‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Writer Admits She Based Episodes on Fabricated Stories About Battling Cancer, Abortion for ‘Attention’

Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch, who based the show’s episodes on her own stories of battling cancer and having an abortion, has confessed that she lied about everything. “I lied, there’s no excuse,” she said.

“When you get wrapped up in a lie you forget who you told — what you said to this person and whether this person knows that thing — and that’s the world where you can get caught,” Finch told The Ankler, adding, “I don’t have to worry about that now.”

The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer, who sat down with Finch for an interview, said that these days, the former Grey’s Anatomy writer is an “absolute pariah” whose “phone doesn’t ring.”

“Her wife left her, family members disowned her and she’s no longer allowed to see the children she helped rear for several years,” Kiefer explained.

During the interview, Finch admitted to Kiefer that she made up stories of hardships “for attention,” and suggested that the catalyst for her lies was people’s behavior toward her while she was dealing with a real injury she had sustained from a hiking trip in 2007.

“What ended up happening is that everyone was so amazing and so wonderful leading up to all the surgeries,” Finch recalled of the way she was treated after her knee-replacement surgery. “They were so supportive.”

But after she got her knee replacement, “it was dead quiet,” Finch said.

“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,” she said.

Finch ended up telling producers at Grey’s Anatomy that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer, that she lost a kidney due to chemotherapy, that part of her tibia was removed also due to the cancer, and that she was forced to have an abortion because chemo made the pregnancy impossible.

She was eventually exposed by Jennifer Beyer, her then-wife, a nurse she met in 2019, who uncovered the truth about Finch, confronted her, and demanded she come clean to friends and family.

Beyer later contacted Shondaland and Disney, reaching out to Shonda Rhimes personally, and told the, that Finch’s stories, which she had based the plotlines of episodes on, were lies.

Meanwhile, Finch insists that her compulsive lying solely stems from her real-life trauma, claiming that she had experienced childhood beatings from her brother, which were later triggered due to the loneliness she allegedly experienced after her knee-replacement surgery.

“I didn’t know the connective tissue between my brother and my medical trauma and my depression and PTSD and anxiety,” she said.

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