Grey’s Anatomy Writer Takes Leave After Possibly Lying About Medical History
Allegedly lying about having cancer is, to quote season two, “bad juju.”
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Grey’s Anatomy Writer Put on Leave After Possibly Lying About Medical History
By Rebecca Alter
Here’s Elisabeth Finch playing a nurse in an ep she wrote (the surgical cap is full of secrets). Photo: Mitch Haaseth/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
Between Inventing Anna, The Dropout, and Bad Vegan, you would think the television economy would be heading fast toward some kind of scammer-content overfishing situation in which we’re totally tapped out of true-life grifter stories. But one heroic television writer has gone above and beyond to keep the creativity flowing … possibly by scamming the Grey’s Anatomy writers’ room. The Ankler reports that writer Elisabeth Finch, who has written on Grey’s Anatomy since 2014, has been put on administrative leave by ABC for possibly lying about her own medical history. According to personal essays she published in outlets including Elle and The Hollywood Reporter, Finch was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer the year before she was hired on Grey’s, underwent a chemotherapy-related abortion, and “lost a kidney and part of her leg and then was required to have knee replacement surgery only to later learn that she had been misdiagnosed.” Finch reportedly shared these stories with the writers’ room, inspiring some plotlines of the show.
But network executives now suspect that these might have been fabrications.
A source told The Ankler that Finch’s wife, Jennifer Beyer, called executives at Grey’s Anatomy’s production company, Shondaland, and ABC parent company Disney to alert them of her wife’s “alleged deceptions.” Multiple sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Beyer realized that “similarities to the story Finch told her colleagues and Beyer’s history matched.” Now Beyer is seeking a divorce. If it’s true that Finch cherry-picked traumas from her wife’s medical history and used them to deceive her colleagues and further her own career, that’s terrible. But it’ll make a really good Shondaland miniseries.
@4 Dimensional
