The former Grey’s Anatomy writer who quit after she was accused of making up illnesses, including a cancer diagnosis, and using them as fodder for the medical drama is coming clean about her lies.
“What I did was wrong,” Elisabeth Finch said in an interview published Wednesday by The Ankler, which first broke the news about her fabrications back in March. “Not okay. Fucked up. All the words.”
Finch went on to explain that she made up those stories because of her trauma over allegedly being abused by her brother.
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“I lied and there’s no excuse for it. But there’s context for it,” Finch said. “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.”
From 2014 to 2022, Finch is credited as a writer on 13 episodes of the long-running ABC drama and as a producer on 172 episodes.
The 44-year-old screenwriter and producer saw her career unravel back in March, when Shondaland and its parent company, Disney, placed her on leave after they were alerted that she’d invented stories about her past and used them as inspiration for the show. Elle also quietly scrubbed all of Finch’s columns on the magazine’s website, including one titled, “Catherine Avery’s Plot Line On ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Is Based On My Life. This Is Why I Finally Wrote About It.”
Adding a more dramatic twist to the TV-ready plotline was the fact that Finch’s wife, nurse Jennifer Beyer, was reported to be the one who told Shondaland and founder Shonda Rhimes about Finch’s lies. Beyer and Finch reportedly met in 2019 while at an Arizona facility that treats women who suffer from trauma and other issues.
Finch had claimed to have survived a rare form of bone cancer called chondrosarcoma, including two years of chemotherapy (which allegedly cost her a kidney), the loss of part of her tibia (due to the cancer), and the loss of a baby, which she claimed had to be aborted due to the chemo.
Through it all, her co-workers on Grey’s Anatomy said it was easy to believe her stories.
“We worked with someone who not only said she was sick with cancer but looked sick with cancer,” one of Finch’s colleagues told The Ankler, adding that Finch looked and acted like 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.”
Shondaland and Disney did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast.
Finch resigned before the investigation could begin, The Ankler reports. She says that on top of her wife leaving her and taking her children with her, she was “cut off pretty quickly from everything” once the news of her lies broke on her 44th birthday in the spring. She now rarely leaves her Topanga Canyon neighborhood.
A psychiatrist and professor told The Ankler that Finch’s behavior doesn’t resemble trauma as much as it does factitious disorder, described by the Mayo Clinic as a “serious mental disorder in which someone deceives others by appearing sick, by purposely getting sick or by self-injury.”
“This case is typical in a lot of ways except it has the twist of being involved in the entertainment industry,” said Dr. Marc D. Feldman, a professor at the University of Alabama. “The main reason people seem to do this is that they have an underlying personality disorder or have a difficult time getting their needs met that aren’t self-defeating. Instead of asking for attention or care, they engage in pathological behaviors that allow them to get what they want indirectly.”
Despite her near-pariah status, Finch added that she hopes to make a comeback on a show like The Handmaid’s Tale.
“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 fucking ass off because this is where I want to be and I know what it’s like to lose everything,’” she said.
