The new Peacock documentary “Anatomy of Lies” focuses on the TV writer and producer Elisabeth Finch, who spent years faking a cancer diagnosis. She used her alleged experiences to inform “Grey’s Anatomy” storylines. Peacock is owned by NBCUniversal, TODAY’s parent company.
The day the documentary dropped, Finch apologized on Instagram in a now-private post, which was shared with TODAY.com by her lawyer, Andrew Brettler.
“I’ve given no one any reason to believe I word I say. I lied about so much; things so many people have been devastated by in real life. ‘I’m sorry’ feels like the smallest words compared to what I’ve done, yet they are the truest,” she said, in part.
What is Elisabeth Finch accused of doing, and how does it connect to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’?
Finch is accused of using lies about her own life, and incidents from other people’s lives, to inform the TV episodes she wrote.
Finch wrote about being diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, which is a rare kind of cancer that usually starts in the bones, in an article for Elle magazine in 2014.
In that essay, she wrote that she “defied” her doctor’s orders to leave work indefinitely and instead returned to “Vampire Diaries.”
“I watched the producers’ cuts under a fog of Demerol, punched up dialogue about vampire-werewolf hybrids with a shunt in my spine,” she wrote. “Yes, I was down 17 pounds, bald, vomiting relentlessly, but I was still living alone. Still stubborn as hell.”
She went on to work for Shonda Rhimes’ hospital-set show “Grey’s Anatomy,” where she said she used her “personal” connection to cancer to inspire plots. Finch spoke about the transition from writing for “Vampire Diaries” and “True Blood” to “Grey’s Anatomy” in a 2016 interview with Carnegie Mellon University.
“I had been telling six years worth of vampire stories and I needed a shift,” Finch said. “I don’t know if that would have happened at the exact same time if I wasn’t sick. Now, being at ‘Grey’s’, a show that deals with doctors, medicine and people having life and near-death experiences, there have been moments where it really has keyed into my own personal experience.”
In 2018, the “Grey’s” episode of “Anybody Have a Map?“ aired. Written by Finch — one of 13 she wrote and 172 she produced, per IMDb — it included the diagnosis of surgeon Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen), diagnosed with the same cancer Finch allegedly had battled.
Finch wrote about her “challenges” in The Hollywood Reporter, which has now replaced her articles with placeholders.
She also interviewed “Grey’s” actor and director Chandra Wilson for an episode she wrote, in which Wilson’s character has a heart attack, for Shondaland. Finch said she had a “cancer that went misdiagnosed for several years due to a doctor who refused to believe there was something wrong, despite my protestations otherwise.”
Finch said she and Wilson connected over trips to the ER. Wilson is a caregiver for her daughter who has cyclic vomiting syndrome.
“Chandra and I swapped ‘war stories’ about ER visits, port-a-catheters, and difficult diagnoses. There was a shorthand — a knowledge of how hard it can often be, as women in particular, to be seen and heard when managing chronic illness,” she said.
The three-part documentary looks at other directions Finch’s web of storytelling took. For example, she falsely told colleagues she went to the Tree of Life synagogue after a 2018 shooting took the lives of 11 congregants, colleagues told Vanity Fair.
She later checked into a PTSD facility and told people there, including her future ex-wife Jennifer Beyer, that told her friend was among the victims, Beyer told Vanity Fair.
Beyer told Vanity Fair she later put together through a Facebook scroll that, on the day that Finch was supposedly cleaning up bodies at the synagogue, she was out with friends.
She also falsely told colleagues that her brother died by suicide, according to an email she sent the writing staff of “Grey’s Anatomy” included in the Vanity Fair story.
Finch’s brother is alive and lives in Florida, TODAY.com confirmed through public records.
The documentary also shows how other people’s lives became “Grey’s Anatomy” plotlines that Finch wrote. In the documentary, “Grey’s” writer Kiley Donovan says she told Finch a personal story that informed the character Jo’s (Camila Luddington) backstory in the episode “Silent All These Years.” Donovan said the experience was “painful,” “weird” and “wrong,” but that she never confronted Finch over the episode, which was acclaimed at the time.
How was her false chondrosarcoma diagnosis exposed?
Vanity Fair reported that it was Finch’s ex-wife, Jennifer Beyer, who first questioned Finch’s diagnosis. Beyer is interviewed in the documentary. Evgenia Peretz, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece, is the co-director of the Peacock documentary.
Finch and Beyer met in 2020 at a wellness facility, where she checked in seeking treatment for PTSD, per Vanity Fair. Notably, she checked in using the “Grey’s Anatomy” character’s name she wrote a significant plot for, Jo, according to the magazine.
Beyer confronted Finch after they married and she put together discrepancies, per Vanity Fair. She told the magazine she saw Finch was not in Pittsburgh following the synagogue shooting, but out with friends. She also said she noticed Finch had a chemotherapy port in a photo that she didn’t have in real life.
TODAY.com has reached out to Beyer for comment.
Finch privately confessed to Beyer and their friends about her cancer lies, per Vanity Fair. Then, amid their divorce, which Finch filed for in 2021, Beyer contacted “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes and showrunner Krista Vernoff, the magazine reported.
The newsletter The Ankler broke the story six weeks before Vanity Fair published its two-part look into Finch’s storytelling.
Finch later spoke to the author of The Ankler, Peter Kiefer, for a December 2022 piece. She characterized her diagnosis and lies as follows: “I told a lie when I was 34 years old and it was the biggest mistake of my life,” she said to me at a later meeting. “It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me.”
She also said, “I’ve never had any form of cancer.”
“What I did was wrong. Not okay. F—-d up. All the words,” Finch said.
Where is Finch now?
Finch’s most recent writing credit was as a writer for “Grey’s Anatomy” in 2021.
Finch released a message the day the documentary dropped, shared with TODAY.com by her lawyer. She said she has been receiving mental health treatment for “nearly three years.”
She said, in part, the “biggest mistake” of her life, “alongside lying about cancer in the first place,” was “saying ‘yes’ to Jennifer’s proposal before I was honest with her.”
She ended the post by saying there is “no excuse” or “justification” to make her lies “OK to anyone.”
“Nothing erases the trauma I caused — the fear, the pain, the anger, the tears, the time. And nothing matters more to me than holding myself accountable in every way. I will continue to repair whatever damage I can and ensure I am not the worst things I’ve done. I recognize all of this will take time for people to believe,” she wrote.
Her final words in the apology are, “I will work and wait as long as it takes.”
In a Facebook post Oct. 17, Beyer appeared to respond to Finch’s apology without naming Finch but instead calling her “our abuser.” Beyer said the note had messages to her and her five children.
“I’ve been reflecting on the public apology our abuser posted recently. The pain she aimed to provoke was achieved in a subtle manner. By addressing me as Jennifer Dawn, and twisting part of our story she intentionally triggered a trauma response in both me and my older children, while the general public remained unaware. This is a clear example of her manipulative tactics at play, rich with deeper implications,” she said.
Beyer also said that she and her children have told Finch “never to post or speak about them again.”
“I will not stand by and say nothing while she continues to exploit my children. It has been traumatizing for both me and the children to witness her continue to use them for her own gain, especially after everything she has put us through,” she said.