It’s no big secret why we’re all so obsessed with scammer and grifter stories: Those of us who don’t make up fake identities or pose as personal assistants online crave the thrill of a (safe, distant) encounter with people who seem to be completely untethered from the “right vs. wrong” moral binary. (Also, sometimes they have intriguing style!)
One of the most fascinating grifter tales to emerge in recent years is that of Elisabeth Finch, the former Grey’s Anatomy writer who turned out to be faking her cancer diagnosis (as well as various other personal tragedies). Vanity Fair writer Evgenia Peretz memorably chronicled Finch’s fall from Hollywood grace in a series of 2022 stories, and now, the strange scammer tale is about to be immortalized via Anatomy of Lies, a Peacock docuseries due out on Tuesday, October 15. Watch the trailer for yourself, then read on to find out everything you need to know about Anatomy of Lies and Finch’s real backstory.
Who is Elisabeth Finch?
Ah, the million-dollar question! Finch, now 46, is a longtime television writer. After getting her start as an assistant on True Blood in 2008, she worked her way up to writing for the show before moving to the sci-fi dramedy No Ordinary Family, and then The Vampire Diaries from 2012 to 2014. After writing an essay for Elle in 2014 about being diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare, malignant type of bone cancer two years earlier, Finch was offered a position in the writers’ room of Grey’s Anatomy in 2015.
What did Finch lie about in addition to her cancer?
During her time in the Grey’s Anatomy writers’ room, Finch published numerous personal essays in Elle, the Hollywood Reporter, and other outlets about her experience getting an abortion while living with cancer; losing a kidney; and being forced to undergo knee-replacement surgery. (Alarmingly enough, several of these stories found their way into scripts Finch wrote for Grey’s, most notably the plotline in which surgeon Catherine Avery—played by Debbie Allen, who was friendly with Finch off-camera—is diagnosed with chondrosarcoma.) Finch also claimed that she lost a friend in the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and helped to clean up his remains, although she was later found not to have been involved with any cleanup at the site. In addition, Finch repeatedly claimed that her brother, Eric Finch, had abused her as a child and had died by suicide as an adult.
What lengths did Finch go to in order to make her lies plausible?
“We worked with someone who not only said she was sick with cancer but looked sick with cancer,” a Grey’s Anatomy colleague told entertainment newsletter The Ankler in 2022. Finch presented as someone “who lost her hair, whose skin was yellow and green, who had a visible chemo port bandage, who regularly took breaks to vomit, who only ate saltines for long periods of time and who wrote and talked about her experiences all the time.”
How did the reality of Finch’s identity come to light?
In 2022, Finch’s estranged wife Jennifer Beyer—who is characterized in Peretz’s story as the survivor of a physically and sexually abusive marriage to the father of her children, a relationship that left her with ongoing PTSD—who met Finch in a mental health treatment facility in Arizona in 2019, contacted Disney and Shondaland, Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes’s production company, to report that Finch may have been lying about her illness. (Beyer, a registered nurse by profession, noted inconsistencies between Finch’s story and appearance and her professional knowledge of how a cancer patient might look or behave; for example, she noticed that Finch did not have a chemotherapy port scar as she had claimed to.) Chillingly, Beyer recognized details of her own life and prior abuse in Grey’s Anatomy plotlines surrounding the character Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington), a doctor who rebuilt her life after fleeing an abusive marriage.
Has Finch made any public statements since her lies were exposed?
Finch was put on administrative leave from Grey’s Anatomy after Peretz’s story detailing Beyer’s allegations went live in May of 2022 and ultimately resigned from the show before checking herself back into treatment in Arizona, finally admitting in an interview with The Ankler that December that she had entirely fabricated her cancer story. “I told a lie when I was 34 years old and it was the biggest mistake of my life. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me,” Finch told reporter Peter Kiefer, admitting that she had also not lost a friend in the Tree of Life shooting and that her brother was alive and working as a doctor in Florida.
How are Anna Paquin (and her kidney) involved in all this?
After Finch and Beyer left the Arizona treatment center where they met, the pair passed the beginning of their relationship at Paquin’s house in Ojai; Finch had gotten to know the actor on True Blood and had even claimed that her donated kidney came from Paquin, although Peretz’s story makes it clear that this is yet another untruth in a long, long series of them.