Here’s What You Need To Know About Douglas ‘Dougie’ LeClaire On Days of our Lives

Julie met her husband’s namesake on the December 4 episode of Days of our Lives. Well, it’s the name Doug Williams III changed it to. He offered Julie a little backstory and filled the audience in on what they needed to know about Doug’s father and grandfathers. But here at Soap Hub, we think there’s a lot more you need to know. So here we go.

Sibling Struggle

Doug (Bill Hayes) was a single dad to little Hope (not yet Kristian Alfonso). But Doug didn’t want Hope to be an only child. So, he hired an anonymous surrogate to have a baby for him as one does. The anonymous surrogate was his housekeeper, Rebecca (Brooke Bundy). She lied to Doug and said the baby was her boyfriend, Johnny’s. (Guess she was pulling a Moses’ mother deal and planning to be her own child’s wet nurse. Or something.)

Johnny, however, wasn’t down with Rebecca’s plans and dumped her. So Rebecca’s friend, Robert (Robert Clary), stepped up to marry her and give the child a name. Rebecca agreed. (How did she plan to tell him she was giving the baby away? We have no idea.)

But then Doug reconciled with Julie (Susan Seaforth Hayes)—we’ve lost count of which time—and since they were planning to have children of their own, Doug decided he no longer needed his unborn surrogate baby. So he cut her loose, still anonymously. (Which was kind of rotten of him. Most surrogates take up the position because they need the money to take care of the children they already have. The last thing they need is another mouth to feed.)

MORE: Here’s what you need to know about Doug Williams III.

Name Sake

When Rebecca gave birth to her son, Robert named him after his best friend—Doug (what a coincidence!). But then Johnny snapped his fingers, and Rebecca ran off to Japan, little Dougie in tow. Alas, Rebecca died soon after. (We suspect Johnny was involved.) Robert went to pick up his son and took him to Paris to live, where he also renamed him Charles after the truth came out about Doug’s paternity.

Tragic Past

In the late 1980s, Robert returned to Salem, where it was revealed that he and his brother had been imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust, a fact he never once mentioned, even to his closest friends. Friends so close, they either never noticed or thought to inquire about the number tattooed on his arm. (This was Clary’s real-life number, as he’d been imprisoned by the Nazis as a teenager.)

Under the circumstances, Doug III is being awfully casual about having served prison time. His grandfather—not the jailbird one—must be so traumatized. But you know young people.