Until recently, Elisabeth Finch, Finchie to friends, was the queen of Grey's
Anatomy
writers , elevated by Empress Shonda Rhimes, who was moved by her condition as a cancer patient: she had a lethal chondrosarcoma that could kill her at any moment .
She told it in a story in Elle
magazine
and ended up in one of the plots of the doctors series.
Finchie wrote the episodes that chronicled Catherine Fox's character's diagnosis and treatment of a beastly chondrosarcoma. As a patient, she became untouchable among the writers.
When Finchie spoke, everyone nodded, and her ideas always ended up in the scripts, without anyone questioning them, something unusual for a collective work that is based on discussion.
Now,
Vanity Fair
has revealed that it was all a lie.
Finchie did not have cancer.
He also did not collect the remains of a friend of his killed in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, nor did he have a suicidal brother.
He had made up all the traumas, and he didn't make up any more because his wife, a nurse he met at a mental health center doing post-traumatic stress therapy, caught him and forced him to confess.
There will be much speculation about this case worthy of other great liars, such as
El adversary
, by Carrère, or
El impostor
, by Cercas, but the answer to why lies in the treatment he received from the production company.
The more tragedies he invented, the higher his salary, the more prominence they gave him in the series and the more square meters of office they gave him.
It didn't take his wife more than a while on Google to confirm his suspicions.
Nobody bothered before because the victims are so sacred, that contrasting their statements is blasphemous.
And that —oh, paradox— is beautiful, because it speaks of a society that prefers to be naive rather than cynical.
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