Disgraced “Grey’s Anatomy” writer Elisabeth Finch would allegedly alter her appearance and take “puke breaks” as part of her orchestrated ruse to get people to believe she was seriously ill with cancer.
A clip of the new three-part series “Anatomy of Lies” on Peacock displayed a glimpse into the extent of Finch’s lies as she faked having cancer for nearly a decade while working on the Emmy-winning show.
In it, her former colleague, writer and producer Andy Reaser, shared the feeling of “betrayal” he felt over the lengths the fraudster was willing to go to convince others she was grappling with cancer and chemotherapy treatment.
“The thing is, it was so confusing,” Reaser said in the clip. “You have to move through eight years of interactions to even wrap your head around it and I’m not even sure that I still fully have.”
Reaser compared Finch’s lies to “performance art” and briefly explained how far she would go to pull one over on her colleagues.
“She was showing up to work with a shaved head and a, you know, a greenish hue. She looked like she lived in a microwave. She was eating these Saltines and drinking ginger ale and going to the bathroom to take puke breaks from her chemo.”
In the clip, Reaser alleged that he heard rumors that Finch would go through the show’s medical props and request to look at a “very particular piece of something” while pretending to be ill.
“For all I know, she had a Lego taped to her chest,” he claimed.
“It’s just so hard to imagine that someone could commit that strongly to that and it seems so much harder to me than just doing your job well,” Reaser explained before the clip ended.
Finch came aboard “Grey’s Anatomy” as a staff writer in 2014.
Before her web of lies was unearthed in a 2022 Vanity Fair expose, the scribe claimed she survived a rare form of bone cancer, had a friend who died in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, suffered the loss of a kidney and part of her leg, was a survivor of sexual assault and endured abuse by a male director while she was a writer on “The Vampire Diaries.”
Following the Vanity Fair article, Disney put Finch on “administrative leave” from the long-running ABC medical drama pending an HR investigation.
Finch later resigned from the show and fessed up to her lies, admitting she “never had any form of cancer” while speaking with the Ankler months after the expose laid out her ruses.
She told the outlet in 2022 that her lies “got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me.”
“I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did. I lied and there’s no excuse for it.”
In an attempt to explain why she kept up with the lies, Finch said, “The best way I can explain it is when you experience a level of trauma, a lot of people adopt a maladaptive coping mechanism.”
Finch compared her “coping mechanism” to people who “drink to hide or forget things. Drug addicts try to alter their reality” and even people who commit self-harm by cutting themselves.
“I lied. That was my coping and my way to feel safe and seen and heard,” she added.
“I wish I had a grid that would show who’s not talking to me because they can’t [legally],” Finch went on during her coming clean interview with The Ankler.
“Who’s not talking to me because they don’t know what to say. Who’s not talking to me because they’re pissed off.”
After the Vanity Fair expose was released, Finch also said that some people she knew “were immediately very, very nasty on text.”
“Family and friends who called me ’a monster’ and ’a fraud’ and said that’s all I’ll ever be known for and soon, more truth would come out,” she recalled.
“Anatomy of Lies” will feature interviews with those closest to Finch and is said to reveal how she’s “a master of manipulation, saved her best fiction for her own life story and exploited the empathy of those around her,” a press release from September said.
Finch does not appear to have taken part in the docuseries.
The three-part docuseries premieres Oct. 15 on Peacock.
