Elisabeth Finch, screenwriter for the ABC drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” finally fessed up to her elaborate medical ruse.
“I’ve never had any form of cancer,” she admitted to the Ankler in a bombshell interview.
“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,” she continued.
Finch was put on a leave of absence earlier this year after allegations swirled that she concocted her supposedly debilitating health crises for attention and was placed under investigation following the explosive news.
Several storylines for “Grey’s,” from which she later departed of her own accord, were based on Finch’s supposed life experiences, which she has now confessed were entirely fabricated.
“What I did was wrong. Not okay. F–ked up. All the words,” said the former crew member, who first began writing for the hit drama in 2015.
What started as an honest knee injury in 2007 quickly unfurled into a complex monstrosity of falsehoods. The “context” of the lie, she explained, began with an addiction to the intensive care she received after her hiking accident and while recovering from surgery.
Then, it was “dead quiet” — no more special treatment or hands-on care — and, thus, the lie began “in that silence.” She also placed blame on the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her brother Eric, accusing him of “terrorizing” her, but not enough to leave a mark.
“I had no support and went back to my old maladaptive coping mechanism,” she said. “I lied and made something up because I needed support and attention and that’s the way I went after it.”
In 2012, she broke devastating news to her friends and colleagues: Doctors allegedly found a tumor. She claimed the rare malignancy was encroaching on her spine and was not responsive to chemotherapy treatments, and she went on to publish multiple personal essays in Elle about her harrowing tale, stories that have since been removed.
She chose the specific type of cancer — chondrosarcoma — due to its difficulty to treat, she told the Ankler. At the time she spun her first fib, she also claimed that she lost a kidney and part of her leg — hence, the knee replacement.
“I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did,” she admitted. “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.”
Her weave of deception extends far beyond herself. In addition to embarrassing the iconic screenwriter Shonda Rimes — the mastermind behind “Grey’s” — and the entire Disney family, she fabricated the deaths of other people to elicit sympathy. She even went so far as to claim that her brother Eric had committed suicide in 2019.
It turned out he works as a doctor in Florida.
“I didn’t know the connective tissue between my brother and my medical trauma and my depression and PTSD and anxiety,” she said, claiming she’s met with multiple therapists in an attempt to reach a diagnosis. Despite desperate attempts to be labeled with a personality disorder, she said the professionals chalked it up to trauma.
A professor of psychiatry and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Alabama spoke to the Ankler about the mysterious case of Elisabeth Finch. The expert, Dr. Marc D. Feldman, said it’s a “classic case of factitious disorder,” despite never meeting the disgraced screenwriter.
“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,” he said. “Instead of asking for attention or care, they engage in pathological behaviors that allow them to get what they want indirectly.”
Finch snacked on saltine crackers — claiming at the time it was the only food she could stomach — while keeping her skin pale and head buzzed. She even went so far as to attach a fake port catheter to herself and would fake vomit in the bathroom to keep the lie alive.
Her performance of a lifetime resulted in her own chair in the writing room, which no one would dare sit in even if she wasn’t present, and she reportedly concocted a slew of supporting lies that painted her as a magnet for misfortune.
“She always had some tragedy or bizarre hardship going on in her life,” recalled an unnamed colleague. “Things that don’t happen to other people happen to her all the time.”
A Gulf War veteran stalked her, slashed her tires and knifed her apartment door, she allegedly claimed. A man exposed himself to her, while masturbating, in a fit of road rage while stopped at a red light, she said. She also claimed she was bombarded with anti-Semitic posters that were pushed under her door.
Finch insisted to the Ankler that those stories were true, although her word has been tainted by her deceitful habit.
Once, she even claimed she had an abortion due to her cancer diagnosis, filming a video for NowThis as political tensions rose around reproductive freedoms.
It wasn’t until March 2022, after more than a decade of carefully crafted lies, that she was caught. Inside sources revealed that her too-good-to-be-true stories were, in fact, just that.
At least, they were too good to be truly happening to her. Doubts over Finch’s claims first arose when a co-worker phoned Jennifer Beyer, Finch’s wife, and noticed that Beyer’s own ailments and incidents bared a striking resemblance to the stories they heard from Finch.
When Beyer met with both Shondaland and Disney, which owns the ABC network, it was clear their sickly screenwriter was healthier than they thought.
“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,” Finch said.
Now, her paranoia has dissipated and the only thing left to do is clean up her mess, she said.
“I could only hope that the work that I’ve done will allow me back into those relationships where I can say, ‘OK, I did this, I hurt a lot of people and I’m also going to work my f–king ass off because this is where I want to be and I know what it’s like to lose everything,'” she said.
