down with the sickness
What’s the connection between a disgraced gay Shondaland writer who faked bone cancer and British TERFs?
Elisabeth Finch is a standout member of a disgraced cohort: the white women who fake serious cancer diagnoses. It’s an ignominous practice that, if not widespread, also doesn’t seem to be that uncommon: whether it’s for donation money, social media following, or combining them into a wellness brand, it’s fairly well trod ground, and you’ve likely heard stories about it before.
Although different than Munchausen’s or a true factitious disorder — in which patients fabricate serious illnesses "without any obvious gain,” sometimes genuinely harming themselves in the process — the fake cancer grift does seem to be of a kind with other, less gainful cons, that predicate themselves on extreme tragedy: one thinks of Tania Head, who falsely claimed to be a 9/11 survivor.
Even among the broader cinematic universe of people who lie about experiencing horrific events, Finch is an example of something somewhat unique. She didn’t pursue a straightforward financial grift in the form of fundraisers or donations — but also didn’t eschew personal gain altogether like someone like Tania Head, who appeared to be mostly motivated by sympathy and hagiography. Instead, she took a more complicated middle route, one that ended up making her infamous: Finch built a TV career off her diagnosis, but one behind the camera.
Sometime after 2014, Finch began a false narrative about having a rare form of bone cancer requiring serious ongoing medical treatment, launching her diagnosis in a moving personal essay for Elle magazine. That essay’s success eventually led to her getting a spot in the Grey’s writer room, where she wrote 13 episodes of TV, including one that included a fictionalized version of her own fictionalized cancer experience. Finch’s shifting narrative eventually grew to include losing part of her kidney, the suicide of a brother, and an abortion. She even appeared in a political campaign ad referencing her imaginary abortion. From the two-part Vanity Fair coverage of her deception:
Other terrible things seemed to befall Finch, some of which she chronicled for the world, some of which she talked about in select company. Against all medical odds due to her cancer treatments, she became pregnant. She faced the awful dilemma of aborting the fetus or dying if she wanted to carry it, because she’d have to cease treatment; she chose to have an abortion. There was the kidney transplant she needed, due to something cancer-related. A dear friend was killed in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, where Finch went to college, and she helped to clean the friend’s remains off the floor—the FBI allowed it. Her brother, Finch was realizing in midlife, had abused her many years ago. Then, he took his own life. Well, not quite. He was so vindictive that he was intentionally unsuccessful, and Finchie was the one who had to pull the plug. She was the Job of the Disney lot.
Finch also joined the #MeToo movement, stating publicly that she had been abused by a male director on the set of another show she wrote for, Vampire Diaries. It wasn’t necessarily unusual for her horror stories to be uniquely gendered, like these reported on in The Ankler:
She always had some tragedy or bizarre hardship going on in her life,” remembers one colleague. “Things that don’t happen to other people happen to her all the time.” There was the time a Gulf War veteran had stalked her for months, slashing her tires and leaving a knife slammed in the front door of her apartment. Another time, she arrived at the office visibly upset. She’d been the victim of a road rage incident, she said, and after the male assailant caught up with her at a red light he exposed his genitalia and masturbated in front of her.
Finch capitalized on this apparent history of tragedy not just for sympathy, as do some women who manufacture a series of chaotic and distressing personal circumstances, but for professional gain. On Grey’s, she used her diagnosis to claim authority and veto power over cancer storylines (some colleagues described it as “weaponizing” her illness), and arguably keep her job on the basis of compassion when the writer’s room was being downsized. Although the wide ranging coverage of Finch after the fact reports that a few people had suspicions or tried to confront her about the lie, the grift only ended when Finch’s now-estranged wife, a registered nurse, contacted Shonda Rhimes directly to tell her Finch was misrepresenting herself. (As the Vanity Fair coverage points out, Rhimes got this news in the thick of launching Inventing Anna, her Netflix project about scammer Anna Delvey.)
Finch is distinct among her peers not only because of her expansive approach to a previously established grift, refusing to choose between money, brand, and interpersonal sympathy as the currency she was after, but because in the aftermath, she’s given an explanation for it — a full-length interview with The Ankler, her own idea, after everything had been revealed.
Generally, the playbook for having a lie like this exposed calls for the liar to either double down aggressively, á la Rachel Dolezal, or to disappear from public life entirely. (Upon being exposed by a reporter, Tania Head went underground, surfacing briefly only once to make an attempt at purporting that she had died by suicide.) Finch, on the other hand, is a rare disgraced grifter who has media training by dint of her profession. She’s chosen to talk pretty openly about her decisionmaking process, giving us a rare window onto at least one version of an explanation for why someone would do something like this.
Here is Elisabeth Finch’s explanation for her grift, as paraphrased from Rolling Stone, which paraphrased from The Ankler:
“I know it’s absolutely wrong what I did… I lied and there’s no excuse for it. But there’s context for it. The best way I can explain it is when you experience a level of trauma a lot of people adopt a maladaptive coping mechanism. Some people drink to hide or forget things. Drug addicts try to alter their reality. Some people cut. I lied. That was my coping and my way to feel safe and seen and heard.”
”Everyone was so amazing and so wonderful leading up to all the surgeries… They were so supportive. And then I got my knee replacement. It was one hell of a recovery period and then it was dead quiet because everyone naturally was like Yay! You’re healed. But it was dead quiet. And I had no support and went back to my old maladaptive coping mechanism — I lied and made something up because I needed support and attention and that’s the way I went after it. That’s where that lie started — in that silence.”
This is a pretty rich piece of rhetoric on its own, and not entirely surprising — in the broad catalog of white women apologies, this features several classic elements, like the invocation of trauma and pop psych language, and the gesture at the need to feel “safe” or “heard.” (Also maybe most notably, the move to state that there’s “no excuse for it” and then… immediately offer an excuse.)
The second part of the statement, though, felt familiar to me in a different way. I puzzled on it for a few weeks, wondering what it reminded me of, before realizing it was this excellent piece in Lux Magazine about Mumsnet and how it became a radicalization engine into TERFdom. (The article is subscriber-only, but I do very much recommend a Lux subscription.)
The more I learned about Mumsnet, the more the forum reminded me of my past reporting on the ways men are radicalized by the toxic online “manosphere,” where pick-up artists (PUAs) and men’s rights activists (MRAs) recruit followers by exploiting real fears (such as economic anxiety) and blaming marginalized outgroups (women, people of color, Jews) for societal failures. As people get drawn into these communities, they become obsessed with a misguided sense of victimization and start to focus single-mindedly on their newfound worldview.
It seemed to me that was exactly what was happening on Mumsnet: some of these newly “gender critical” Mumsnetters were relatively privileged women who had never felt marginalized until they gave birth and came to feel isolated in their nuclear households and (rightfully!) outraged at the lack of support for mothers in the U.K. They turned to Mumsnet for solidarity, and somehow became fixated on trans women in the process.
What’s the connection between British TERFs and a disgraced gay Shondaland writer who faked bone cancer? There are a few, actually. First, it would be a mistake, I think, not to recognize TERF ideology as itself an intentional con: this piece from Jules Gill-Peterson is a useful case study on the intentional misrepresentations that form its underpinnings, and I think the ongoing debacle of Jamie Reed’s documented falsehoods designed to undercut one of the few operational resources for trans youth in the country is more recently illustrative.
A second point of overlap is, as Katie Baker explores in Lux, a more abstract one: there’s genuine social problem as a taproot, which then goes completely off the rails to become, as Baker puts it, “a misguided sense of victimization.” As Baker points up, MRAs and Mumsnet TERFs are drawn into the pipeline as they get wise to real oppression, even if a very rudimentary understanding of it — but for various reasons that are largely tied to a disinterest in confronting their own complicity in the systems that are harming them, they decline to engage with the real cause of the problem, and thus its real solutions.
Elisabeth Finch’s stated impetus for building an entire life on a cruel lie was that she was deeply hurt by a dropoff in support and care after healing from a significant surgery (and had sustained serious developmental trauma earlier in life from alleged abuse by her brother). “It was one hell of a recovery period and then it was dead quiet because everyone naturally was like Yay! You’re healed. But it was dead quiet. And I had no support… I lied and made something up because I needed support and attention.”
This is, on its face, seems a pretty feeble explanation, probably especially to the people Finch hurt directly. A critical reader might note that while serious, Finch’s surgery (a knee replacement) wasn’t life-threatening, and that she did have a level of support and care prior to feeling that it became insufficient, something many of us never get at any point.
However, many of us have also had experiences like this, often more grave than Finch’s. We experience a major trauma — a life-threatening illness, the loss of a loved one, a disabling event, the onset of a chronic illness — and discover that most of the people in our lives don’t have the staying power to continue providing the level of engagement, support, and material help that we need over the long term. The same people who dropped off meals, drove you to appointments, or offered to take care of household chores for you when you first got a diagnosis aren’t necessarily still there months or years later, when you’re even more worn down and exhausted, have had to go part-time at your job because of your symptoms and can’t even really afford your care even with insurance but also can’t work enough to cover it, and are having a breakdown in a Lyft because you need to get blood drawn every two weeks and this time it took the phlebotomist twelve tries to find a vein and you don’t even have a ride home.
It isn’t even our community’s fault, this failure. The terrible catch-22 of life in the last days of the empire is that all of us need more support than the people in our life can provide, even with coordinated community care. Especially since the pandemic and rise of fascism in the US, and as each of us incur more and more cumulative harm, we each require more support while simultaneously becoming less capable of offering it to others. A deeply imbalanced economy of care wobbles farther and farther off its axis each day. As much as we want to provide for each other, mutual aid isn’t a feasible solution to institutional breakdown; you can’t budget your way out of poverty.
Like the Mumsnet transmisogynists and the self-identified incels, Finch stumbled into the sights of a real problem — our social institutions have completely abandoned us, our communities are overburdened and under-resourced, we all need more support and attention, and none of us can reasonably expect to get it. Also like the Mums and the incels, Finch has managed to do the right math on this (sort of) but manipulate it to get the wrong answer. Rather than looking to the source of the problem, she’s determined to get hers at any cost — mostly cost to others.
Which brings us to one of the other major shared themes here: Finch is, meaningfully, a white woman, and the phenomenon Baker is identifying is also based in whiteness. (This isn’t to say that MRAs or TERFs are only and can only be white people; regardless of the presence of individual people of color, it doesn’t change that these movements and others like them are both ideologically and materially tied to white supremacy.)
People face incalculable oppression and harm every day, both individually and collectively; they don’t always decide to build a palace of interwoven lies to live in for the rest of their days at the expense of everyone else around them. But whiteness is predicated on extreme individualism, and paradoxical to the actual historical record of events, teaches that anyone else’s gain is your loss, even in the realm of human rights. There are long-established social movements that work to get everyone better access to the “support and attention” that Finch wanted, just as the resources that would actually help ameliorate the problems of the incels and TERFs are being actively fought for, usually by the same people they virulently hate. But Finch and others like her aren’t capable of or willing to do the challenging, fulfilling collaborative work that those movements call for: instead they lean on the workaround, the lie.
White women like Finch (and me) have been historically shut out of official halls of power in the US, but have had indirect access to those channels through their interpersonal relationships and social currency. In this context, lying, exaggerating, or claiming falsified harm in order to get our needs (as we perceive them) met is a well-established cultural practice. The video footage of Amy Cooper calling the police from Central Park to say she was being threatened, in obvious contradiction to the scene being recorded, comes to mind. I think many white women who engage in this practice in less extreme ways than Finch or Cooper would say the same thing Finch does: that it was necessary to get her needs met, and therefore defensible. Cooper said on Bari Weiss’s podcast that "I don't know that as a woman alone in a park that I had another option” but to call police.
In the Ankler piece wherein Finch tells her story and makes her bid for empathy, she shares that she’s hoping some kind of redemption is possible for her — on a human level, probably, but more importantly a professional one, and that she wants to be able to return to a writer’s room at some point. The interviewer asks what show she sees herself writing for, and Finch chooses Handmaid’s Tale:
“I've struggled with that show a lot and I love what they're doing in the world of redemption and what redemption looks like. And what accountability looks like. It's taken a lot of hits because people have wanted certain survivors, characters who are survivors, to act a specific way. They want them to be less angry or less this or less that, and characters are reacting in all different types of ways to pain and to suffering.”
It’s all almost unbearably on the nose, right up to the optimism about somehow failing up into prestige television after a high-profile wrongdoing, and the insistence on a gendered read as a traumatized woman specifically. Maybe most striking, though, is Finch’s misapprehension of why Handmaid’s Tale has “taken hits.” Its tunnel vision focus on white women’s pain, centered at the expense of harm to people of color, has been consistently criticized both within the show’s plot and baked into the original franchise. Its premise is entirely predicated on imagining what it would look like if the present-day violence done to Black, brown and Indigenous people were hypothetically inflicted on white women in a future dystopia, as many critics of color have spelled out.
The problem with Elisabeth Finch’s dream redemption narrative, as everyone but her can see, is that it uses the suffering of real people as the basis of a fiction that centers white women — white women who, as Sesali Brown puts it, “get to move effortlessly between the perfect victim and a martyr” while everyone else is left to deal with their pain on their own.