Grey’s Anatomy recently premiered its 21st season on the 2024 TV schedule, and for a show that’s provided so much on-screen drama over the past two decades, it’s also had its fair share of conflict behind the scenes. The most recent example of this was the 2022 story of writer Elisabeth Finch, who lied about having cancer and other tragedies in her life that inspired some of Grey’s Anatomy’s best episodes. The docuseries Anatomy of Lies dives into those fabrications, but it turns out there was much more the directors weren’t able to include, like one story that involved another infamous liar with ties to Rhimes — Anna Delvey.
Longtime Grey’s fans have endured Katherine Heigl’s feud with Shonda Rhimes and stories of Patrick Dempsey’s allegedly “terrorizing” behavior that led to McDreamy being killed off. However, the Vanity Fair article written by Evgenia Peretz and the ensuing three-part docuseries Anatomy of Lies (available to stream with a Peacock subscription) from Peretz and her filmmaker husband David Schisgall uncovered a story that was as wild as anything we’ve ever seen on the show. And yet there were still parts of Elisabeth Finch’s deception that didn’t make the cut. Schisgall told The Wrap:
There’s a ton of stuff that we weren’t able to put into the show… We weren’t able to put in the image that Elisabeth made of herself as Anna Delvey. We weren’t able to put in the story that we heard that she would be triggered by the word ‘hot dog’ and so she would head out of the room.
Other triggers were discussed on Anatomy of Lies, including Elisabeth Finch not being comfortable with rainy weather or the mention of guns due to PTSD from her friend being killed in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018. (She later admitted she knew no one who died in that tragedy.)
But I’m really interested in the Anna Delvey of it all. Delvey — aka Anna Sorokin, who has been in the news recently for her hilariously dismissive response to getting eliminated from Dancing with the Stars — is the fake heiress who lied her way into New York’s upper-class social scene, swindling people and banks out of millions of dollars along the way. She’s also the subject of the Netflix series Inventing Anna, created by none other than Shonda Rhimes. It makes sense that Elisabeth Finch might have seen a bit of herself in Delvey, and I’m curious about this story that got left on the cutting room floor.
Another fabrication that was edited out involved Elisabeth Finch’s then-wife Jenn Beyer and Finch's brother, who the writer said had abused her as a child and then died by suicide during her time with Grey’s. (Finch’s brother is reportedly alive to this day.) Evgenia Peretz said:
One of the crazy lies that we just didn’t have room for was that after her brother’s alleged suicide, she went on a trip to Hawaii with Jenn, and she told her Grey’s colleagues that she was going to reunite her dead brother’s love child with his Filipino mother, none of which was true. It was a very elaborate lie, and this is while she was with Jenn in Hawaii telling her she was scouting for locations for an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
So do Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall plan to continue to follow Elisabeth Finch and possibly tell these stories? Peretz said it’s unlikely:
I don’t think we’ll be doing any more reporting on it. But if someone were interested in doing a limited series that would be incredible. I would love to see that.
The couple may be done with the former Grey’s Anatomy writer, but there’s apparently more to mine from this well, and if anyone ever did want to do a series on it, they’d be willing to share their research. Schisgall said:
We’d be glad to pour all the things that we know into something like that. There’s so much more to this story that we would like to pass off to others.
It’s hard to believe there’s so much that didn’t make it into Anatomy of Lies, given the lengths Elisabeth Finch went to to keep up the charade. If you’re interested in going on that stranger-than-fiction journey, the docuseries is available to stream now on Peacock, and you can catch current episodes of Grey’s Anatomy at 10 p.m. ET Thursdays on NBC.
