The Dark Side Of Grey's

The toxic work culture and bullying on the set of the hit drama is being exposed in a book

- Kylie Walters

With 18 seasons of heartbreaking moments, there isn’t much the medical staff at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital haven’t seen, including a shooting, a plane crash, and a patient with a bomb inside them. But now a new book by Lynette Rice, How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy, reveals the on-screen scandals of the hit drama pale in comparison to the real-life theatrics that took place once the cameras were switched off.

Since their initial boozy encounter in a bar during the first episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the chemistry between Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Derrick Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) lit the screen on fire. While fans mourned when the brain surgeon was killed off in a car crash in 2015, many of the cast and crew were reportedly breathing a sigh of relief that Dempsey, 55, wouldn’t be returning.

“There were HR issues. It wasn’t sexual in any way,” the program’s executive producer James D Parriott said in an extract of the book, which ran in The Hollywood Reporter. “[Dempsey] sort of was terrorising the set. Some cast members had all sorts of PTSD with him. He had this hold on the set where he knew he could stop production and scare people,” he explained.