Grey’s Writer’s Horrific History of Falsehoods Gets a Full Dissection in Peacock Doc Anatomy of Lies
We knew that the story of disgraced Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth R. Finch was bad. But we had no idea just how horrible it really was until we screened Peacock’s three-episode Anatomy of Lies documentary (now streaming).
Over the course of the three hours, the limited series hits us with one whopper after another, foremost among them being the lie that Finch was treated for chondrosarcoma, the type of cancer that she gave Debbie Allen’s Catherine Fox on ABC’s long-running medical drama. To sell her hard-luck story, Finch — who on Tuesday issued another mea culpa on social media — shaved her head, took regular “puke breaks” from the writers’ room and even walked around with a chemo port. “For all I know,” former Grey’s colleague Andy Reaser comments in the doc, “she had a LEGO [brick] taped to her chest.”
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We hear about the abortion that Finch claimed chemo had forced her to have (which she didn’t have), her alleged sexual harassment on the set of The Vampire Diaries (which that series’ acting coach refutes), and her PTSD after a friend was supposedly killed in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. (Neither did Finch lose anyone in that tragedy, nor did she spend days afterward in Pittsburgh picking up remains.)
We are told that Finch didn’t ask permission, she just used Grey’s colleague Kiley Donovan’s admission that her biological father was her mother’s rapist to write the well-received “Silent All These Years” episode of Grey’s in which Camilla Luddington’s Jo Wilson learns her harrowing origin story. Finch was even supposed to have gotten a kidney transplant from True Blood leading lady Anna Paquin. Spoiler alert: No such operation ever took place.
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Perhaps most disturbing of all is the impact that we are shown that Finch’s never-ending lies have had on soon-to-be-ex-wife Jennifer Beyer, who was made to think she was losing her s—t, and her children, who now suffer from trust and attachment issues. But it doesn’t seem as if Finch could help herself; from her lips, the truth always came out bent and distorted. For instance, when Beyer’s abusive ex took his own life, Finch told her co-workers that the brother who had badly beaten her when they were kids had died by suicide. (There is no evidence that he ever struck her, and, for that matter, he is still alive and well.)
Finch even stole Beyer’s therapist for her own!
And why? Attention is the conclusion that Anatomy of Lies draws. Dubbed a “trauma vampire” by her Grey’s peers, whenever the former EP wasn’t center stage, she’d find a way to bring the focus back to herself (often by manufacturing a new PTSD trigger). So maybe in a fittingly twisted way, the show comes to a happy ending: If nothing else, Finch surely has enough attention now.
Your take on Finch? Drop it in a comment below after grading the documentary.
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