Review: ‘Anatomy of Lies’ Reveals the Depths of a Very Nasty Scammer

By Kayleigh Donaldson | TV | October 10, 2024 |

Even in our current era of semi-ironically celebrating so-called scammers, there are lines in the sand we’ve collectively agreed should not be crossed. Robbing your friends and associates by pretending to be a German heiress? Apparently, we’re cool with that because it’s low stakes enough to spin into a millennial Robin Hood tale, regardless of the details. Faking cancer? Well, that’s less acceptable. There are many documentaries and podcasts dedicated to the frighteningly common phenomenon of people lying about their health for money and clout, but when Vanity Fair released a two-part investigation into Elisabeth Finch, we were still shocked by the sheer scope of her cruelty.

Finch, a TV writer with credits on True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, became a media darling when she spoke out about living with chondrosarcoma, a rare and typically fatal form of bone cancer. Writing about her illness got her the attention of Shonda Rhimes, who hired her to work on Grey’s Anatomy. Finch wrote daringly about her many struggles, including having an abortion while undergoing chemotherapy, being sexually assaulted by her brother, and suffering from PTSD after she cleaned up the remains of a friend who was killed in the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting. She even used her own experiences as inspiration for some episodes of the show. How could one woman bear the burden of so much tragedy? She didn’t. She made it all up.

Anatomy of Lies, a three-part documentary series on Peacock, delves into this dark and wildly melodramatic story. The case of Finch was both enthralling and aggravating. It was truly too juicy to be true, the kind of endless trauma porn that, while true for many people, couldn’t help but feel like the escalation of a soap opera narrative. It’s not simply that Finch faked having cancer. It’s that she had to have a very rare form of it that her “doctor” said he’d never seen before in someone her age. When many women shared their stories about having abortions during the early 2010s, she had to have an even more dramatic one. Former colleagues of Finch from the Grey’s Anatomy writers room talk about how Finch forced her way into becoming the “definitive” expert on various social issues for the show because she claimed her lived experience was the only true expertise any of them had.

That self-aggrandizing takes on an even nastier flavour after one writer reveals that she’d shared with Finch how she had been born as a product of rape, and suddenly Finch was citing her own fake experience with sexual assault to write into the show a character who was also born of rape. This is one detail that differentiates Finch from other cancer scammers, where money was the primary motivating factor (see the podcast and upcoming documentary Scamanda for one such example.) Finch made a good living from TV writing and did so before she started lying, but the clout she garnered from becoming the most traumatized woman in Hollywood took her far.

The documentary is a pretty straightforward affair that avoids psychoanalyzing Finch as well as the wider system she took advantage of. One former classmate of Finch notes that having a good story to sell about yourself is as important a quality in Hollywood as being good at your job. Finch certainly had a great tale to tell, but there’s not much room given to exploring the commodity that is trauma porn in the entertainment world. Certainly, we could be here all day discussing how shows like Grey’s Anatomy revel in human suffering, almost to the point of parody. It does, however, show the ways that Finch seemed to think about her lies: they were part of a season-long arc, building up to dramatic reveals and emotional payoffs. She just didn’t have a series finale in mind.

Many people are absent from this documentary, most glaringly Shonda Rhimes, who seems keen to sweep this entire mess under the rug (one person accuses Shondaland of handling the case with “kid gloves.”) Finch’s parents and brother (who she claimed assaulted her then died by suicide) are also not present. Neither is Finch herself, mercifully. If there is a star of Anatomy of Lies, it’s Jennifer Beyer, the then-estranged wife of Finch (they have since divorced.) Through Beyer’s tragic story, we see the true human cost of Finch’s manipulations and egotism.

After lying about losing a friend in the synagogue shooting, Finch checked herself into a treatment facility for PTSD. There, she met Beyer, a victim of domestic abuse who had lost custody of her children through her husband’s cruelty and the ensuing trauma it caused her. Beyer, who still looks shellshocked while being interviewed, gets brutally candid about feeling targeted by Finch. She initially viewed Finch, who didn’t use her real name in treatment, as a much-needed ally, someone who love-bombed her and seemed to understand what she was going through. Indeed, while Beyer struggled with her husband sending her threatening messages and stalking her at the safe house she was staying in, Finch was also receiving taunting messages from her own abuser. Sure, your pain is bad but Finch’s was always worse.

Finch certainly comes across as a master manipulator, one who spun claims of such intense levels of trauma that nobody could ever question her. Former colleagues admit to feeling skeptical of some of her claims but never wanted to be the person to call out the cancer patient. But being gaslit for so long takes its toll, especially when you end up married to the woman doing it. It’s Beyer who finally uncovers the truth (and pretty easily, which reveals how shoddy Finch’s theatricalities truly were) but she was also terrified to tell anyone else lest they think she was “crazy” and took her kids away from her again. Finch’s control over her and her children only became crueller as she realized her story was about to fall apart.

Anatomy of Lies is conventionally presented to us in typical TV documentary manner: talking heads, drone shots of landscapes, words being typed onto screens (but mercifully no reenactments.) It’s no frills but appropriately so because it’s Beyer’s story that matters most here. This isn’t just about Finch’s scam: It’s about how a traumatised woman let down by the system became a pawn in this game and put her own safety at risk to let the truth be known. Attention was Finch’s addiction, but fuelling her hunger relied on exploiting dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Beyer paid that price more than anyone else.

Some may wish that Anatomy of Lies offered a denser psychological profile of its subject but I think it smartly understands that Elisabeth Finch is not a complicated or interesting human being. Sure, she pulled off a house of cards-style lie for many years, but she herself is nothing special. She’s a serial liar who wanted people to pay attention to her, a “trauma vampire” who sees other people’s pain as something worth stealing. As evidenced by her attempt at a comeback via a hilariously inept profile on The Ankler and her continued gaslighting of Beyer through the legal system, she’s learned nothing. If Anatomy of Lies does anything, it will kill any attempt at a return Finch will inevitably try to mount. She doesn’t deserve the good story. It was always Jennifer Beyer’s, anyway.