In his efforts to cover up the first of his lies at No. 1, Young & Restless’ Adam Newman (then Michael Muhney) framed a maid who just happened to be the aunt of his attorney, Rafe Torres. When the lawyer did what any good nephew would and started poking around, Adam threw him off track by claiming that he had feelings for the gullible do-gooder. He then went to, ahem, extremes to impress upon Rafe how strong those feelings were.
Bold & Beautiful queen bee Stephanie Forrester never had a problem fibbing. (Wait till you get to No. 5.) But she really hadn’t meant to spend decades promulgating a whopper by letting husband Eric believe that he was son Ridge’s father — she thought he was until old flame Massimo Marone reentered her life in the 2000s and a freak accident led to their discovery that the dressmaker should’ve had a greater genetic predisposition for shipping than designing.
Days of Our Lives’ Paulina Price meant well, really she did, when she gave away daughter Lani to sister Tamara to raise. That was the only way that Paulina reckoned she could keep her “niece” safe from abusive boyfriend TR Coates. But when Lani discovered in 2021 that she’d sent years’ worth of Mother’s Day cards to the wrong person… erm… let’s just say that it took a minute before she let Paulina take a load off anywhere but in the hot seat.
In 1987, As the World Turns teen Lily Walsh was hit with a double whammy: Not only did she learn that Lucinda had misled her for her entire life and wasn’t her biological mother, her actual biological mother was the sister of her crush, Holden Snyder. But there was, thankfully, a silver lining to the twisting of the branches of this particular family tree: Holden turned out to have been adopted, too!
For years, Young & Restless’ Drucilla Winters and brother-in-law Malcolm didn’t know whether their one-Nyquil-stand had resulted in the birth of her daughter, Lily. But then, when they finally found out in 2005 that he, not sibling Neil, was the dad, they decided to spare his feelings by keeping up the charade that before they’d only suspected was one. That is, they kept it up for as long as they could, at least.
After faking his demise in the late 1980s, Young & Restless’ Phillip Chancellor got to feeling bad about the grief through which he’d put his family. So nearly two decades later, he sent Cane Ashby to Genoa City to pretend to be him. When the lie was finally exposed in 2009, despite the “new” Phillip coming equipped with a sexy Australian accent, the “old” Phillip was read the riot act by the loved ones who couldn’t believe that he would’ve preferred to play dead than come out to them.
Bold & Beautiful matriarch Stephanie always felt that the truth was like other people to her will: meant to be bent. So after decades of letting husband Eric believe that their microcephalic daughter Angela had been stillborn (thus allowing an imposter to eventually infiltrate their midst), she pulled the same stunt with daughter Felicia, allowing the whole family to think that she’d succumbed to cancer when really, Mommie Dearest was forcing her to undergo chemotherapy.
No one ever mistook Young & Restless’ Locke Ness Monster for a saint. (The devil’s horns and pitchfork were heckuva giveaway, after all.) Still, it came as the shock of all shocks — especially to bride Victoria Newman — when it was revealed in 2022 that the cancer that had so sped up the timeline of their relationship had been… a total lie. If Ashland had been sick at all, it was only in the head!
There are lies, and then there are — shudder — lies. This one falls into the — shudder — latter category. Back before he had his murderous brain tumor removed, General Hospital psycho Franco Baldwin went to great lengths in 2010 to sell the absolute falsehood that he had raped Sam McCall and might be the father of her and Jason Morgan’s baby-to-be. Franco hadn’t and wasn’t, but that didn’t in any way lessen the hell through which he put the expectant parents.
More than two decades — or the time it would take for a Days of Our Lives kid to be SORAS’d all the way into the AARP! — is how long Tony DiMera spent on a deserted island. And all those years, galavanting around Salem and wreaking homicidal havoc was his lookalike, André, whose nose should’ve grown so much, he would’ve poked out somebody’s eye if he’d turned his head too quickly!
In 2009, Young & Restless’ Adam Newman learned that lies are like potato chips — you can’t have just one. So after causing sometime stepmother Ashley Abbott to miscarry, then ensuring that she continued to believe she was pregnant, he produced a real, live, card-carrying newborn for her. How? By lying to future wife Sharon Newman that baby Faith had died and giving that infant to Ashley!
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