Victor Newman Has Burned Every Person Who Ever Loved Him and They Always Come Back for More

THE GREAT VICTOR NEWMAN BURNS THEM ALL DOWN AND THEY STILL COME BACK

TL;DR: On The Young and the Restless, Victor Newman has spent over four decades systematically destroying the people who love him most, from his first wife Julia to Hope Adams to Ashley Abbott to Nikki Newman herself, and his children have paid an even steeper price. Yet somehow, every single one of them keeps crawling back. We’re mapping the full carnage.

It Started With a Cage. It Never Really Stopped.

There is no one in daytime television quite like Victor Newman.

Born Christian Miller, abandoned in an orphanage at seven years old, Victor Newman clawed his way to the top and renamed himself a victorious new man. And then, for the next four and a half decades on The Young and the Restless, he made absolutely sure that everyone who dared to love him understood what that cost.

His very first wife, Julia Newman, learned the hard way. Victor kept her isolated at the ranch while he built his empire, and when she found companionship with photographer Michael Scott, his response was to physically lock Michael in a cage on the Newman property.

A cage.

He was so consumed with jealousy and control that Julia miscarried during the chaos that followed. Blood tests eventually confirmed he was the father, but by then the damage was done and Julia was gone. That was 1980. The template was set, and it has never changed.

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The Women He Loved and Leveled

Nikki Newman is the great love story and the greatest cautionary tale of Victor’s life, all wrapped into one impossible woman.

The Great Victor Newman saw her stripping at the Bayou, decided he would shape her into something worthy of him, and the two of them have been in a cycle of passion and devastation ever since. He has contributed to her relapses, blackmailed her into remarrying him using stolen funds as leverage, and told her she disgusted him after she fell off the wagon.

Most recently he stood in the Newman Ranch orchestrating fake kidnappings while Nikki stood there, horrified, unable to stop him. Four marriages. Decades of forgiveness. He breaks her and she rebuilds around him every single time.

Ashley Abbott is perhaps the most quietly tragic chapter in Victor Newman’s romantic history.

He had an affair with her while married to Nikki. She got pregnant and had an abortion she spent years regretting, and that grief fractured them apart. Then Victor married her anyway, years later, and proceeded to spy on her laboratory, steal her formulas, wiretap her office, and pit her own Abbott siblings against each other in service of his endless war.

Ashley loved Victor Newman genuinely and paid for it with her professional dignity, her family relationships, and eventually a miscarriage she did not even know had happened because Adam gaslighted her into believing the baby survived. Victor did not cause that particular cruelty directly, but he absolutely created the environment that made it possible.

Hope Adams was the one who almost got away.

She was a blind Kansas farm owner, the most unlike-Victor woman imaginable, and for a brief window of time she brought out a tenderness in him that Genoa City rarely got to see. They fell in love and married. When Hope became pregnant, Victor pushed her to have an abortion because the baby might inherit her blindness.

She refused. She gave birth to their son, saw clearly who Victor was and what raising a child in his orbit would mean, and went back to Kansas. She asked him to stay out of their lives, married another man, and raised their son believing Cliff Wilson was his father for years.

Hope understood something everyone else in Victor’s life has never quite managed to accept: the only safe distance from Victor Newman is a very long one.

Sabrina Newman never got to see the destruction coming.

She was a friend of Victoria’s, young and genuine, and Victor loved her in a way that surprised even him. Their marriage was short. She was killed in a car accident orchestrated by a mobster seeking revenge against Victor, which means Sabrina died specifically because she had the misfortune of loving a man too dangerous to love.

Victor spiraled into a grief so consuming he faked his own death, burned down the chateau he had built for her, and nearly did not come back. She was collateral damage in a war she never signed up for.

The Children He Uses As Weapons

Victoria Newman has been her father’s most loyal soldier and his most abused pawn for her entire adult life.

Victor had Billy arrested on their wedding day to stop the marriage. When the resulting chaos caused Victoria to lose a pregnancy, he treated it as an acceptable price. He has demoted her, cut her out of plans he shared with Adam instead, and used her children as leverage more times than any person should reasonably endure.

She is currently locked out of Newman Enterprises due to his own AI scheme unraveling around him. She is still fighting to get his company back for him.

Nick Newman has disowned his father multiple times and keeps coming back anyway. Victor has hidden paternity secrets about Nick’s own children, covered up crimes that directly affected his family, and handled threats in his signature unilateral fashion without a word of warning to anyone. Right now Nick is recovering from injuries connected to the Matt Clark situation, a mess entirely of Victor’s making. His response was to thank him for it.

Then there is Adam Newman, and the Victor and Adam dynamic is the darkest, most prolonged study in what this man does to the people who want his love most desperately.

Victor showed up at Hope’s bedside as she was dying and learned the son she called Vic Wilson was actually his. Adam came to Genoa City carrying a lifetime of abandonment and a furious hunger for the father who never came for him. Victor has spent every year since alternating between dangling approval and snatching it away, framing Adam, bailing him out, publicly disowning him, and blackmailing him using his own son Connor’s paternity.

Adam still wants his father’s approval. Victor still knows exactly how much that costs him. That is the entire machine right there.

Abby Newman grew up believing she belonged to Brad Carlton, only to discover her real father was Victor Newman. Ashley had secretly used Victor’s stolen sperm to conceive her after he had a vasectomy without telling anyone. Abby eventually took the Newman name and considers Victor her father despite the circumstances of her very existence.

The man does not even need to be present in a relationship to cause lasting damage.

The Pull That Never Breaks

What Victor Newman understands, and what everyone around him refuses to accept, is simple: love is leverage.

He does not manufacture loyalty through kindness. He manufactures it through need. His wives need his devotion. His children need his approval. And the man who was abandoned at seven years old and promised himself he would never need anyone built his entire life around making sure everyone needed him instead.

The current chapter, faking a kidnapping to force Cane Ashby back to the table and cornering the Abbotts over Chancellor, is simply the newest verse of the same song. You can read more about the ongoing chaos over at notmyfirstday.com.

Victor has been singing it since 1980. The names change. The mechanism never does.

So here is the question that keeps us up at night: of everyone Victor Newman has ever burned, who do you think had it the absolute worst? And who is most likely to finally walk away for good? Sound off below!

WATCH THIS: Does The Mustache deserve prison time?

@soapoperamag I love Victor… But even I can admit this has gone too far. How much lower will this man go before the law comes calling? It's high time to update that mugshot! #YoungandtheRestless ♬ original sound – Soap Opera Magazine