Grey’s Anatomy screenwriter admits web of lies in bombshell interview

A Grey’s Anatomy screenwriter who faked cancer has finally fessed up to her web of elaborate lies in a bombshell new interview.

A screenwriter for the long-running drama Grey’s Anatomy has admitted to an elaborate medical ruse after allegations swirled earlier this year.

In a bombshell interview with The Ankler, Elisabeth Finch, 44, said: “I’ve never had any form of cancer.

“I told a lie when I was 34 years old and it was the biggest mistake of my life,” she said. “It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me.”

Finch was put on a leave of absence earlier this year after allegations emerged that she had concocted a debilitating health crisis for attention, Page Six reports.

Several storylines for the US medical drama, 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 OK. F***ed up. All the words,” said the writer, who first began working for the hit show in 2015.

Stream more entertainment news live & on demand with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer available for a limited time only >

Elisabeth Finch (pictured right, in the scrub cap) on the set of Grey’s Anatomy. Picture: Getty

What started as a real knee injury in 2007 after a hiking accident, quickly descended into a complex web of lies, she said, beginning with an addiction to the intensive care she received while recovering from surgery.

She explained that when the special treatment ended, her lie began “in that silence”.

She also said that childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her brother, accusing him of “terrorising” her but not enough to leave a mark, meant she regressed to an old coping mechanism of lying to get attention.

“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.”

It led to Finch in 2012 telling friends and colleagues that doctors has allegedly found a tumour.

She claimed the rare malignancy was encroaching on her spine and was not responding to chemotherapy. Finch went on to publish multiple personal essays in Elle magazine about her harrowing tale, stories that have since been removed.

Finch (centre) had the Grey’s Anatomy cast and crew believing she was battling a rare form of cancer. Picture: Getty

She chose the specific type of cancer – chondrosarcoma – due to its difficulty to treat, she told The Ankler. At the time she told her first lie, 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 said in the interview. “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.”

But the lies didn’t stop there.

In 2018 she claimed she’d had an abortion due to her cancer diagnosis, filming a video for NowThis as political tensions rose around reproductive freedoms.

And Finch also claimed that her brother had committed suicide in 2019. Instead, he is alive and well and works as a doctor in Florida.

Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo on set. Picture: Supplied

“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 labelled with a personality disorder, she said the professionals chalked it up to trauma.

‘Classic case of factitious disorder’

A professor of psychiatry and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, Dr Marc Feldman, spoke to The Ankler about the case.

Though he hasn’t met the screenwriter, looking at her history, he said it’s a “classic case of factitious disorder” which is also known as Munchausen syndrome.

“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 behaviours that allow them to get what they want indirectly.”

Through her lie, Finch ate saltine crackers, claiming it was all she could stomach, while keeping her skin pale and shaving her hair. She went as far as to attach a fake port catheter to herself and would pretend to vomit in the bathroom.

“She always had some tragedy or bizarre hardship going on in her life,” an unnamed colleague said. “Things that don’t happen to other people happen to her all the time.”

These included claims by Finch at various times that she had been stalked, her car tyres slashed, anti-Semitic posters were pushed under her door and a man had exposed himself to her while masturbating.

Finch insisted to The Ankler that those things had in fact happened.

The screenwriter brought what she said were her own real-life health issues to her Grey’s Anatomy scripts. Picture: ABC/Nicole Wilder

The truth is uncovered

It wasn’t until March this year, after more than a decade of carefully crafted deceit, that Finch’s lies were uncovered. Sources revealed that her too-good-to-be-true stories were, in fact, just that.

Doubts over Finch’s claims had first arisen when a co-worker phoned Finch’s wife, Jennifer Beyer, and noticed that Ms Beyer’s own ailments and incidents bore a striking resemblance to the stories they heard from Finch.

When Ms Beyer met with both Grey’s Anatomy production company Shondaland and Disney, which owns the ABC network, it cast doubt over Finch’s claims about her health woes.

“When you get wrapped up in a lie you forget who you told,” Finch told The Ankler, “what you said to this person and whether this person knows that thing. And that’s the world where you can get caught.”

Now that her paranoia has dissipated, the only thing left for Finch to do is to 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***ing a** off because this is where I want to be and I know what it’s like to lose everything,’” she said.

This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission