peter Kiefer. But no amount of justification absolves her of unethically blurring lines between fact and fiction, hurting her family and co-workers at so many levels.

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.”

Finch declined to be interviewed for the docuseries, although screenshots of her social posts and snippets of her audio and video interviews over the years are interspersed throughout. The docu-makers spoke to Peter Kiefer about his interactions with Finch, but he is not featured in the series. Neither of them, or the people who have been duped by her, believe that Finch feels any remorse.

Anatomy of Lies is co-directed by executive producer Evgenia Peretz, the author of a two-part Vanity Fair exposé on Finch, which details her rise and fall in Hollywood and her relationship with Jennifer Beyer, and her film-maker husband, David Schisgall, and produced by Vanity Fair Studios and Dorothy St. Pictures.

The docuseries leaves us with many questions about Finch’s motivations and why she felt the need to consistently spread so much hurtful disinformation. It can be tough to have people go on record about the details of a controversy, details that the docu-makers may have discovered in off-the-record interviews. However, Peretz’s Vanity Fair articles provide some insight, and she states in an interview that the entire Finch controversy was driven by her “unquenchable thirst for attention.” Probably.

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