Anatomy Of Lies May Explain Alex Karev’s Exit On Grey’s Anatomy

A new Peacock docuseries unravels the tale of Elisabeth Finch, the infamous Grey’s Anatomy writer who lied about having cancer during her tenure on the show.

Before her deceit was uncovered, Finch wrote several memorable episodes of the long-running medical drama — including one of its most popular ever, Season 15’s “Silent All These Years,” where Jo met her birth mother and the women of the hospital delivered a powerful show of support to a patient in crisis.

But Finch also wrote one of the show’s most controversial entries, Season 16’s “Leave a Light On,” aka Alex Karev’s exit episode. Here, Alex revealed through letters to his loved ones that he’d left Seattle for a “farm in nowhere, Kansas” to raise the twins he never knew he had.

Alex abandoning Jo to raise a family with Izzie was a shocking twist that defied even the most out-there fan theories — but nearly five years later, Anatomy of Lies might offer an explanation as to how the bizarre storyline came to be.

Art Imitating Life?

In the second episode of the three-part docuseries (which dropped on Oct. 15), Anatomy of Lies draws the comparison between Alex’s sudden life change and Finch’s own. In 2019, Finch met a woman named Jenn Beyer — a nurse and mother of five — when they were both patients at a mental health treatment center.

The pair forged a romantic connection and soon married, with Finch moving to Kansas to be with Beyer and her children.

The similarities don’t stop there — according to the docuseries, Finch also allegedly went by the nickname “Jo” during her stay at the treatment center.

Finch’s Influence On Grey’s Anatomy

While Finch never publicly confirmed whether “Leave a Light On” was based on her life, she’d been open about applying her experience (real and otherwise) to Grey’s characters before.

Most notably, Finch was the writer behind Catherine Fox’s diagnosis with chondrosarcoma, a bone cancer, in Season 15. This was the same type of cancer Finch claimed she had — and she confirmed Catherine’s arc was, indeed, inspired by her own illness (or at least, her purported illness).

“I wrote in such a frenzy of fear and doubt, I didn’t recognize how much of me I wrote into the episode until I was on set, all of it staring me right in the face,” Finch once wrote in an essay for Elle — claiming that Catherine’s attitude toward her diagnosis and treatment was the “battle cry” she’d “held inside [herself] every damn day of chemotherapy.”

But Beyer ultimately caught on to Finch’s lies and alerted Rhimes. Then in late 2022, months after Vanity Fair published an exposé about Finch, the writer admitted that she’d never actually had chondrosarcoma. In fact: “I’ve never had any form of cancer,” she told The Ankler.

Finch resigned from Grey’s Anatomy that year, and for better or worse, her contributions remain.