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New Peacock Documentary Exposes Grey's Anatomy Writer's "Jaw-Dropping" Deceptions
Grey's Anatomy writers believed Elisabeth Finch was drawing from her own painful cancer battle as she wrote for the popular medical drama, but her health battles would turn out to be nothing but a work of fiction.
As a star writer on Grey’s Anatomy, Elisabeth Finch was known for her ability to craft compelling fiction — but her friends and coworkers never realized she was also creating a false narrative about her own life.
Peacock’s new docuseries Anatomy of Lies, directed and executive produced by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall, will explore the staggering lies Finch told to those closest to her, whether it was her false years-long battle with a rare form of cancer or her brother’s supposed death by suicide.
“Premiering Oct. 15 on Peacock, Anatomy of Lies reveals the rise and fall of Grey’s Anatomy star writer Elisabeth Finch, whose jaw-dropping lies fooled Hollywood for years, and became fodder for many high-profile episodes of Grey’s,” a synopsis explains.
The story will be told by some of Finch’s “closest contacts,” many of whom are speaking out for the first time.
“I think she saw her life like a TV series,” one person close to the story said in the official trailer. “You have to keep going big, because that’s how you keep your audience.”
Her carefully crafted deceptions would finally be exposed in 2022, first by The Ankler and then in a two-part exposé in Vanity Fair, costing the clever television writer her job and many of the relationships she had built with others.
“I let her into my home, into my kids’ lives. When you love somebody you ignore red flags until they’re hitting you in the head,” Finch’s estranged wife, Jennifer Beyer, said in the trailer of the convincing ruse.
Before the docuseries drops next month, here’s everything to know about shocking true-life tale:
Did Elisabeth Finch have cancer?
As a child, Finch grew up in suburban New Jersey where she loved to write and watch television, according to The Ankler.
Those two passions collided when she got her first job in television writing for HBO’s vampire-drama True Blood and later landed a job as a staff writer and co-producer for the long-running ABC medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.
It was in the writer's room that she told coworkers she had been diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. She also claimed to have lost a kidney and had an abortion because of the chemotherapy she was allegedly undergoing, and told others she had part of her tibia removed during treatment, per Vanity Fair's report.
Finch wrote about her trials in national publications and incorporated her experiences into some of the Grey’s Anatomy plot lines as she soaked up the empathy and concern from others — but eventually the truth would be exposed.
“I’ve never had any form of cancer,” Finch eventually confessed to The Ankler, calling the lie the “biggest mistake” of her life.
She also claimed that, in 2019, her older brother Eric died by suicide, but that wasn’t true either, Vanity Fair reported.
Finch tried to explain her actions to the publication by describing the lies as a response to earlier “trauma.”
“I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did,” she said. “I lied and there’s no excuse for it. But there’s context for it. The best way I can explain it is when you experience a level of trauma a lot of people adopt a maladaptive coping mechanism. Some people drink to hide or forget things. Drug addicts try to alter their reality. Some people cut. I lied. That was my coping and my way to feel safe and seen and heard.”
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Who is Elisabeth Finch’s wife, Jennifer Beyer?
Her eventual downfall was brought on, in part, by her wife, Jennifer Beyer, a registered nurse and mother of five from Kansas. The pair met in 2019 at mental health treatment center in Arizona, according to Vanity Fair. Beyer was just getting out of an abusive 18-year marriage and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Her final mark was trauma survivor Jennifer Beyer, who entrusted Finch with her deepest secrets. But as Beyer uncovers the web of lies that deceived Hollywood for years, she faces a daunting challenge: Can she reclaim the narrative from a convincing storyteller who showed no signs of stopping?” the synopsis for Anatomy of Lies asks.
After getting married, Beyer began to realize that Finch was pirating aspects of her life to incorporate into the show. She eventually reached out to Grey’s Anatomy’s production company, Shondaland, and Disney, the parent company of ABC, to share her concerns about Finch, according to The Ankler.
Peretz, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who wrote the initial two-part story, now serves as director and executive producer on the three-part docuseries.
“Jenn is such a sympathetic character, and she’s been through so much,” Peretz told Vanity Fair.
Beyer — who is in the process of divorcing Finch — will share her story and video footage she captured during her whirlwind romance in the docuseries, along with commentary from Finch’s former coworkers, former writers at Grey’s Anatomy, and two of Beyer’s older children.
“It can be very cathartic to tell your story,” Peretz told Vanity Fair. “I hope that for Jenn’s sake, especially, having told her story to such a wide audience is therapeutic. And I hope that audience members who have been in a similar situation to Jenn, where they’ve been lied to or betrayed and feel gullible or whatever it is, feel like they’re not alone.”
Where is Elisabeth Finch now?
After the allegations were exposed, Finch was placed on administrative leave and left Grey’s Anatomy.
Today, she still hasn’t written off a return to television writing and is hoping someone will give her a second chance.
“I could only hope that the work that I've done will allow me back into those relationships where I can say, ‘Okay, I did this, I hurt a lot of people and I'm also going to work my f-cking ass off because this is where I want to be and I know what it's like to lose everything,’” she told The Ankler in 2022.
Finch did not participate in Anatomy of Lies.
Anatomy of Lies premieres Oct. 15 on Peacock.
