Peacock’s Anatomy of Lies Is the True Story of Elisabeth Finch
Friends, we are here today to discuss Elisabeth Finch, a TV writer who invented a series of fake personal tragedies that ensnared and impacted everyone in her remote orbit. When Vanity Fair published a two-part story about Finch in May of 2022, I was drawn to it immediately, as I’ve been drawn to stories like this all my adult life since a person did something similar to me and my friends 17 years ago.
(Photo by: Jennifer Beyer/PEACOCK)
Elisabeth Finch’s story was particularly compelling because Finch didn’t just con her loved ones, she conned us all by drawing on her (fake) personal experiences with cancer in her work writing for Grey’s Anatomy and wrote essays about her experiences for reputable publications.
She then went on to strike up a romance with Jennifer Beyer, a domestic abuse survivor she met at a mental health facility, marry her, and then co-opt Jennifer’s history as her own in myriad unconscionable ways. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of her story, as the reason for her stay at the mental hospital was fabricated, and Jennifer was so enormously vulnerable at the time. Elisabeth’s presence was soothing and helpful, until it wasn’t.
This week, Peacock released Anatomy of Lies, a docuseries that dives even deeper into Finch’s story, and it’s a gripping and well-constructed work that adds a great deal to what’s already out there. We hear from Beyer, but also from Beyer’s children, Elisabeth’s college girlfriend / best friend and a classmate from USC, fellow patients from her mental health inpatient program and a few members of the Grey’s Anatomy writers room.
I found myself amazed, again and again, by how her talent with crafting perfectly sentimental and usually melodramatic pieces of writing, from tweets to scripts to emails to essays, enabled her to connect with people under false pretenses. It’s also what made her such a perfect fit for Grey’s Anatomy.
At a time when so many other white cis women were reckoning with our privilege, Finch was making up stories to ensure she remained marginalized enough to stay relevant. She had a story for #metoo, and she had a story for the overturn of Roe. She faked knowing someone who was killed during the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, and faked being part of the volunteer group that cleaned the synagogue after the shooting. At another point, told her co-workers she was missing work because het brother killed himself when in fact she was missing work because her girlfriend’s ex-husband had killed himself.
Finch used her invented persona to take control of the Grey’s writers room and center herself within it in a way that seems really unbearable for the others in the room, as well as a particularly brutal disregard to the millions of people who actually have health issues or disabilities that require workplace accommodations.
In March of 2022, The Ankler broke the that Finch was being investigated. This was followed up with a splashy story in Vanity Fair that went very viral, very quickly:
- Scene Stealer: The True Lies of Elisabeth Finch, Part 1: “For years, a Grey’s Anatomy writer told her personal traumas in online essays, and wove those details into the show’s plot—until a surprising email to Shondaland accused her of making it all up.”
- Scene Stealer: The True Lies of Elisabeth Finch, Part 2: “When Elisabeth Finch met Jennifer Beyer in 2019, the two women forged a fiercely loyal friendship, and eventually got married. But as Beyer would soon realize, Finch’s past wasn’t what she claimed—and Beyer’s own difficult history was up for the taking.”
Elisabeth Finch Responding To The Articles and Documentary
Elisabeth Finch did a sit-down interview with The Ankler shortly after the Vanity Fair article came out. “I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did,” she tells the reporter. “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.”
It’s true that many people with fictitious disorder got comfortable with lying because they had to lie at a very young age, either to deal with abuse or trauma or to conceal the truth of their life at home. It’s hard to know what the truth is of that, with Finch.
After “Anatomy of Lies” was released, Elisabeth Finch posted an apology to her instagram account. It seems she’s also contesting the proposal story told by Jennifer and her kids in the documentary, as well as their account of her sustained interest in parenting. (Finch also describes herself as a “mama” in her instagram bio.)
Elisabeth Finch’s Essays About Her Life That Were Mostly Lies
Finch’s essays for Elle Magazine were silently scrubbed from their site when The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Elisabeth Finch was under investigation at ABC “to determine if elements including Finch’s cancer diagnosis and abortion while undergoing chemotherapy, among other subjects, were not accurate.” But the internet is forever, so:
- In her February 2014 piece for Elle, she discusses How Friends, Family and Friday Night Lights Helped Me Fight Cancer, recalling “turns out, there’s no pamphlet on How to Be a Single Thirtysomething Woman With Cancer.”
- Again in Elle, in January 2016, she explains how she Confronted the Doctor who Missed Her Cancer, describing a “research excursion” she took for Grey’s Anatomy which brought her face-to-face with her former doctor, who was giving the lecture she’d come to hear. He “recognizes [her] immediately” and tells her she looks well, and then she details their past visits with said doctor, one in which he told her “Neurotic Jewish Women are my specialty” and disregarded her testimony of her own pain and blamed her unwellness on her weight and lack of exercise.
- Elle again — this time, she’s explaining how she decided to have an abortion… while getting chemo. She also did a video in 2017 for Now This about this abortion, tying it in to the attacks on Planned Parenthood and Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment.
- In January 2019 she hopped over to The Hollywood Reporter for Why My Cancer Disability Became a Storyline, which included gems like “someone wondered aloud if Catherine’s story might give cancer patients false hope, since my case was so rare.”
- Then there’s the story that has yet to be debunked or confirmed — her March 2018 Hollywood Reporter piece alleging harassment on the set of the Vampire Diaries.
The True Story Behind Grey’s Anatomy Episode Silent All These Years
In Anatomy of Lies, Grey’s writer Kiley Donovan reveals that it was after disclosing her own experiences finding out that she’d been conceived by rape that Finch decided to write an episode where Jo learns the same about herself. The episode in question is the 19th of Season 15, “Silent All These Years.”
The documentary also indicates that Camilla Luddington has told a different story about the episode, which is relayed in this June 2019 piece — Elisabeth Finch on Why Jo’s Story Changed and What’s Next for Meredith After That Shocking Finale. Tell Tale TV reported that Camilla Luddington had emailed Krista Vernoff with the idea that Jo’s birth Mom had been raped.
Finch also literally appears in the episode. She is amongst the doctors guiding a rape survivor’s hospital bed down a hallway towards surgery, which Jo (the character based on Finch) has lined with doctors to help the rape survivor, who says she sees her attacker’s face everywhere.
ABC
Why Do People Fake Illnesses?
People who fake illnesses fall into a few categories. The most common are malingerers, who do it for an external reward — like getting money, winning a lawsuit, avoiding criminal responsibility or missing work. This often falls into the category of the now-famous “GoFundMe scam.” In response, some people have dedicated themselves to helping others uncover the “cancer cons, phoney accidents and fake deaths” of this nature. The proliferation of these scams have, again, made it difficult for people who truly need help to receive it.
Then there’s factitious disorder: “a serious mental disorder in which someone deceives others by appearing sick, by purposely getting sick or by self-injury.” They do so mostly to get attention and sympathy from others. Elisabeth Finch has not been, as far as we know, diagnosed with factitious disorder, but her story is similar to others who have. In The Ankler interview, the author of Dying to be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception says Finch “sounds like a classic case of factitious disorder.” Even when money isn’t involved, these scenarios subject the subject’s friends and family to an emotional rollercoaster of trauma, grief and stress and often permanently erode their ability to trust others as well as their sense of their own ability to read people and spot red flags!
Fictitious disorder in this capacity is also often called Münchausen (named after Baron Munchausen, who told embellished stories about his military experience), which itself has a few subsets. “Münchausen By Proxy” is when you use another person to play the patient role, a situation most famously ascribed to Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the subject of the Hulu miniseries The Act. In recent years, the term “Münchausen by Internet” was coined to “people who simplify this process by carrying out their deceptions online” which “appears, because of its ease, to be much more common than its real-life progenitor.”
More Stories Of Factitious Disorder Like Elisabeth Finch’s
There are probably 100 or more pieces of longform journalism, documentaries, books and podcasts about scammers, but these are the stories that are closest to the story told in Anatomy of Lies (where financial gain was not the primary focus of her lies) or that feel like adjacent stories relevant to the conversation.
In Season 2 of the “Something Was Wrong” Podcast, Tee befriends a co-worker, Sylvia, a mother who eventually tells Tee she’s been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Treatment begins and so does a whole ass wild web of lies.
The Sympathy Pains Podcast tells the story of Sarah Delashmit, who spent most of her life pretending to suffer from various illnesses, such as breast cancer and muscular dystrophy, as well as experiencing multiple miscarriages and the deaths of family members. She would maintain multiple false personas at once until it all came crashing down. Particularly interesting in this tale is the centrality of Camp Summit, a retreat in Texas for children and adults with disabilities. You can also read about Sarah’s story in Elle Magazine.
A Suspense Novelist’s Tale of Deceptions is a New Yorker story about Daniel Mallory, the pseudonymous author of The Woman in the Window, who faked cancer and his brother’s suicide, launching his literary career with an essay about taking care of his sick mother while suffering from a brain tumor.
Another television writer shared his story of being a veteran working in a writers room with a woman who pretended to be a “Cuban Jewish gay Princeton graduate” and “a former Marine captain with 4 tours under her belt, a bronze star, and a Purple Heart.” This story is bananas go read it!Chaya arrives in Brooklyn looking for new friends in the Jewish community and meets the author, and almost immediately reveals that she’s in remission from cancer and soon she’s experiencing a wide array of medical emergencies and requiring extensive care.
In The Disease of Deceit, the author meets “Chaya” when she’s just arrived in Brooklyn looking for new friends in the Jewish community. Almost immediately, Chaya reveals that she’s in remission from cancer and soon she’s experiencing a wide array of medical emergencies and requiring extensive care.
In No Evidence of Disease, he author’s girlfriend, Diane — who actually has cancer — meets Stephanie Bourque at a free makeup event for women with cancer. They become close and Stephanie’s story stops adding up.
2012 was when stories of Munchausen’s By Internet really took off, mostly due to the story behind Gawker’s The Long, Fake Life of J.S. Dirr: A Decade-Long Internet Cancer Hoax Unravels. A seminal work and one of the first big stories of this nature exposed he story of a man and his son, “Warrior Eli,” allegedly dying of cancer — neither Eli or his father ever existed.
The Stranger’s The Lying Disease talks about Warrior Eli but is centered on the story of Valerie, who began blogging about her breast cancer diagnosis in 2010, through which she meant Beth, another blogger who claimed to be going through treatment for lymphoma, who’s story quickly stretched the bounds of believability. This story is remarkable because as Valerie continued to participate in online support groups for cancer patients and share her story online, more and more hoaxers came into her life! And one of them talks to the author of this piece.
In 2013, Deadspin told the story of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o, who’s girlfriend, Lennay Kakua, died a few days before his team was set to battle Michigan State. Lennay turned out to have faked many aspects of her story, explained in the Netflix documentary Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (I recommend reading that review of it before diving in, it’s a complicated story).
The documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There is the story of Alicia Esteve Head, who claimed to be a survivor of the 9/11 attacks and joined a support group, later becoming its president.
This post was originally published in 2022 and has been updated for the release of “Anatomy of Lies.’
The second part of the VF article, which really dives into the wife she stole a bunch of her story from, is absolutely terrifying.
Also usually these people are fascinating in a train wreck sort of way but the Hipster Grifter might be my hero?
Yeah part 2 was terrifying — so fucking cold and heartless. I can’t imagine the pain her ex wife is in from this but I’m glad she has the comfort now of knowing her story is the true one and that the world has heard it
Never ceases to amaze me what people are capable of…
That interview with Belle Gibson (which I kept hearing as Mel Gibson) is BANANAS! Love the interviewer – she is not afraid to call out the BS!
I am also fascinated by these people (factitious disorder) and have met WAY too many in my line of business. I have spoken with a few experts and I try to remember that most of them have a history of childhood trauma/PTSD/often abuse combined with a personality disorder. They are often seeking out the care and concern that they did not receive as a child to fill the unfillable void from not having normal bonding with a parent or caregiver.
That’s really interesting. It’s easy (for me at least) to focus on the damage that someone with facetious disorder can do. Thanks for the reminder. And are there effective treatments for it?
Treatment? Eh…intensive therapy if they are willing (rare). Usually hospitals coordinate to share a care plan on the patient that is attached to their chart to help prevent iatrogenic injury (hospital caused injury from excessive or unnecessary treatment or testing). We try to reduce the risk that they bring on themselves by hospital and doctor shopping for invasive procedures etc. unfortunately we can’t warn any contacts of the patient legally without consent of the patient. I have personally had patients admit to me that they had been faking a cancer or other diagnosis for years and I could not tell their partner. Malingerers KNOW they are faking and do it for gain- they are actually easier to manage because they have insight into WHY. Factitious disorders know on some level but have little control over their behavior and often little insight. They don’t want money, they want to be cared for In a medical setting. I’ve had people who manipulated doctors into performing multiple multiple painful surgeries on them for example. They often desire painful and invasive care. It’s a tough diagnosis and takes mountains of evidence & testing and years to prove only after the elimination of all other options.
My partner and I are huge Greys fans and just recently rewatched the entire series start to finish (way too much time during COVID) and neither us had heard about this, so this was a FASCINATING read. Honestly this story is so fucked up on so many levels. That poor woman… (Beyer, obviously)
On a much shallower level – I always hated that Jo storyline, this makes it so much worse!
i did start to wonder if there was any of those “real doctor reacts to grey’s” about that storyline
Wow.
There was an mm romance author who allegedly did this. He claimed to have cancer and his readers donated to his fundraisers. It came out that not only did he not have cancer but his wife wrote all the books. And they also had at least one fan who confided in them and they used their fan’s story in one of their books. It all blew up on Twitter a few years ago.
I had no idea that other authors did this too.
This also happened with a f/f author recently, Maggie Robbins, the whole lesfic author community came together and donated to help her and then the people found out it was all a lie. This was ongoing for like a year and half. It was a big shock.
it’s so interesting the way they mobilize these niche communities of people who come together over a mutual passionate interest and that builds a kind of trust between everybody where they’re not really primed to ask too many invasive questions when things seem off
In my line of work, I teach older adults experiencing vision loss later in life. I believe I have encountered at least two or three of the factitious people who bswear to their core that they are visually impaired when there is nothing wrong with their eyes
man, that’s rough!
Okay I have to confess I took a half day off work yesterday to read almost every single one of these articles. This is my favorite column!
omg this is HIGH PRAISE
As long as she didn’t tell work she had cancer to get the morning off… 😝
There’s also the early internet saga of Kaycee Nicole, who never even existed. The metafilter investigation (linked in the wikipedia notes) is a fascinating read.
somehow I failed to make that link work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaycee_Nicole
i hadn’t heard of her before THANK YOU FOR THE TIP, wow A TRUE PIONEER!!
omg since I saw this story in the link round-up last week I have been…I mean it was SO entertaining and WTF-enducing and terrifying at the same time. Completely obsessed with it now. Like, I googled so much about it.
me too i keep googling cuz i am DYING to hear from other writers in the room or actors on the show AND YET nothing so far!!!
Omg Riese, thank you so much for this days long rabbit hole of content. I am so fascinated.
Also I can’t wait to read your book. :)
i can’t wait to sell and publish it!!
Great recap!
I am dying to know what the other grey’s writers and actors think. I followed her on my back up insta years ago, she went private after this, but she’s still posting… and some of the writers and actors are still liking/commenting on her posts. But others on twitter and liking cryptic tweets referencing the drama. I simply NEED to know!
Life serves you lemons. Hardly anyone doesn’t get a bagful of them at one time or another. Elizabeth Fisher steals someone else’s lemons and drinks all the lemonade. There is no foolproof way to vet someone, but one little tip may be that you should be wary of a person who doesn’t want any witnesses or your pity, a person who doesn’t let you see for yourself what they’re up to (probably because they’re making the whole thing up). What immediately comes to mind is a cheating husband. They expect you to believe everything they say, but the minute you want to ride along, ask too many questions they or find out you’re checking up on their story, they make you seem heartless, insensitive, untrusting, unduly suspicious, and use the poor-brave-pitiful-me card to make you feel guilty about ever questioning their whereabouts. Which brings me to those romance scams and friend requests you get on social media from “I really like your posts and would like you be my friend?” kind of bs. I’ve helped many people steer away from these fakes that only want your money. There are so many fake people that it makes those who are really undergoing hardships, serious disappointments, life-threatening medical conditions or who have tragic events happen to them feel small. Elizabeth Finch hasn’t broken laws (yet), but she would if shoved up against a wall – it will always be herself that she saves and not those she has lied about the battered emotionally.
Sure, she lied for personal & material gain and clout. But Do you really think that that’s the same as someone who deliberately tries to scam people like on GoFundme? Read up on cluster B personality disorders! Personally I think she possibly has CoMorbid Histrionic and Narcissistic Personality disorder. That is a thing. But it’s also entirely possible that may just be a garden variety malignant narcissist- not exactly a rare bird in Hollywood.
It’s hard but I’m going to reserve any editorializing on the possible diagnoses floated by the author and jump right to suggesting what I believe to be far more likely explanations. After (or more accurately WHILE) reading both parts of the VF piece on this Nasty piece of work, the word that came to mind over and over again was “histrionic”. She obviously has a pathological need to seek attention and in particular to be the center of attention and wasn’t above lying to secure sympathy and attention. This is the chief trait of Histrionic Personality Disorder. HOWEVER HPD on its own tends to enhance empathy in the person with it. Given her brazen co-opting of others’ struggles for personal gain in addition to attention seeking, that’s unlikely. She also displays a lack of empathy or shame for her actions and casts herself as the victim; the love-bombing, gaslighting& doubling-down. These are all narcissistic traits. It seems rather obvious that she exhibits at least a few traits of a malignant narcissist. The far more likely scenario is that this Finch woman has co-morbid Histrionic & Narcissistic PD. It sounds a bit counterintuitive but This is apparently a fairly common combination. It seems more likely than Munchausen’s. She didn’t ACTUALLY make herself Ill after all. And yeah, it’s one of the splashier, soapier disorders but there is an argument to be made that something like Factitious Disorder is a particular manifestation of a personality disorder or co-morbid PDs such as Narcissistic,Histrionic or potentially Antisocial PD. And lest anyone bring it up, I’m deliberately leaving out the one PD everyone loves to hate & demonize so much that the misunderstanding and mischaracterization as “evil” must surely be Deliberate- Borderline PD. Just about anyone can exhibit a symptom or two on a bad day but I don’t think that this chick is one of them.
Hbo had a comedy called I Love That For You and it was about a woman who had leukemia as a child but lies as an adult to use it to advance her career. Elements of the show were based off the actor’s real life and it had cast members from snl and other funny tv shows. I really liked it and I thought the writing had some great moments.
Another really interesting podcast about this kind of con is “Believe in Magic,” on BBC Sounds. It details this case of “Munchausen by proxy” where this teenage girl, who was ostensibly ill with several chronic disorders, including Benign Intracranial Hypertension, started up a charity to help sick children get access to concerts, parties, and other fun days out – and the charity got a lot of attention because, through bombarding them on Twitter, it got spread around by One Direction.
Turns out her mum was making her sick, or convincing her that she was sick: she had two older sisters who had managed to escape, and they described things like being exclusively fed things that would exacerbate any health problems they actually had. It was interesting because it highlighted how people get away with this kind of scam (the mum would change GP’s or doctors the second any of them asked too many questions, and there wasn’t enough continuity of care to action any concerns), how it’s not actually that difficult to achieve some kind of celebrity endorsement, and how difficult it is to actually question or reveal scammers. No one wants to be the one to make the accusation of fraud, because you might be wrong about it being fraud, and accusing sick people of lying is a shitty thing to do, right?