Former Grey's Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch has confessed to major lies about her personal life, namely battling cancer.
Months after being placed on administrative leave from the long-running ABC medical drama and then resigning from her job following a March 17 report by The Ankler newsletter that she may have "fabricated medical details from her personal life," Finch is coming clean.
"I told a lie when I was 34 years old and it was the biggest mistake of my life. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and got buried deeper and deeper inside me," she told the outlet Dec. 7, adding, "I've never had any form of cancer."
Finch continued, "What I did was wrong. Not okay. F--ked up. All the words."
E! News has reached out to ABC for comment and has not heard back.
In 2014, Finch wrote in an ELLE magazine article that she had been diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer and was later hired by Grey's creator Shonda Rhimes to work on the show, with her reported health battle even incorporated into a storyline.
However, following the revelations that her medical claims were, in fact, false, she was removed from the show, which she resigned from before a planned review of the allegations by ABC's parent company Disney. And as The Ankler, which first broke the story, noted in its recent article, Finch later checked herself in for a five-week-long stay at an in-patient treatment facility.
Finch allegedly took great strides to appear ill in front of her colleagues, with an unnamed former colleague telling The Ankler that the writer was a co-worker "who lost her hair, whose skin was yellow and green, who had a visible chemo port bandage, who regularly took breaks to vomit, who only ate saltines for long periods of time and who wrote and talked about her experiences all the time."
In addition to pretending she had cancer, Finch also told colleagues in 2019 that her brother died of suicide, The Ankler reported. In reality, the outlet said, he is alive, and living in Florida.
But amid her guilt over lying to her co-workers, Finch shared that she missed her fellow writers on the series.
"One of the things that makes it so hard," she admitted, "is that they did rally around a false narrative that I gave."
And she hopes taking accountability can one day help mend some of the broken relationships brought on by her lies.
"I could only hope that the work that I've done will allow me back into those relationships," Finch explained, "where I can say, ‘OK, I did this, I hurt a lot of people and I'm also going to work my f--king ass off because this is where I want to be and I know what it's like to lose everything.'"