Days of Our Lives Wouldn’t… Would They? The Horrifying Identity of Paulina’s Blackmailer That Would Trigger Even the Most Diehard Fans

Please don’t be true!

None of us really thought that Paulina and Chanel’s troubles were over on Days of Our Lives after Alex snatched their mysterious file from Sloane, right? She hasn’t been on for that long, but it’s clear that Sloane’s as slippery as an eel and utterly unscrupulous. There’s no way she wouldn’t have scores of backup copies on-hand.

Someone, whether Paulina, Stephanie or even Alex, since he seems to best know what kind of a person Sloane is, should have known this wasn’t the end of things. But, we guess not, because according to spoilers, it looks like Sloane’s going to pull the trigger after the election because Chanel’s arrested the following day. And that seems… odd. Once the secret is out, the blackmail leverage is gone.

Whether or not Paulina wins the election, she’s made it clear that she wants to protect Chanel at all costs. Holding this secret over her seems a surefire way to break her down and get money out of her eventually.

But turning Chanel in when both she and Paulina seem certain that doing so would ruin her life? That’s just… vindictive. (It’s probably even more vicious since Chanel still hasn’t gotten around to coming clean to Allie. And if she thinks the threat is over, she likely won’t until after it’s too late.)

And that’s got us thinking again about who’s behind this whole scheme. And the more we learn how the story’s progressing, the more we keep coming back to one, horrifying name. Because in order for this story to have a payoff, it can’t be some random person we’ve never seen in Salem or heard of before doing the blackmail. It has to be someone with a connection to Paulina.

And despite the fact that we can easily imagine Paulina ticking off a great many folks in the business world in her rise to the top, there’s really only one enemy of hers that we know of: TR.

You Can’t Keep a Bad Villain Down?

No, you’re thinking. He’s dead!

Eh, so what?

Look, we’ve already got Charlie back talking to Ava. The jury’s still out whether it’s his actual ghost or a figment of her imagination. But Days of Our Lives does love bringing villains back from the dead — sometimes literally, other times a bit more… spiritually.

Either way, it is not a stretch to think they’d bring TR back, pissed at Paulina and wanting to get his payday out of her, but smart enough to know to lay low now that he’s “dead.” In between him losing it last time around, he did have moments of clarity where he tried to force himself to calm down and think things through.

With the chance of Eli ratting him out at any second and knowing taking Paulina for all her money and knocking her off was a pretty extreme plan, he might have been plotting an escape hatch for the worst case scenario. Like faking his own death.

But that wouldn’t mean someone as vindictive as him would be done with Paulina or her money. He’d just have to find another way to get to it so that even if his life and reputation were ruined — which was pretty much guaranteed the moment he shot Eli — he could still live comfortably in a new life.

It wouldn’t be the first time he “started over,” rebranding himself from Ray to TR.

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Doing this can both terrorize Paulina — something we know TR enjoys doing — and make some money out of her. Heck, maybe his plan the whole time was to throw Chanel under the bus, regardless of whether Paulina paid.

As for why Sloane would agree to work with him to begin with… Greed? Money seems to be about all she’s interested in. Blackmail isn’t exactly legal, so lawyer or not, she’s got a pretty loose association with the law.

Either way, it’s clear this story is far from over. And things are likely to get far, far worse before they get better.

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Check out our photo gallery of soapdom’s all-time best villains — maybe you’ll find someone else to be blackmailing Paulina!