When “deceased” mobster Julian Jerome returned to Port Charles in 2013, he did so with a new name (Derek Wells) and a new face (the handsome one belonging to William deVry). The one thing that wasn’t different about him: the chemistry he had with Alexis Davis, with whom he’d unknowingly had a daughter, Sam McCall.
Julian probably cost himself a Father of the Year mug by kinda-sorta threatening to withhold desperately-needed bone marrow from grandson Danny in order to save his own hide. So disgusted were Sam and half brother Lucas Jones that they cut him out of their lives. Alexis tried to as well, but…
Alexis had even more trouble resisting Julian than she did a bottle of wine. She knew that he’d be just another in her long list of sketchy lovers, and yet… Well, you can see what “and yet… ” was. They couldn’t keep their hands (or their lips or their anything elses!) off each other.
On New Year’s Eve 2015, Julian was as determined to make Alexis jealous as Olivia Falconeri was to make Ned Ashton see green. And by God, the two of ’em certainly went the distance, partaking in an ill-advised one-night stand that resulted in the birth of baby Leo.
Alexis managed to tune out all of the naysayers in her life — and they were legion — long enough to exchange vows with Julian. And right on cue, the naysayers were proven right when everyone at the reception was taken hostage by an enemy of the groom’s sister, Ava.
In order to protect Ava, Julian did the last thing that he wanted to: He rejoined the Mob. Even worse, as the puppet of back-from-the-dead sister Olivia, he was forced to hold a knife to Alexis’ throat, a moment that ever since has haunted both the couple and their fans.
Gas in the car? Good. Booze in the driver? No bueno. But it was that deadly combination that led to the incident in which Alexis accidentally turned Julian into a well-muscled speed bump.
The crime spree that Julian undertook under duress landed him behind bars for what was supposed to be 25 years. Thanks to Llanview attorney Nora Buchanan and a letter from Olivia (his sister, not his babymama), though, his sentence was reduced to… how long was he in there? Twenty-five days? Twenty-five minutes? In any case, it wasn’t even long enough to develop a taste for bread and water.
Once a free man again, Julian rebranded himself as a mild-mannered barkeep and embarked on a new romance with Dr. Kim Nero. Unfortunately, her lingering feelings for babydaddy Drew Cain meant that her relationship with Julian was destined to expire even more quickly than her terminally-ill son, Oscar.
If ever there was a good news/bad news scenario, it was Julian’s hard-won bond with Lucas. Pop was so eager to keep his son from learning the truth about “his” baby Wiley that he tried to permanently shut the blabbermouth of Lucas’ husband, Brad Cooper — inadvertently almost killing Lucas in the process!
Julian might have thought that he was tough, a master manipulator. But that was before he was blackmailed into marriage by Nelle Benson, who ironically needed an insta-husband in order to improve her chances of winning custody of — wait for it — Wiley, who was actually her son with Michael Quartermaine.
Following the untimely demise of Alexis’ boyfriend Neil Byrne, she dove into the bottle with the gusto of a gold medalist in drinking. When Julian attempted to intervene, it… uh… it didn’t go well. Meanwhile, he was being pressured by new baddie Cyrus Renault to begin a new life of crime.
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