Anatomy of Lies: Documentary series details deceit by Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch

After being diagnosed with a rare cancer, Elisabeth Finch spent years undergoing chemotherapy treatment, was subjected to clinical trial after clinical trial, underwent a kidney transplant and experienced fertility issues as a result of what she went through.

While all this was going on, she was also carving a name for herself in Hollywood as an in-demand television writer, using her medical experiences to help score her dream job on the mega-hit Grey’s Anatomy.

Finch wrote her health battles into storylines, giving one of the show’s main characters, Catherine Avery, the same rare cancer — chondrosarcoma — she developed in 2012 (the essay she wrote for Elle magazine about her battle with the disease helped land her a job on the show).

When she finished up, Finch was a co-producer who had helped craft 172 episodes.

But here’s the thing — every word of what “Finchie”, as she was known in the writers’ room, told people, and wrote about in great detail, was a lie.

There was nothing wrong with Elisabeth Finch.

She never had cancer, never underwent treatment, or survived a brutal regimen that saw her covering her chemo port with bandages and attending work with her bald head covered by a scarf. She was living an elaborate lie, and it was all pure fiction.

Now, three-part documentary series Anatomy of Lies — set to air in Australia from November 29 — is blowing her web of deceit wide open.

The series takes a deep-dive into Finch’s remarkable story, a story so extreme it could have been ripped straight from the pages of a Grey’s Anatomy script.

It was first brought to light by journalist Evgenia Peretz in 2022, via an expose in the esteemed Vanity Fair.

Peretz’s detailed two-part investigation dissected how Finch hoodwinked those around her and was able to fabricate her medical back-story and use her supposed personal trauma as the basis for several plotlines on the hit medical drama, and as fodder for self-penned stories in various high-profile publications.

Finch played the victim for years, her stories, which she mined in her work on Grey’s Anatomy and shopped around to publications like The Hollywood Reporter, got steadily more extreme.

By the time her web of lies began to unravel, she had written about and claimed to have experienced sexual assault (on the set of The Vampire Diaries, the show she once wrote for) and abuse at the hands of her brother.

She told colleagues that one of her close friends had been killed in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (she had supposedly helped “clean his remains off the floor” in the aftermath), that she had had an abortion due to her cancer treatment, and that she had even vindictively pulled the plug on her brother’s life support after his unsuccessful suicide attempt (for the record, her brother is still very alive and working as a doctor in Florida).

All of it was pure fabrication.

“Her writing was so highly regarded, because she had been through so much,” says one of her colleagues in the opening moments of Anatomy of Lies, which boasts extraordinary access to those closest to Finch.

In the end it was someone closest to her — her ex-wife Jennifer Beyer — who exposed Finch, emailing Grey’s Anatomy bosses to detail her partner’s fabricated past.

She was also in contact with Peretz.

After the publication of the Vanity Fair story, Finch was put on administrative leave and eventually left the show, but as Peretz — who is a co-director on Anatomy of Lies alongside her husband David Schisgall — told the Guardian, “there was a deeper emotional story to tell”.

When Peretz first met Beyer, she was in the midst of a messy divorce — Finch was threatening to take custody of her kids — but felt no one believed the story she was trying to tell.

“She couldn’t make eye contact. She was extremely fragile. She wasn’t sure that people were going to believe her. A lot of people in her world still didn’t believe her,” Peretz said.

By giving Beyer a chance to take part in the program — she appears alongside her two eldest children, Maya and Van — she has been able to regain some sense of control, “and she’s now in a very strong place”, Peretz said.

“And watching and being a small part of that transformation was definitely the most gratifying part of making this show.”

On the day the documentary went to air in the UnS, Finch took to her Instagram page to admit that she “lied about so much”.

“‘I’m sorry’ feels like the smallest words compared to what I’ve done, yet they are the truest,” she reportedly wrote (her Instagram profile is set to private).

“I trapped myself in the addiction of lies, betraying, and traumatising my closest family, friends, and colleagues.

“I’m making amends and expressing my genuine remorse as best I can when people are ready. And I’ve accepted the fact that some may never be.”

Anatomy of Lies airs on November 29 at 9.30pm on 7Bravo and 7Plus.