Even before Evgenia Peretz’s two-part Vanity Fair story about the long con of former “Grey’s Anatomy” writer Elisabeth Finch went to print in 2022, her husband, filmmaker David Schisgall, was already warning her that Hollywood would snatch up this story if she didn’t.
“I remember sitting in our bedroom, and hearing more and more about what she was reporting and just saying to her: ‘This is a documentary. Either you are going to make it or someone else will,’” Schisgall tells Variety .
He isn’t wrong. As is repeatedly stated in “Anatomy of Lies,” Peacock’s new docuseries co-directed by Peretz and Schisgall, Finch’s story is tailor made for Hollywood. An aspiring writer with experience on shows like “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries,” Finch desperately wanted a job writing for her favorite series, “Grey’s Anatomy.” But it wasn’t until she published articles about her devastating battle with a rare form of bone cancer known as chondrosarcoma that her work was brought to Shonda Rhimes, and she got her wish.
Finch was hired in 2014 and eventually rose to the rank of co-executive producer, making a notable mark on the show’s narrative by infusing her writing with the harrowing details and heroic resiliency of her own battle with cancer. Her cancer directly inspired an arc for Debbie Allen’s character Catherine Avery, who was diagnosed with often-terminal chondrosarcoma but defied the odds by living with it — just as Finch had.
Elisabeth Finch with Debbie Allen
As time went on, she became vocal with those in the writers’ room about other tragic turns in her personal life, including the loss of her friend in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh and the resulting PTSD she developed from supposedly cleaning up his remains there; the realization through therapy that her brother abused her as a child; and the trauma of having to pull the plug on him after his failed suicide attempt left him brain dead. Through it all, her co-workers and bosses gave her unquestioning support and leeway, while still maintaining her status on the show.
But as it turned out, none of Finch’s stories were true. What started as very public proclamations about a cancer she never had became an elaborate ruse involving faked chemo treatments, repeated head shavings, cross-country flights at the drop of a hat, wild demands for sensitivity and an extended stay at a mental health treatment facility for PTSD. At the facility, Finch met Jennifer Beyer, a mother of five and a walking raw nerve frayed by years of abuse by her husband. After forging a deep connection over their traumas, Finch and Beyer would eventually marry and co-parent Beyer’s children following the suicide of their father — all the while Finch was siphoning off details from Beyer’s darkest hours for her writing.
In the docuseries, Peretz and Schisgall include extensive interviews with Beyer, as well as two of her children, who came to revere Finch; and a handful of “Grey’s Anatomy” writers who were duped by Finch for nearly a decade. But the woman behind the con doesn’t make an appearance.
“At a certain point, we didn’t want this to be — and it really couldn’t be without Elisabeth — a documentary about this person’s affliction, and why they are like this,” Peretz says. “It really had to be framed as something that shows the result of what this person did to all these people and how they deal with it.”
“The Inverse of Elisabeth Finch in Every Way”
Peretz first learned of Finch through a source from a previous story, who also happened to be a former writer on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Eventually, she was put in touch with Beyer, whose emails to both Rhimes and then-“Grey’s” showrunner Krista Vernoff set in motion an internal investigation at Disney into Finch’s lies.
Jennifer Beyer
Understanding the rushed timetable to report a story the industry would clamor to get their hands on, Peretz flew to Kansas where Beyer lived in March 2022 and sat with her for six hours during their first meeting. Beyer was anxious and fragile, Peretz remembered. She requested she not use a tape recorder or notebook. Just listen to her story about how Finch ingratiated herself into Beyer’s life, preyed upon her trauma, leeched it for her own work on “Grey’s” and then tried to drive a wedge between Beyer and her children.
“Over the course of that conversation, I realized this was so much more than a Hollywood con story,” Peretz says. “There is this incredible person who is the inverse of Elisabeth Finch in every way. She was someone who had experienced real trauma. She had been severely abused by her husband over many years, so by the time Finch walked into her life, she was already in a vulnerable state. It gave this story a human, tragic, very dark angle.”
For those watching the documentary, the Jennifer Beyer on screen is a far cry from the person Peretz first met, according to Schisgall. “The most gratifying thing about this project has been watching Jenn go from this fragile and skittish person that Evgenia met, who was still unbelieved by many people, and see her growing in strength and confidence to where she is now.”
Beyer was, perhaps, the biggest reason they felt emboldened to do a documentary as well. In her relationship with Finch, she documented everything, giving the filmmakers a wealth of visuals to illustrate the manipulation unfolding in Kansas.
“Jenn had lost custody of her children, and I think when Elisabeth met her and she started integrating herself into Jenn’s life, Jenn didn’t want to miss a moment of her kids’ lives,” Peretz says. “So from that time on, she was taking pictures constantly, which gave us this amazing visual trove.”
Beyer, herself, also became the expert witness. “You never know when you start these things, but Jenn turned out to be this extremely intelligent, perceptive and winning woman that you can be psyched to spend two hours with,” Schisgall says.
“We Tried Many People Who Didn’t Want to Touch It”
On paper, the series marks the biggest collaboration between Peretz and Schisgall to date. Beyond her journalism career and his film work, they previously co-wrote the screenplay for the 2011 Paul Rudd film “Our Idiot Brother,” directed by Jesse Peretz, Evgenia’s brother. But Schisgall says they are often each other’s first unofficial sounding board.
“Usually, I’m the person that reads her first draft, and on the work I am doing, she is usually a credited or uncredited executive producer,” he says. “We always collaborate, it has always been a great part of our marriage. And for this, I had the experience with documentaries and she had the contacts through her reporting.”
Leaning on her contacts was essential to capturing Finch’s other life back in in Los Angeles with the incredibly patient and understanding writers of “Grey’s Anatomy,” who rarely questioned when Finch would disappear out of the blue and even helped finish her scripts when she went AWOL on deadline — even though she still got the writing credit.
“Grey’s Anatomy” writer Kiley Donovan
Peretz’s Vanity Fair piece quotes several unnamed sources from “Grey’s” attesting to Finch’s behavior. But in the “Anatomy of Lies” series, several former writers — Andy Reaser, Mark Wilding and Kiley Donovan — go on camera to talk about their experiences working alongside her. Peretz admits it wasn’t easy getting these writers to sign on to the documentary.
“I think to a certain extent, they were doing it for Jenn, who they really didn’t know,” she says. “They wanted to step up for someone who wasn’t Hollywood-savvy, and just prop up her narrative. And just for themselves, they had sacrificed a lot for Elisabeth too. I think it was also a healing experience for a few of them to tell their stories.”
Donovan, specifically, details the personal conversations she shared with Finch about her discovery that she was the child of rape. Within months, Finch had stolen that story and used it as a story arc for the character of Jo Wilson (Camilia Luddington), who Finch would come to obsessively use as a vessel for her writing on the show.
The other big lift within the industry was doing their due diligence to try and get bigger names from the “Grey’s” universe to speak out. “Shonda made it clear when I wrote the article that she wanted no part of it, so it was basically a non-response when we reached out to her for this,” Peretz says. “We tried many people who didn’t want to touch it. We definitely tried for Camilia Luddington, Ellen Pompeo, Debbie Allen. Obviously, Krista Vernoff, and some other writers.”
None of them are involved, although Luddington is the only one name checked in the series as not responding to comment because of how integral Finch had been to her storylines.
But in a way, even without the involvement of marquee names associated with “Grey’s,” the show itself is a damning document of Finch’s con. In making the documentary, Peretz was eager to use clips from her episodes, pinpointing the exact parts of her story and the stories of others that she reaped for the screen.
“We knew on a visual level, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ clips would be an interesting part of it,” Peretz says. “To see how Elisabeth had weaved her tales and personal stories into the show. And then the stuff with Jo was really fascinating to us.”
In addition to Catherine Avery’s cancer and Jo Wilson’s PTSD, the series also makes the case that the messy exit of original cast member Justin Chambers got a dose of Finch’s fables as well. While the reason for Chambers’ sudden exit from the show has never been spelled out, the eventual story on screen found his character Alex Karev going to live on a farm in Kansas with his former wife Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl), a nod to Finch’s own new life with Beyer in Kansas.
“It Was Like 100 Degrees in the Room, but It Was Just Spellbinding”
Beyond Beyer and the “Grey’s” writers, the most affecting testimonies in the docuseries come from two of Beyer’s children, Maya and Van, who speak out for the first time about how Finch’s deception nearly destroyed their family. Peretz and Schisgall didn’t know they would have access to her oldest children when they started filming, but Beyer’s trust in the couple led to her letting them speak for themselves.
“When we interviewed Maya, it was a very long interview and it was like 100 degrees in the room, but it was just spellbinding,” Peretz says. “I could not believe that someone so young could be so emotionally intelligent, articulate, dynamic on camera, honest, authentic. I mean, it was incredible. That was one of the most memorable experiences for me. And Van was the same, even though they have different personalities. Having the combination of these two incredibly intelligent, loving children was so important for the story about what Finch did and illustrating what Jenn is really like as a mother.”
Elisabeth Finch, Jennifer Beyer
Interacting with the family, and seeing firsthand how much work had to be done to rebuild their relationship, laid bare what Schisgall considers to be Finch’s greatest sin.
“It’s not really in the show, but to me, the cruelest and most awful thing Elisabeth Finch did in the course of all of this was to bond with Jenn’s three younger children at a time when they were so vulnerable after their father’s death, and step in as a parent while —at the same time, living a lie with them,” he says. “Exploiting and manipulating them for her own emotional needs. That’s a terrible thing to do to children in that situation.”
“She Is a Master Manipulator”
One of the threads weaving through the series’ three episodes is this question of how could so many people, including powerful executives in Rhimes’ production hub Shondaland and throughout ABC, not see the con artist in their midst? Having now reported the story on multiple platforms, Peretz thinks she has some semblance of an answer.
“One thing that people kept telling us was that when lies were dropped in over the course of a decade, they don’t experience it as suspicious because it’s not one after another after another,” Peretz says. “And good people, the kind of people Finch was attracted to, are not wired to doubt that someone has cancer, or that someone is dying, or that this person had a friend who died in a terrorist attack. Because why would someone lie about that?”
Schisgall is more blunt in his assessment. “You have to kind of be a monster yourself if your friend says they have cancer, and you wonder if they are telling the truth,” he says. “She is a master manipulator, but the main way she got away with it was on people’s empathy.”
“She Actually Has No Remorse”
Neither Peretz nor Schisgall have ever spoken to Finch, who eventually stepped down from the show after Beyer’s emails to “Grey’s” senior staff. So understanding the enigma at the center of their story is a complicated facet of the series. The world got some insight into her psyche in December 2022 when The Ankler published a tell-all interview with Finch , who fell back on old party lines about the abuse at the hands of her brother being the root cause of all her actions — abuse that has never been confirmed.
The interview, written by Peter Kiefer, plays an important part in the final moments of the series, as different “Grey’s” writers read aloud some of her comments and react to them.
“She was cornered, but still trying to spin the story,” Peretz says of the Ankler story. “She was still talking about her abusive brother as the root of everything and trying to get a writing job on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ And I think that the people who saw that thought it was pathetic. It was not an apology. It was some sad last-ditch effort. and she actually has no remorse.”
Kiefer actually broke the story about Disney opening an investigation into Finch’s fabrications six weeks before Peretz’s story hit newsstands. Peretz confirms she and Schisgall talked to Kiefer in the process of making the documentary, especially about his interactions with Finch, but he is not featured in the series.
“We were in communication with him, and we were trying to include his perspective, but we weren’t really able to work it out,” Schisgall says.
That being said, Schisgall’s own take on Finch’s hail-Mary interview was genuine shock that she didn’t take credit for her web of lies.
“It seems to me that the best end to this story would be to just go permanent midnight, and lay it all out,” he says. “It sort of surprises me that it is not the route she took.”
“There Is a Lot More to This”
While Peretz and Schisgall prepare to move on from Finch’s story, they are still holding onto pieces of the reporting that they can’t quite share with the world just yet — or don’t have the right people willing to say them on the record.
As Peretz puts it, it shouldn’t be underestimated that Finch still strikes fear in people: “I think she is also just a scary person.”
Beyond a few teases, they are keeping everything else they learned from off-the-record interviews close to the chest. “It is true of all documentaries, but it was especially true of this one, that there is so much more that we know that is not in the show,” Schisgall says. “A lot of which is incredibly interesting, and some of which we could have put in the show, but just didn’t have the time or place for it — or couldn’t get people to speak on the record about it. But there is a lot more to this.”
This wouldn’t be a true Hollywood scandal without the threat of a sequel. So would they ever return to the subject for a follow-up? Not if they can help it.
“My hope is that nothing so dramatic, traumatic and awful happens to any of these people ever again,” he says.
“She Is a Walking, Talking Miracle”
After filming, Peretz and Schisgall have stayed in touch with Beyer, who is living with her children in Kansas and works, believe it or not, as a nurse. But not just any kind of nurse.
“She is a nurse on the ward in Kansas that deals with the sickest babies and the most difficult pregnancies,” Schisgall says. “So she goes to work every day to these life-and-death situations, and she is very good at it. But that is who she is. She is raising five kids, she’s been through hell and then she goes into work every day and that is her job. She is a walking talking miracle.”
The whole family is flourishing, in fact. But Peretz acknowledges that it is still progress they can’t take for granted. “All of this is very hard to get over and there are still a lot of challenges. Who knows when it might raise itself up in you psychologically. But they are a very highly functioning group right now.”
As for Elisabeth, morsels of information trickle out now and then. But who knows what’s real and what’s the latest spin.
“Elisabeth, we gather, is still living in L.A.,” Peretz says. “We have heard snippets of her reaching out to people still inquiring about jobs. We have heard she has something in the works about her life. We don’t know if it’s a novel…”
Peretz stops and corrects herself with a laugh, instantly recognizing the irony of Finch’s life as fiction. “We don’t know if it is a memoir or a script.”
Schisgall quickly interjects, “But with anything involving Elisabeth, if she says she is working on something and we hear it third hand, you can’t believe anything she says.”
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