“It never occurred to me to not believe her,” Capshaw said of Elisabeth R. Finch, while Luddington shared a shocking story about the former Grey’s writer.
Grey’s Anatomy stars Jessica Capshaw and Camilla Luddington are sharing their thoughts on Elisabeth R. Finch, one of the show’s former writers who infamously lied about having cancer.
On Sunday’s episode of their iHeartRadio podcast, Call It What It Is podcast, titled “Call It Liars,” Capshaw and Luddington weighed in on Finch’s controversy following the recent Peacock three-part documentary, Anatomy of Lies. The doc chronicles Finch’s “jaw-dropping web of lies,” and how she lied about her personal and medical history, including a faked battle with chondrosarcoma, a rare bone cancer, for nearly 10 years.
Finch was a writer for Grey’s from 2015 until she resigned in 2022 after she was put on leave by ABC’s parent company, Disney. Her fake battle with cancer was even incorporated into the long-running medical drama at one point.
Capshaw — who starred as Dr. Arizona Robbins in the series — said she was shocked when she learned about Finch’s lies, admitting that she “believed” the writer.
“It never occurred to me to not believe her,” she said. “The things that she lied about, you could never in a million years imagine questioning.”
“It’s so hard to explain,” continued Capshaw, who exited Grey’s in 2018, but made a guest appearance in 2020. “Of course, I was surprised that she wasn’t who she really said she was, and she was not reporting any experiences that were actually hers, but I wasn’t surprised that someone could do that. And I sort of just felt like, ‘Oh, like, well, she was really good at that, because I believed her.'”
“But again, I was not sitting in the seat of the woman who she married and represented a completely different life to,” she said. “That feels like a movie.”
Luddington — who plays Dr. Josephine “Jo” Wilson on Grey’s Anatomy — admitted that she doesn’t want to speak about her “experience on set with this person,” noting that it’s “hard” for her. However, she did share a “piece of information” that she claims “nobody knows” and is “not in the documentary.”
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“What I really hate, again, about this is it makes you go back and sort of question all the different things,” Luddington told her former costar. “And this person. I remember going to Hawaii for the first time, and I was so excited that I could afford going to Hawaii. I was never able to afford something so tropical and glamorous. And I told everybody that I was going to Kauai, and I was really excited. And I was going with my boyfriend who’s now my husband, obviously.”
“I think it was about three days into that trip and [Finch] was sat at the bar in the hotel,” she continued. “The hotel where I was in Kauai, sat in the bar, three days into my trip. Yeah, she was with somebody else, and I just remember thinking it was the most random coincidence.”
When Capshaw asked Luddington if she recalls telling Finch which hotel she was staying at during her vacation, the latter said, “I’m sure I would have told her.”
“Is there a world in which she just happened to be on vacation at the same time as me at that hotel in Kauai? Sure. There’s definitely a world where that happens. People run into each other. It’s crazy,” she continued, to which Capshaw expressed her skepticism.
“I don’t know,” she said, to which Luddington replied, “I don’t like the now questioning of that, going back and reevaluating all those things.”
“Did she check in as Jo Wilson?” Capshaw joked.
“That’s not even funny,” Luddington said.
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Capshaw said that she saw Finch “all the time” on set. “I completely believed everything she said,” she admitted. “There was never a moment of suspicion. I never thought, ‘That’s funny that she said that like that.’ Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
She then recalled their apparent last conversation before she exited Grey’s in 2018.
“When I left, I remember she came and found me and we ended up having a really, really long conversation outside my trailer because she was so sad that I was leaving and wanted to talk about it,” Capshaw said. “Maybe she wasn’t sad at all.”
Finch issued a statement to The Ankler in December 2022, in which she confessed to her lies. In addition to faking having bone cancer, she also previously claimed to colleagues in 2019 that her brother had died by suicide. Finch revealed to The Ankler that her brother was still alive and living in Florida.
As to why she continued to create fabrications, Finch told the outlet at the time, “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.”
After Anatomy of Lies was released on Peacock earlier this month, Finch released a statement.
“The truth is, there is no excuse, no justification — nothing will ever make my lies to anyone okay,” she said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “Nothing erases the trauma I caused — the fear, the pain, the anger, the tears, the time. And nothing matters more to me than holding myself accountable in every way. I will continue to repair whatever damage I can and ensure I am not the worst things I’ve done. I recognize all of this will take time for people to believe. I will work and wait as long as it takes.”
