When Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch was suspended from work in March 2022, it marked the moment her house of cards finally came tumbling down. The former True Blood and The Vampire Diaries writer had appeared to be a powerful Hollywood success story. She claimed to have drawn on her real-life experiences of battling a rare form of bone cancer to inspire storylines on the hit medical show. In fact, she was spinning a jaw-dropping web of deceit that is now being explored in-depth in the new Peacock docuseries Anatomy of Lies.
This much is true: Finch grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and attended film school at the University of Southern California. She got her career started by writing a short film called Looking for My Brother, which was released in 2006. That brought her to the attention of True Blood, which hired her as a writers’ assistant in 2008. After gaining several writing credits, she moved on to The Vampire Diaries in 2012 where she wrote a string of episodes and earned the nickname “Vampire Girl” for the niche she seemed to be carving out for herself.
However, her dream was to write for Grey’s Anatomy, and she grabbed the medical drama’s attention in 2014 with a personal essay she wrote for Elle magazine. In the article, Finch recounted her experience of being diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare and usually fatal form of bone cancer, but made it clear that the diagnosis didn’t get in the way of her work. She recalled one doctor criticizing her for returning to a writers’ room to “[punch] up dialogue about vampire-werewolf hybrids” while dealing with a shunt in her spine.
Shortly after the Elle piece was published, Grey’s Anatomy super-producer Shonda Rhimes offered Finch the job she’d been dreaming about. Less than five years later, Finch’s story about battling bone cancer had become a plot line on the series. In the Finch-written episode “Anybody Have a Map?”, which aired in November 2018, surgeon Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen) learns she has chondrosarcoma.
Finch, who was by then showing up to work bald with a scarf around her head, claimed she’d been living with the cancer since 2012, and was the only one in her clinical trial to have survived. She was given time off to have chemo at the Mayo Clinic, and wrote about her experiences for shondaland.com to promote her episodes.
As Finch told it, cancer was only the start of it. She told friends she’d unexpectedly fallen pregnant and had to choose to have an abortion rather than cease her treatment. She had a kidney transplant. A close friend died in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018. Her brother, who had abused her in their youth, unsuccessfully attempted suicide – and she was the one who had to pull the plug.
It wasn’t until February 2022 that Finch’s coworkers at Grey’s realized something wasn’t right. That month, Rhimes received an email from Finch’s estranged wife, Jennifer Beyer. Beyer warned Rhimes that Finch had been fictionalizing her own life. She told her the writer with the tragic backstory was not to be trusted.
Finch was suspended from work the following month, and in December of that year finally came clean. “I’ve never had any form of cancer,” she admitted in an interview with The Ankler. “What I did was wrong. Not OK. F***ed up. All the words.”
She also confessed to lying about her brother’s death by suicide – he’s still alive and living in Florida. She revealed she’d shaved her head to look like she was undergoing chemo, and had taped a dummy catheter to her arm.
Finch said she felt relieved to be coming clean. “When you get wrapped up in a lie you forget who you told – what you said to this person and whether this person knows that thing – and that’s the world where you can get caught,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about that now.”
Anatomy of Lies is on Peacock from October 15.
