Anatomy of Lies: Women who con

As the doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital piled trauma on top of trauma through plane, car and ferry crashes, hospital fires, and mad gunmen, one of the show’s writers was battling her own tower of tragedies off-screen.

During Elisabeth Finch’s time as a writer for The Vampire Diaries, then as a writer and co-executive producer on Grey’s Anatomy, she shared her struggles with the public, publishing articles through Elle, The Hollywood Reporter, and even the Shondaland production blog. Elisabeth wrote frequently about her experiences with the rare bone cancer chondrosarcoma – which she drew on for one of the Grey’s Anatomy episodes she wrote: Season 15, episode 7, titled Anybody Have a Map? in which Dr Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen) confronts her own chondrosarcoma diagnosis. Elisabeth became the series’ go-to expert on cancer. Her ability to empathise with the characters, an invaluable asset. 

Among friends and in the privacy of the writers room, Elisabeth revealed her devastating decision to terminate her pregnancy during chemotherapy, along with intimate details of her life, including her efforts to clean up the scene after a dear friend of hers was murdered in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre. She exposed the dark family secret that had driven her brother to try to take her own life, along with her own soul-crushing decision to take him off life support. And she fought back through medical leave for a kidney transplant, and for knee replacement surgery. Through it all, Elisabeth kept her chin up with “quiet dignity” as she sat in the Grey’s writers room, the scarf around her head covering up her hair loss from chemotherapy.

Then, in February 2022, just as Grey’s Anatomy creator-producer Shonda Rhimes was releasing her true-crime doccie about con artist Anna Delvey, she and Grey’s executive producer Krista Vernoff received a disturbing email. It warned them that Shonda had a con much closer to home. The writer was a registered nurse named Jennifer Beyer, a name that they knew well. She was the recently estranged wife of Elisabeth Finch. 

Binge Anatomy of Lies now on Showmax.

As Shondaland opened an investigation in March 2022, it was soon clear that this was not a vindictive ex just lashing out. In May 2022, investigative journalist Evgenia Perez published the first of several articles in Vanity Fair, detailing the lengths that Elisabeth had gone to, from her time as a junior writer on the series True Blood, to convince the world that she was bravely struggling through tragic circumstances. Her cancer? A lie. Her brother? Alive. 

Elisabeth Finch had gone to extraordinary lengths to convince the people around her that she was deathly ill. She was so convincing that not even a writers room full of pros had clocked any gaps in her story. The team had written their Munchausen patient in Season 2, episode 4, titled Deny, Deny, Deny. But there’s such a massive taboo about faking serious illness, that when faced with Elisabeth’s sometimes increasingly sickly appearance, along with her in-depth knowledge of cancer, nobody doubted her. On top of that, she had Shonda’s personal blessing – she had hired Elisabeth for Season 11 after reading her article about her cancer battle in Elle in 2014. 

Elisabeth’s lies gained her authority in the writers room along with accommodations for her supposed illness and constant praise for her grit and grace. But for most of us, those benefits would soon far be outweighed by the sheer effort she had to put into maintaining such an elaborate deception for 10 years (from 2012, to March 2022) – even faking chemo port scars and vomiting fits in the work bathrooms.

If nobody suspected Elisabeth…well, why would they? It’s a fascinating question, and Anatomy of Lies sets out to break down Elisabeth’s deceptions and motivation across three episodes, with Evgenia Perez onboard as a co-director with David Schisgall. 

Binge Anatomy of Lies now on Showmax. 

Lie society: 5 women who con

While Elisabeth Finch preyed on her colleagues’ and friends’ compassion like an “energy vampire”, other con women have manipulated not only the public’s tendency to overlook women as criminals, but other vulnerabilities like greed, ignorance, and the social taboos against committing horrific and pointless acts. Explore more in these five doccies. 

1. Tell Them You Love Me: Emmy-nominated and BAFTA-winning documentarian Louis Theroux explores how university philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield tried to use her impeccable credentials and authority to try to convince the world that Derrick Johnson, a non-verbal man with cerebral palsy, enthusiastically consented to a physical relationship with her. Her university work centred on ethics, race, and disability rights, and she claimed that she had been able to communicate with Derek because he was of average intelligence. But the procedure she used, Facilitated Communication, had already been branded as a pseudoscience, with no more reliability than if Derek had spoken to her through a ouija board. 

2. Rosemary’s Hit List: People around police officer Rosemary Ndlovu seemed to die tragically. But in reality, she was taking out insurance policies on people before hiring hit men to target everyone from her lover, to her mother, sisters, nieces and nephews – down to the newborn babies. And when she came under suspicion, she hired hitmen to kill the officer investigating her case, Detective Sergeant Keshi Mabunda, along with her station commander, Colonel Nthipe Boloka. One of the most brazen con artists in South African history, Rosemary exploited sloppy insurance paperwork and traditional respect for women’s grief and mourning, then danced in court and sang about her arrest. Rosemary’s Hit List won the 2024 SAFTA for Best Cinematography.

3. Savior Complex: In 2007, American high school student Renee Bach spent nine months volunteering at a missionary-run Ugandan orphanage. Two years later, armed with nothing more than a high school diploma and a belief that she had a religious calling, she returned to set up her own NGO, called Serving His Children (SHC) at the age of 19, and excitedly documented her efforts online in her blog. Ten years later, that same blog would be used as evidence in court when she was brought to trial in a civil case in connection with the deaths of more than 105 of the 940 children in care at SHC between 2010 and 2015. HBO documentary Savior Complex spotlights her steps on a road to hell paved with good intentions, as faith crossed over to arrogance and vanity.

4. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley: This documentary draws on journalist John Carreyrou’s true-crime book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, in which he combined his investigations into the private health firm Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was promising a revolution in healthcare, centred on its claim that it could run a huge battery of lab tests and scans for conditions using just the blood drawn from a single pinprick to the tip of a finger. Outside the company, Elizabeth could rely on technobabble to bamboozle venture capitalists who had no capacity to understand whether what she was selling them was even possible. While she was an engineering school dropout with no medical qualifications, Elizabeth had a firm grip on the language and promises that excited investors, and a host of attractive names on her board of directors.

5. Devilsdorp: This four-episode Showmax Original true-crime documentary series explores Krugersdorp Satanic Panic-driven serial killings that took place between 2012 and 2016. Perspective on the case and the ability to dedicate four hours to analysing its twists and turns make this a must for anyone wanting to take a deep dive into the psychology of these small town cult killings. Find out how Cecilia Steyn created her Electus per Deus cult, built connections with her five closest allies by begging for their help, then turned their superstitions and need for purpose against them, manipulating them into murder for her own financial gain. The series is narrated by investigative journalist Jana Marx, who wrote The Krugersdorp Cult Killings: Inside Cecilia Steyn’s Reign of Terror. Devilsdorp won the 2022 Best Made-for-TV Documentary SAFTA.