...and it belonged to someone else, naturally!

There's an old fable about a young poor boy that grew up in a dusty village in the middle of nowhere and wanted nothing more than a sturdy horse so that he could ride out to the well and fetch water for his family. On his fourteenth birthday the young boy was surprised with a beautiful Appaloosa horse. Now everybody in the village said, "How wonderful, the boy got a horse!" But the Zen master of the village responded with sage intent, "We'll see." Two years later the same young boy fell off the same horse and broke his leg, causing the villagers to sadly exclaim, "How terrible." But the Zen master replied, "We'll see." Soon after, a war broke out not far from the village and all the young men had to go off and fight - except the young boy couldn't because his leg was all messed up, and everyone in the village cried, "How wonderful!" And then the Zen master responded, "We'll see."

When it comes to Victor Newman, we're still waiting to see...

The legend of Victor Newman reads like something out of the Brothers Grimm: Desperately poor family places hapless child in an especially-dreary orphanage run by witches (or an especially dour order of nuns) in his native, well, actually, we don't know where he's from, do we?

Could it be Transylvania, birthplace of Dracula? Certainly, there's no shortage of people of the mind that he and the Prince of the Undead share enough personal traits such as "bloodsucking, preying on the innocent and an evasiveness that borders on pathological" to be BFFs. In addition, for some reason, women adore him. We're not talking soccer moms here, people - His Majesty would never deign to cast his gaze toward the kind of woman who raises non-neurotic children and shows up for school plays and soccer games, when she's not working at a 9-5 job that would test the patience of Job.

No, Victor prefers them young, nubile and impressionable - that way they'll keep coming back year after year, long after they should have come to their senses, and grown weary of his shtick and of themselves under its spell. The same way his women dispense with judgement, Victor dispenses with boundaries and discretion; Wife Number Six, Sabrina Costelana, entered his orbit as daughter Victoria's closest confidante. Needless to say, his daughter's relationship with Costelana soon turned frosty as Victor's attentions toward her friend turned steamier. Tragically, Costelana died last fall in a car accident. Some wags suggested at the time that she owes the foggy night, and the thugs who sabotaged the car she was riding in bigtime for facilitating her escape from Newman's clutches.

Indeed, if they don't fall into the arms of the Grim Reaper, The Brides of Victor Newmanstein seem inexplicably drawn back to his arms (and bed) like moths to a blowtorch. Nikki Reed and Ashley Abbott, each a success in her own right, keep finding themselves in the arms of Victor (on separate occasions) only to find themselves in increasingly-perplexing situations at the hands of the man they "love." Paging Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Laura Schlessinger - whatever, somebody please help these women!

In the 19th Century, a former minister named Horatio Alger became entranced by the idea that no matter how desperate, a young boy - usually a bootblack or newsboy - armed with pluck, decency and energy could make something of himself. The resulting novels, each a variation on that theme, were immensely popular at the time and have become part of American lore continuing to this day. It forms the basis for the way Victor Newman regards himself and the way he demands he be regarded. His power is legend, his manhood unquestioned. We know this because we could conclude nothing else thanks to the endless dramatic entrances, the withering looks of contempt, the allegiance to no one but himself. "Hail Victor Newman!" his demeanor shouts. "I have triumphed over incalculable odds! I could crush each and every one of you under my boot like a worm. I am the American Dream!" Such grandeur! Such majesty!

Tracking Newman's past is like slipping down a rabbit hole where deception is virtue and vindictiveness is the air one breathes. He's ruined various corporations, left a trail of women lost and shattered in his wake, and once even caged a man and fed him rats. You only have to go back less than a year to find the tentacles of Mr. Newman involved in corporate espionage, not to mention sabotage. Though no official investigation is on the books, one hopes the SEC will take a close look at the demise of the Caribbean Bank of Corazal. A bank known only by the world's top billionaires collapsed just twenty-four hours after Mr. Newman pulled his holdings. In a deal gone sour that makes Bernie Madoff's misdeeds look like stealing another kid's lunch money, questions and reverberations abound regarding Newman's role in the current economic downturn - and they just keep coming.

But business is business, and nothing personal; any bile Newman can't expend on his business life is expended in his personal life. He pursues personal destruction as enthusiastically as corporate takeovers.

Most recently, he turned his sights on a promising art scholar named Colleen Carlton. Her crime? Assuming her late father, Brad Carlton's seat on Newman Enterprise's Board of Directors. Backstory: The senior Carlton was killed in a winter accident on Lake Elizabeth, leaving his entire family, including his daughter, reeling with grief. According to the bylaws of the Newman board, Carlton's seat goes to a member of his immediate family.

Newman, sensing in Ms. Carlton something other than the usual yes-men he prefers to pack the board with, took swift action by luring her into a regrettable transgression, which he recorded and posted on View-Click for viewing by anyone with a computer and an internet connection. The resulting scandal disqualified Carlton from the board. But disgracing his goddaughter (yes, you read that right) was only the opening salvo in the latest round of Newman's never-ending feud with the Abbott family.

Victor has always saved his best work for Jack Abbott (disclosure: Jack Abbott is my brother). In a plan distinguished not only by its genius but also by its depraved level of cruelty, Newman tracked down Jack's emotionally unstable ex-wife from twenty years past, arranged for plastic surgery which rendered her unrecognizable, filled her full of reconciliation fantasies with Jack Abbott and sent her back into a world she had retreated from long ago. Patty Williams was an innocent, precious woman, who just wanted to be wanted, who sat on the stairs with ribbons in her hair, wondering what to wear, waiting for someone to care. She was still waiting for Jack Abbott twenty years later when Victor Newman showed up, and sensing her vulnerability, gained her trust, armed her with a new face and romantic delusions and sent her after my brother, half-cocked and fully loaded.

The consequences would be life and death.

When happily-ever-after never materialized, jealousy and rage took over and Ms. Williams targeted the women in Newman and Abbott's lives. Her first target was Newman's latest hostage, my sister Ashley Abbott. Williams gaslit Ashley into believing she was seeing a dead woman. Traumatized by this assault on her sanity, Ashley is only now starting to recover. Williams then turned her attention on Newman's five-year-old granddaughter, the aptly-named Summer Newman. With the precision of a predator drone, Williams poisoned the little girl with a kiss of death. The result was severe brain damage leaving Summer with what may prove to be the permanent mental capacity of a three-year-old. The question demands asking: What kind of a human being would allow that to happen to any child, much less his own grandchild?

If God has a sense of irony, it's been on high-def display recently. After Williams' schemes were uncovered, her last screw came loose and in her attempt to escape the long arm of the law, she took Colleen Carlton hostage on the shores of the very lake which had claimed her father last winter. It was there that Jack managed to pull a barely-breathing Colleen from the lake, only to be prevented from administering CPR by Ms. Williams who was armed, loaded, cocked and well on her way to losing what little was left of her always-tenuous grip on reality.