Evgenia Peretz
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Evgenia Peretz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thanks so much to Evgenia Peretz for being on Infamous this week, a wonderful Vanity Fair writer. And she wrote a story in 2022 that I was absolutely obsessed with. And now the world is obsessed with it as well. It actually has some similarities to Scamanda, I think. So it's about this woman, Elizabeth Finch.
She was a Grey's Anatomy writer, and she was accused of making up huge swaths of her life. In a really twisted and fascinating way. After, again, you wrote that story, she went and co-directed a documentary about Elizabeth Finch called Anatomy of Lies, which is out now on Peacock, so you can watch it.
It's a story not only about this one woman who seems to have lied about so many things to get ahead in her career, but also about how our society values trauma and personal narratives and so much more. So welcome, Evgenia, to Infamous. Thank you.
Tell us how this story first came on your radar.
And that had been in Elle magazine? That was in Elle. Okay. So that was a personal essay that she just freelanced. She wrote it just because she had something to share. Yes.
Yeah, because she's basically saying she has this rare bone cancer. I have to say, my father actually had bone cancer, which is incredibly, incredibly rare. Oh my gosh. And it is not found often until it's very late in the process because nobody knows to look for it.
But that's what, you know, if you hear of this 16-year-old boy who is a soccer player and one day he shatters his leg on the field and they find out he has like a huge... tumor in his leg, that's the kind of thing that she was saying she had. So she's saying she had this routine knee surgery, and then they found this tumor.
And she's writing things like she always says that the doctors are sort of in the wrong or complicated or somehow just... these strange figures, which is very Grey's Anatomy, right? Yeah. When I defied Dr. Cryptic's orders to take an infinite leave of absence from work, he thought chemo deserved my sole attention. He doubted my commitment to getting well.
I watched producers' cuts under a fog of Demerol, punched up dialogue with a shunt in my spine. I was down 17 pounds, bald, vomiting relentlessly, still living alone, still stubborn as hell. So, you know, there is a real like Marlboro man. I am so strong cancer warrior, which is not a term I love, but that's how she was playing this.
And then you can imagine Shonda Rhimes, who's one of the most powerful women in Hollywood saying, this is the kind of person I want on my show. I don't want to cut this person. Right? Yeah.
Oh, my God. That's a lot of money. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. Did she concoct this cancer diagnosis to get a job on Grey's Anatomy?
She also gets a plot line, right? Tell us about the plot line on Grey's Anatomy that's based on her.
What do you think was powering this? Because now she's got there, right? She's got the career. She's got what she wants. Yeah. And she keeps going. Keeps doing it. Yeah.
And meanwhile, she's making like a million dollars a year. Like having other people write her scripts for her, but she's in this like incredibly unbeatable position. Yeah. Yeah.
One of the things that made me wonder, does Elizabeth Finch know what she's doing and feels that she herself needs some therapy and she actually is so upset because she goes to rehab, which is where she meets Jennifer Byer, who will later become her romantic partner. But she's in like a rehab therapy.
So does she know? Is she like, I can't believe that I'm doing this crazy scam and I need help. And so I'm going to.
Jen thinks like this is an amazing woman and this relationship is amazing, right?
And she emails Shonda Rhimes. She actually goes to tell them what Finch is doing, which is Amazing, right?
It's like a Shonda Rhimes TV show, right? Like it's like inventing Anna or a scandal.
Yeah. So she realizes like there's a grifter among us. Look, this is incredible. I think everybody should watch Anatomy of Lies tonight on Peacock to learn what happens after that. There's still many more twists and turns that we did not reveal of the story. You just kind of can't believe it. It makes you wonder. Who are the people that I have surrounded myself with?
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