A TV writer who faked having cancer for years previously revealed the reason she spun her web of lies.
The scandal has made its way back into the public consciousness after a documentary recently released titled Anatomy of Lies.
The doc focuses on Elisabeth Finch, the writer in question who faked having a rare kind of bone cancer.
Finch’s ex-wife, Jennifer Beyer, put the pieces together of Finch’s lies after realising that elements of her own story were being stolen by the Grey’s Anatomy writer.
This includes elements of Beyer’s own abuse being written into stories for the show.
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The most shocking example came, however, in Finch telling the writer’s room of the show that her brother had suddenly taken his own life, when her brother is in fact alive and well.
The news came out after Hollywood newsletter The Ankler broke the news that Finch had been placed on leave by Grey’s Anatomy after Beyer reported her ex-wife’s lies to the production company.
This occurred in early 2022, with the newsletter later getting a full interview with Finch.
Finch shockingly made no attempt to cover up her lies, outright admitting she had never had cancer.
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She had openly spoken about her cancer for years, with a fellow writer in Anatomy of Lies referring to her as ‘the cancer expert’.
The specific type of cancer Finch claimed to have, chondrosarcoma, made its way into a Grey’s Anatomy story in an episode that she wrote.
She faked her cancer by shaving her head and taking impromptu 'sick breaks'.
The cancer was one of many lies the writer admitted to in her interview with The Ankler – including lying about her brother’s suicide, receiving a kidney from Anna Paquin, and about having a close friend who died in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
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In her interview with The Ankler though, she revealed one of the reasons she claimed began her spiralling web of lies.
The article read: “During our first recorded interview, she lifts up the hem of her dress to expose a six-inch scar on her kneecap.
“This was, to borrow a screenwriting term, the inciting incident.
“During the 2007 Writers Guild strike, she injured herself while hiking in Temescal Canyon, which resulted in what she describes as years of medical purgatory”.
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Finch described becoming totally reliant on her friends, something that sources corroborated to The Ankler.
She said: “What ended up happening is that everyone was so amazing and so wonderful leading up to all the surgeries.
“They were so supportive. And then I got my knee replacement. It was one hell of a recovery period and then it was dead quiet because everyone naturally was like ‘Yay! You’re healed’.”
She went on to say: “it was dead quiet. And I had no support and went back to my old maladaptive coping mechanism — I lied and made something up because I needed support and attention and that’s the way I went after it. That’s where that lie started — in that silence.”
In a recent apology released by the writer in the midst of the release of the documentary, she said: “I’ve given no one any reason to believe a word I say. I lied about so much; things so many people have been devastated by in real life. ‘I’m sorry’ feels like the smallest words compared to what I’ve done, yet they are the truest.”
Michael Slavin