How Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch faked cancer & her brother’s suicide – until key mistake caught her out

FROM pretending she had cancer to claiming her brother took his own life, screenwriter Elisabeth Finch even wrote her lies into the hit US hospital drama.

We investigate the Hollywood hoax that was stranger than any fiction.

On a March evening in 2020, millions of devotees of hit hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy settled down to watch the latest episode, titled Leave A Light On.

The episode, in which it’s revealed that fan favourite Dr Izzie Stevens has been left infertile following cancer treatment, was particularly poignant for all the cast and crew – as Elisabeth Finch, the staff writer behind the story line, had heroically endured the exact same thing.

Diagnosed with a rare bone cancer called chondrosarcoma in 2012, Finch suffered a seemingly neverending series of tragedies in her personal life, including losing a beloved friend in an anti-Semitic attack and her brother to suicide.

Except, none of it was true.

For almost a decade, the writer, now 46, spun a web of lies that hoodwinked her friends, loved ones and co-workers, appropriating other people’s misfortunes as her own.

Her exposure in 2022 – thanks to her wife-turned-whistleblower Jenn Beyer – sent shockwaves through Hollywood, and is now the subject of a new three-part documentary, Anatomy Of Lies.

“She lied about everything,” a source close to Finch, who has known her for more than 20 years, tells Fabulous.

“There wasn’t anything that seemed off-limits.

“How someone can use other people’s trauma like that is crazy.

“Everyone who knew her is still getting their heads around it two years on.”

Growing up a precocious child in leafy New Jersey, Finch – who penned 13 episodes of Grey’s and produced 172, as well as briefly starring as a nurse in season 15 – moved to California after university to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.

She started as a writer’s assistant on True Blood in 2008, then moved on to The Vampire Diaries in 2012, and Grey’s Anatomy in 2014.

From the offset, Finch was open about her cancer battle, wearing a scarf over her bald head and a bandage over the port in her arm used to administer chemo drugs.

She’d often rush to the bathroom retching, and take time off for treatment.

“She said she had to have an abortion because of the cancer treatment she was on, and that she’d also lost part of her leg and a kidney because of it,” says our source.

“She had friends drop her at the airport to fly to clinics for treatment, then secretly not actually travel anywhere.

“She’d have other friends drop her at hospitals, and then she’d just wander around, not actually having any treatment.”

Meanwhile, she was also writing essays for publications including Elle and The Hollywood Reporter about her cancer battle.

In 2016, she wrote her illness into the script for Grey’s Anatomy, with the fictional character of Dr Catherine Avery being diagnosed with a similar spinal tumour.

Then, in October 2018, Finch said she had lost a friend in an anti-Semitic attack, in which a gunman stormed the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 innocent people.

She even claimed that the FBI had allowed her on to the site to help collect human remains.

“Finch studied at Carnegie Mellon University [in Pittsburgh] and had attended the temple a few times for services,” says the source.

“After the shooting she asked for time off from Grey’s, telling staff she had to help with burial arrangements for her friend.

“There were so many people duped by her, but the one who has suffered the worst is poor Jenn.”

Jenn Beyer had just come out of a difficult relationship when she met Finch in an in-patient mental health clinic in spring 2019.

A nurse and single mum of five from Ohio, she had little in common with the high-flying Hollywood writer, but the pair soon bonded over their shared tragedies.

When Jenn relayed the cruelties she said she’d suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, Finch revealed she’d suffered virtually identical physical and emotional abuse as a child by her brother.

“Jenn thought she’d found a kindred spirit,” says the source.

“The reality is, what she found was toxic.”

While in the clinic, Jenn also learned about Finch’s cancer battle and the fact she’d lost a kidney, though the writer said she found it difficult to talk about and asked Jenn to respect her decision not to discuss it.

Shortly after leaving the clinic, the pair fell in love, with Finch sending a message to Jenn, saying: “My expectations are and always will be this: don’t lie to me.

“That’s all I ask… It can annoy us or bum us out, even hurt us.

“But the Truth Will Out. Always.”

Her words would prove strangely prophetic.

Several months later, in September 2019, Finch supported Jenn when her ex-husband killed himself during their bitter custody battle.

At the same time, however, Finch was appropriating Jenn’s trauma as her own, telling co-workers that her brother – not Jenn’s ex-husband – had taken his own life.

In an email to her co-workers she said: “Hey all, I’ve been absent and coming back tomorrow… I just don’t know who’s looped into what and I’d rather put it out there so no one is in the dark or feeling egg-shelly.

“I’ve gone [because] my brother died by suicide.

“He was on life support for a short while, but ultimately did not survive.”

They had no clue that her brother – who has, to date, declined to ever speak about his sister – was alive and well, working as a doctor.

Similarly, Jenn had no idea about the email, and in November 2019, the couple got engaged.

The next month, during a trip to a hospital after Finch claimed to be unwell, the doctor did a CT scan and referred to Finch’s “kidneys” – plural.

Jenn thought it was odd, but Finch glossed over it, and the pair tied the knot in February 2020.

However, by now, some friends were becoming sceptical.

“There were a couple of Finch’s friends who were starting to grow suspicious. She seemed to have one bad thing happen after another, but she was just so convincing,” says the source.

As the months went by, Jenn couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss, either.

She began sleuthing, secretly scrolling through Finch’s Facebook account, and discovered that on the day she’d told Jenn she’d been at the Tree of Life Synagogue, she had in fact been out with friends.

The next day, October 28, 2017, when she said she’d been cleaning up her friend’s body for burial, as per Jewish tradition, she’d been out again.

Then she saw pictures of Finch supposedly in the midst of having chemotherapy, with a bald head but with eyelashes and eyebrows intact – something Jenn, as a nurse, knew was impossible.

So Jenn decided to confront her.

“My understanding of it is that Finch fessed up to her,” says our source.

“Jenn had every right to walk out there and then, yet she didn’t.

“Jenn’s condition of them staying together, though, was a ‘confessional tour’.

“Jenn wanted her to visit everyone that she’d lied to and tell them what she’d done.”

While Finch started confessing to a small group of close friends, the Hollywood grapevine went into full swing, and soon her private confessions were being passed around writers’ rooms and WhatsApp groups.

“No one could believe she’d stoop so low,” says the source.

“Life informs art, but to make things up, pass [other people’s suffering] off as your own and then use them for material at work is incredibly calculating.”

In February 2022, Jenn received an anonymous email.

It contained the message Finch had sent to the Grey’s staff about her brother’s supposed suicide.

It was the final straw and Jenn contacted Shondaland, the hugely successful production company behind Grey’s Anatomy, and which also produces Bridgerton.

“Please stop letting Finch tell ‘her stories’, because they’re other survivors’ stories…” she wrote, before starting divorce proceedings.

“She blatantly stole, used and peddled Jenn’s hurt, pain and trauma for her own benefit,” says the source.

“She used it as fodder for her writing and to gain sympathy from others.

“It’s beyond low to steal ideas from anyone as a writer, let alone your own wife’s misery.”

The following month, Finch was placed on administrative leave pending investigation, but she resigned from Grey’s Anatomy before she could be investigated.

When Vanity Fair published an exposé of her deceptions in March 2022, the disgraced writer disappeared from public view, only emerging nine months later to give an interview to Hollywood newsletter The Ankler explaining her side of the story.

“It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me,” she said of the litany of lies she told.

“I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did.

“I lied and there’s no excuse for it.

“Some people drink to hide or forget things.

“Drug addicts try to alter their reality.

“Some people cut [themselves].

“I lied. That was my [way of] coping and my way to feel safe and seen and heard.”

She also admitted shaving her head and taping a catheter to her arm to feign cancer, and confirmed that her brother had not taken his own life.

The longest-running show of its kind in TV history, Grey’s Anatomy may have survived the scandal, but Finch’s career did not.

Though in 2022 she revealed her hopes to work on The Handmaid’s Tale, she has become a Hollywood pariah, black-balled by the industry she loved, as well as being disowned by friends and several members of her family.

“Even at the end, she had to control the narrative. I have no idea who she’s friends with now,” says the source.

“Everyone I knew has excommunicated her.

“It’s just so sad [because] she was so thoughtful and generous at times.

“I keep hearing she wants to come back and work as a script writer, but I can’t see that happening.”

Meanwhile, Jenn is trying to move on with the rest of her life.

“I let her into my home, into my kids’ lives,” she says, tearfully in the new documentary.

“When you love somebody, you’ll ignore the red flags until they’re hitting you in the head.

“I trusted her, but I needed people to know the truth.”

• Watch Anatomy Of Lies on Sky Atlantic and Now.