Grey’s Anatomy of Lies
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What is the premise of 'Anatomy of Lies'?
Campsite Media. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media, this is Infamous. I'm Natalie Robomed. What would you do if you found out that someone in your life, your co-worker, your best friend, maybe even your wife, was lying to you? Not just about little things, like whether they took the trash out or remembered to call the vet, but really huge, consequential, life-changing stuff. Like whether they had cancer, or only one kidney, or were present for the aftermath of one of the most traumatic events in recent American history.
We start now with a story that has incredible drama. It is potentially so over-the-top and crazy and involves elements of betrayal so massive.
Now a writer on the long-running medical drama, Grey's Anatomy is under investigation for allegedly fabricating her medical history. In my mind, I would want to say to her, like, what the fuck? Vanessa and I sat down with the woman who unearthed the story, filmmaker and journalist Evgenia Peretz.
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.
Thank you for having me.
Who is Elizabeth Finch and why is she significant?
Tell us how this story first came on your radar.
So I was given a tip by a former Graves writer, and she was hearing... this rumor about Elizabeth Finch, this Grey's writer, who had claimed to have cancer for like eight years. And it was actually the thing that got her the job at Grey's Anatomy because she had written an article for Elle, a first-person story about her battle with cancer and how she was a writer and how basically working through her cancer was giving her life meaning. and she was determined to keep working.
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.
She was working at Vampire Diaries at the time, but she had always worshipped Shondaland and Grey's Anatomy. And this article came across the transom of Shonda Rhimes and Shondaland and they figured okay well this woman has been through something awful and has so many valuable things to say about the experience of living with cancer and dealing with hospitals and the health care system and being a victim of something horrible like this she'd be great for our show. And so that's how she got hired. So let's go back a second. So who is Elizabeth Finch? Where does she come from? And how did she end up in LA and writing for these kind of vampire shows? So she's from New Jersey. Originally, she wanted to be a playwright, and she was a big playwright in high school. And then she went to USC for film school after college. And She was persuaded to get into TV because it pays more than being a playwright. So her first job, she was an assistant, and then she got a job on True Blood, and that led to a job on Vampire Diaries.
So she was a young writer working on these two vampire shows. And a decent trajectory, but she wanted to do something that was higher brow, I guess you could say, with more kind of emotional human appeal. Yeah, I mean, that's something that your documentary really lays out, that she seems to have this endless lust for more. I mean, she was a working TV writer, but she wanted to be doing something even bigger and better. Yeah. And so she landed this job on Grey's Anatomy, which seems like it was a dream job for her.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the premise of 'Anatomy of Lies'?
0:01–2:21
2
Who is Elizabeth Finch and why is she significant?
2:21–4:55
3
What lies did Elizabeth Finch tell to advance her career?
4:55–8:05
4
How did Elizabeth Finch's cancer story impact her career?
8:05–10:02
5
What role did trauma play in Elizabeth Finch's life?
10:02–13:18
6
How did Elizabeth Finch manipulate her position in the writer's room?
13:18–17:08
7
What are the consequences of Elizabeth Finch's deception?
17:08–35:41