Natalie and Vanessa talk to Evgenia Peretz about Peacock's Anatomy of Lies, which is well worth watching now. Directed and produced by Evgenia and David Schisgall, Anatomy of Lies provides a thorough exploration of a Grey’s Anatomy writer’s ascent in Hollywood, the complex network of falsehoods she created, and the aftermath as her deceit was uncovered. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'Anatomy of Lies'?
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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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What lies did Elizabeth Finch tell to advance her career?
As we've already said, she got this job partly because she wrote this essay for Elle about her diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer. And so she gets this job on Grey's. And one thing the documentary laid out that I thought was really interesting is the ways in which her cancer diagnosis potentially protected her.
So can you tell me about her sort of early days on Grey's and how she was doing in that writer's room?
Sure. So early on, when this woman, Krista Vernoff, took over as showrunner, she did what's called a blind read of the current writers. And this is a standard thing for when a new showrunner takes over. They might let some people go and hire some new people. So she did a blind read of something Elizabeth Finch had written and decided she didn't like it or it wasn't good enough.
And so she was about to be on the chopping block. But then word came from the bosses at Shondaland that this should be reconsidered. And I believe the article, the Elle magazine article was attached in this email that Elizabeth Finch, had cancer and the message received was, we can't fire this woman because of her cancer.
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.
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Chapter 4: How did Elizabeth Finch's cancer story impact her career?
I have survived racism, sexism, every ism designed to make me feel small and make me less. If I can do all of that, if I can survive all of that, then I just might survive this too.
very much in line with that whole aesthetic.
There seems to be a disconnect between how she presented her work ethic and what she was actually showing up as in the writer's room, in terms of having other writers pick up the slack and being late on deadlines, right?
Right. Well, I think everybody was cutting her slack from the beginning, and they were just impressed that she was showing up and working so hard, which is probably what a normal person would do at any job. It's not like she was working extra hard, but given that she had cancer, it was impressive.
And then as the years go on and she's taking these breaks to go to the Mayo Clinic for weeks at a time, there picking up the flat for her happily.
Let's explain a little bit about how a writer's room works, maybe for folks who don't know. Would you lay that out a little bit?
Sure. So the Grey's writer's room is roughly 17 people. So they sort of break down the season and the various character storylines. And then one writer will go off and write that script. She would be having to write a script and she was sick or needed the time off. And so
Other writers would pitch in and really do quite a lot of it, if not the bulk in some cases, out of the kindness of their heart and their empathy for this person. But because her name was on it, they didn't get credited on these scripts. She's still getting the money for that script.
And the residuals, right?
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Chapter 5: What role did trauma play in Elizabeth Finch's life?
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?
I think she did. And she was at Vampire Diaries. It was a tough room. And there were a lot of people who were afraid that they were going to be fired. So she did not speak up much. She was just not a strong contributor. So then she wrote her article for Elle about getting cancer. And then suddenly she became beloved at Vampire Diaries and then very quickly got her job at Grey's Anatomy.
So I think it's very possible that in her mind, she was like, holy shit, I could be fired from this job. And then what? I've got to make a strong move right now.
She also gets a plot line, right? Tell us about the plot line on Grey's Anatomy that's based on her.
Basically, shortly after she gets there, there's this teenage girl who gets chondrosarcoma and she loses part of her leg and she's like a real know-it-all. And she says, I know it's unheard of to get chondrosarcoma in someone so young, but I've done all the research, I know all about it. But then later she decided, okay, I'm gonna make my cancer a storyline and I'm gonna give my cancer to someone
the character of Catherine Fox, who is played by Debbie Allen. So a huge character on the show. So Catherine Fox gets chondrosarcoma and she is determined to fight it. And people are afraid that she could die, including her surgeon, because its survival rate is so low and surgery is so dangerous. And then she gets the surgery.
It was successful-ish because there's still little cancer living in her. And then there's this whole aria of Debbie Allen lying on the hospital gurney, just having come out of surgery about all the incredible things she's going to do, even though she still has cancer. I'm going to chase around my grandchild and I'm going to love my husband.
I mean, ship that people would not say once they've gotten, you know, just one day later, awaken from surgery. So that was how she played it in the show. And in fact, when they were debating the storyline in the room, there were a couple of doctor writers in the room because that's standard for Grey's Anatomy. They had these medical consultants there.
who were also writers and contributors in the room. And at least one of them was like, you know, realistically, someone with contra sarcoma would not survive. And Finch got very outraged and adamant and ran out of the room and was like, you're basically telling me that I'm gonna die. And she was so indignant that they played it her way.
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Chapter 6: How did Elizabeth Finch manipulate her position in the writer's room?
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.
As the doc series goes on, it gets more and more intense. You see how this woman... is drawn to other people who have deep traumas. That is her lifeblood. And then sort of pretending kind of internalizing other people's traumas and acting like they happened to her. And I think it's this craving for the attention that comes with that. Like if I get all this love and attention,
because of these terrible things that have happened to me, that feels great. It's like a hit. It's like a drug high. I do think it's a kind of addiction, that kind of attention. And maybe not wanting other people to get attention, right? Yes, yes. Every time that there is something important happening in someone else's life and attention is being directed to that person,
Suddenly, she would feel sick or need to go to the hospital or she'd be having a PTSD reaction to something that didn't happen to her. One of the big lies was she claimed to have had a friend that was killed in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. And she had to go to the synagogue in Pittsburgh and helped clean up the body of her friend from the synagogue floor. And she talked about this.
She posted about this ad nauseum. Then a year afterwards, she was having PTSD from it. In the Grey's room, people couldn't talk about gunshots in the room because it was too triggering. It was just this rush she got from like, oh, my God, Finch is being triggered again. This is terrible. 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.
The Hamburglar was just a mascot, but Jerome Jacobson was the real deal, a McDonald's security chief who almost pulled off the ultimate inside job. On Wondery's podcast, The Big Flop, comedians join host Misha Brown to chronicle pop culture's biggest fails and try to answer the age-old question, who thought this was a good idea? At the time, the McDonald's collab with Monopoly was a genius idea.
Come get a Big Mac and you could go home with a million-dollar prize piece. The only problem? When they picked their head of security, the one guy in charge of protecting those million-dollar pieces, McDonald's drew the wrong card. Comedians Ify Wadiwe and Beth Stelling join Misha to break down what really happened with the McDonald's-Monopoly scandal.
Listen to The Big Flap wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 7: What are the consequences of Elizabeth Finch's deception?
She was there not for addiction, but for her supposed PTSD from the Tree of Life shooting. And while she was at Sierra Tucson, she met a woman she became very close with.
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.
Yes.
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.
No, no. I mean, maybe on some deep, profound level that she's not in touch with. Maybe that's why she's there. But the ostensible reason she goes there. that she tells everyone is that she's having such bad PTSD from this synagogue shooting and having been there that she needs help. And she checks in under the name of Joe, which was the character that she was obsessed with on the show.
And she was writing her storyline for the rest of the season. She goes in under the name of Joe for this, ostensible reason of PTSD from the shooting. But really, she's going there to collect storylines for Joe's character because she has to be writing the rest of Joe's storyline. So she meets Jen. And incredibly, Jen has a couple of similarities to Joe herself. Jen is a nurse.
So she's been working in a hospital. And she has an abusive husband joe had an abusive ex-husband on the show who wanted to kill her and she finds out from jen that she was in an abusive relationship she meets jen and jen has a incredibly sad life story with so much trauma and i feel like elizabeth finch just glommed onto her as like okay this is psychically the
person engulfed in trauma that I just want to live with in my life. And also I'm going to get information for the character of Jo. She's basically studying her. Yeah. So she's like hearing all about her Jen's EMDR therapy, all about her past. She even uses the same name of the therapist Carly on the show. Right. And mind you, without telling Jen that this is what she's doing. Right.
I mean, at Sierra Tucson, they were becoming very close, very close friends.
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