With an imagination put to good use plotting the twists and turns on True Blood and The Vampire Diaries combined with her battle against a rare type of bone cancer, Elisabeth Finch seemed like a perfect fit to join the team behind Grey’s Anatomy. The screenwriter and producer spent eight years weaving her personal trauma into storylines for the hit medical drama, all while showing up to work wearing a headscarf to hide her hair loss from treatment.
But her cancer was all a fiction, like many of the other stories she told about herself as she trapped herself “in the addiction of lies”, as she would later describe it.
Finch landed her gig in 2014 after writing a viral story for US Elle about being diagnosed with chondrosarcoma in 2012.
“I was super obsessed with Grey’s and I had every episode memorised in my head,” she said on a 2019 episode of The Writers Panel podcast.
She quickly became the go-to for writing any cancer-related plotlines. A 2018 episode, ‘Anybody Have a Map?’, even saw surgeon Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen) learn she has chondrosarcoma and weigh up the risks of the surgery that could leave her a quadriplegic.
Finch’s web of lies went on undiscovered until she was exposed by her estranged wife. Claiming trauma after working on an episode about rape, Finch booked herself into a mental health treatment facility in Arizona.
There, she met nurse and mother-of-five Jen Beyer. They became friends, then lovers and wed in February 2020.
But the nurse realised things didn’t add up, such as realising an area where Finch claimed to have had a port for treatment had no scar.
“I met a woman at a mental hospital. I let her into my home,” Beyer told documentary Anatomy of Lies. “I let her into my kids’ lives. She lied to me, and I had no clue at all.”
Beyer confronted her wife, who later confessed all. Once separated, Beyersent an email to her ex’s boss, Hollywood powerhouse Shonda Rhimes revealing the truth. Finch was placed on administrative leave and later resigned in 2022.
“What I did was wrong,” Finch admitted in a 2022 interview with The Ankler. “Not OK. F–ked up. All the words. 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. I’ve never had any form of cancer.”
It seems that having cancer wasn’t the only thing Finch was untruthful about. In Anatomy of Lies, Beyer claimed Finch lied about having to have an abortion to saveher life, that she was sexually abused by a relative as a child and that she lost a dear friend who was killed in the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Beyer also claimed Finch said that actress Anna Paquin had donated a kidney to her after the pair became friends while working together on True Blood.
Unusually, despite the long running con, it appears she was after sympathy instead of financial gain.
“It’s like other people are getting attention, so Finch is triggered,” Beyer said. “She needs the attention on her.”
