The ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Liar Confesses it All

“At a certain point, the hardest thing becomes remembering what you said or told people.” 

It’s Halloween, a fitting holiday for former Grey’s Anatomy star writer Elisabeth Finch to sit for her first of four interviews since her mask was ripped off seven months earlier. She is seated in a wooden lounge chair so old and rickety that it’s threatening to collapse, perched high above Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon on a slatted wooden deck that overlooks her sprawling hillside property. She’s wearing a white embroidered dress, a purple shawl and a blanket draped over her lap to stave off the afternoon chill. She looks nervous but appears determined to work her way towards a full confession. “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,” she says in a voice that starts to quaver. “I don’t have to worry about that now.”

In March, Finch’s grandiose ruse, which included a head-spinning web of deceptions that started with a fabricated debilitating cancer diagnosis, abortion and kidney loss stretching back nearly a decade, was first made public in a story by The Ankler after Disney (whose ABC broadcasts Grey’s Anatomy) and production company Shondaland had put one of their best-known writers, now 44, on leave. Even in an industry famous for celebrating and accepting fabulists, charlatans and con artists, the nature and extent of Finch’s lies crossed an unspoken line. No, she hadn’t physically hurt anyone like, say, Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey. But Finch, by fabricating and dramatizing huge swaths of her life story, broke the trust of one of the most successful writers’ rooms in Hollywood history — and made fools of Shonda Rhimes, the town’s most powerful TV producer, and Disney, the most family-friendly maker and distributor of TV in the world. 

Of her time at Grey’s, days where she taped a dummy catheter to her arm and shaved her hair to feign that she was undergoing chemotherapy, she now says, “I really miss it. I miss my fellow writers. It’s like a family and… one of the things that makes it so hard is that they did rally around a false narrative that I gave.”

Today? She’s an absolute pariah. The mere mention of her name in certain quarters of the industry causes visible revulsion. Her phone doesn’t ring. Her emails go unanswered. Her wife left her, family members disowned her and she’s no longer allowed to see the children she helped rear for several years. She fills her day taking long walks and talking to her therapist. And she’s sitting down with me, the reporter who first broke the story about her lies, to tell her story. This time, she says, a real one. Because there is nothing else she can do. 

“What I did was wrong,” she says. “ Not okay. Fucked up. All the words.”