Grey's Anatomy · Clue Awards · R. Kelly
What motivates an alleged fraudster like Elisabeth Finch?
the true crime that's worth your time
The Clue Awards have been, um, awarded. This is the new competition from CrimeCon, and is billed as the “first awards program dedicated entirely to true crime content.” This was its first year, so it probably still needs to prove itself before Sarah or I shorthand it as “The Oscars of true crime,” especially since the Oscars is now arguably a true-crime scene itself. The Tonys of true crime?
All the winners are on CrimeCon’s site; here’s the rundown:
TV docuseries: Fall River (insert snide remark from Sarah about Epix’s black hole of content here [“I actually liked that series, which nobody will ever find again” — SDB])
Episodic (as in, focuses on a variety of cases) TV series: Cold Justice
Episodic podcast: Stolen
Docuseries (as in, focuses on one case throughout) podcast: Carrie Low Vs.
Documentary film: Escaping Captivity: The Kara Robinson Story
Book of the year: The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer
Any surprises here? Any picks you want to beef with? If so, you know what to do…
Jim DeRogatis has been reporting on the allegations against R. Kelly since 2000. As folks who have followed the Kelly case know, “2000” is not a typo: though Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly has been credited with bringing the claims against the musician to light, DeRogatis and his colleague, Abdon Pallasch, have been sounding the alarm for over two decades.
In a new interview with the Guardian, the Chicago Sun-Times music critic talks about being the music business’s Cassandra, doomed to tell the truth for years but not to be believed.
When DeRogatis and Pallasch published their first report into Kelly in December 2000, they assumed the reaction would be so strong that the story would be over, he says. Instead, their investigation – which revealed that Kelly exploited his fame to have sex with a 15-year-old girl – was largely ignored by the national press, and condemned by Chicago’s three biggest Black radio stations, who viewed Pallasch and DeRogatis, both white men, as “trying to tear down a successful Black man”, says DeRogatis.
…
“Where was Rolling Stone?” says DeRogatis, almost spitting the words in anger. “Where was the Chicago Tribune? Where were the organisations much bigger and better staffed than the Chicago Sun-Times? And the police? Every system in Chicago, schools, journalism, churches, certainly the judicial system with that travesty of a 2008 trial, everybody failed these young Black girls. And, you know, that is the most frequent comment I heard in two and a half decades of reporting. Nobody cares about young Black girls. Nobody is going to believe us.”
DeRogatis and Pallasch shared 33 bylines on Kelly between 2000 and 2008, and most of these stories were met with indifference. During this period, Kelly’s career flourished. What made DeRogatis keep pushing ahead with the story? “I’m from Jersey,” he says. “You know, I’ve got a thick head, I’m stubborn … It’s this thing I have: no matter how shitty the movie, I have to see how it ends.”
DeRogatis’s interview appears to be promotion for his appearance in R Kelly: A Faking It Special, which dropped this week on Discovery+. That’s the series where “experts” (ymmv) look at footage of alleged criminals and point out supposed tells that indicate their guilt. As a person who is both skeptical of body language as a science and unwilling to add Discovery+ to my streaming habit, I am unlikely to watch his appearance on the special, but his lengthy interview with Sirin Kale more than does the trick. — EB
Why are we talking about anything besides Elisabeth Finch this week? If the Supreme Court had not given me enough to resent them recently, the shadow they cast over Vanity Fair’s bombshell two-parter on the TRULY INSANE (and I do not use the language of mental illness lightly) claims against Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch might be the final straw. Any other week, this story would basically own Twitter, but not this week. Dammit. (Sits and fumes for about 10 min.)
OK, moving on.
Longtime VF contributing editor and notable screenwriter Evgenia Peretz has the yarn, a twisty tale of jaw-dropping lies of the most manipulative and craven sort. The wildest thing, in my opinion, is how brazen Finch’s alleged deceptions (including false claims of cancer, saying she “cleaned up” a slain friend’s remains at a mass shooting, and a wild pattern of falsehoods about alleged abuse at her brother’s hands) were, poorly established lies intended to…I am not sure? Here’s a snip from part one:
Everyone in Finchie’s world, as they called her, believed she was that miracle. Not only was chondrosarcoma unheard of in someone her age, but she was, incredibly, living with it, since 2012. In fact, she was the only one in her clinical trial who survived. She showed up so bravely to the Grey’s Anatomy writers room, a scarf over her bald head. And she so inspired everyone around her that they did whatever they could to support. Her bosses gave her all the time off she needed to participate in her maintenance chemo and clinical trials at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Friends there drove her to and from appointments. When cancer story lines came up on the show, Finch led the way—she was the expert. And she even chronicled her experience with chondrosarcoma on the side—in Elle and The Hollywood Reporter, and on Shondaland.com, to promote her episodes. She wasn’t one to draw attention to herself, no. Cancer, alas, had become her brand.
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 child 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.
Saying she “lied to get attention” is the sort of thing we say about a tween or teen, not a successful, high-functioning adult person. There has to be more to this, right? That is, perhaps, the one drawback of Peretz’s remarkably engrossing report. While many folks who were taken in by Finch’s alleged deceptions speak on the record, Finch (perhaps understandably, as presumably she’s negotiating various professional and personal separations in the wake of the scandal) remains an enigma.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read parts one and two if you haven’t already, then to report back here with your theories on why Finch would commit such an astounding series of frauds. And, if I may presume: Give yourself some time with this one,. There are so many details in each that are easy to miss if you’re just jamming through, and also, the story is so gobsmacking that it deserves to be savored. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: The Staircase takes, and Candy if we can (handle that wig)!
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