Mulder Foxworth

  • Grew up in a middle-class family on the east coast. His father had a gambling problem, and Mulder always found his family in lack because his father constantly gambled away the family’s disposable income.  One bad night, Mulder’s father lost the family’s entire savings, Mulder’s college fund, and their house.  The mother took Mulder and left, but his father found them and begged his mother to take him back. An argument ensued, and the father was drunk. He strangled Mulder’s mother to death and was sentenced to 20 years for second degree murder. Mulder was sent to foster care.
  • While in foster care, Mulder is sexually abused by his foster parents, an upper middle class family that lived modestly but had political aspirations. One day a 12-year-old Mulder mustered up enough courage to go to authorities about what happened, but his foster mother – who was right in the middle of a campaign for City Council – stopped him before he could go and pleaded with him to remain silent, and promised him anything he wanted in exchange for his silence. It was then that Mulder learned the power of secrets. He spent the rest of his teenage years blackmailing his foster family to get his way.
  • While attending Notre DameUniversity, Mulder finds himself struggling in a very vital class for his Journalism degree, but hears a rumor of a faculty member having an affair with a player on the football team. He utilizes some of the investigative skills he picked up in class, and finds out the truth: not only is his teacher sleeping with multiple members of the football team, but she was also giving them undeserved passing grades so they could remain academically eligible to play. Of course, Mulder uses this to his advantage: in exchange for not publishing his findings in the student newspaper where he works part-time, he gets all of the same “perks” from the teacher as the football players got. The scandal eventually became public anyway.
  • Mulder grows disenchanted with journalism and changes majors to marketing when he meets a wealthy marketing executive. The executive is living the kind of life that Mulder was denied growing up, and it attracts him.
  • He interns in the marketing department at a small biotech company, and is a roommate with Ithaca Davidson, who works in the research department. The two are mildly antagonistic towards each other, mainly because they have such differing philosophies.
  • A week before his graduation, Mulder finds out his father died in prison. A wellspring of bad emotions and memories comes, and he tries unsuccessfully to drink away the pain. Ithaca comes in to find Mulder contemplating suicide. He talks Mulder out of it, only to have Mulder tell him that he was sexually abused as a child. This was Mulder’s secret, and he had not told anyone about that before or since. Ithaca prayed for him that day, but since has not made any mention of Mulder’s secret. That bothers him, because he believes it leaves him open to being exploited by Ithaca.
    Mulder has since tried to find some dirt on Ith to use against him, but hasn’t been able to dig up anything. And Ith hasn’t tried to exploit Mulder’s secret, but Mulder believes that doesn’t mean he won’t, and it’s only a matter of time before Ith tries to use that leverage. And Mulder hates feeling so vulnerable.
  • Mulder believes he has learned from his father’s sins. He is not a gambler. He believes in taking calculated risks, and in stacking the odds in your favor, by hook or by crook. Try to minimize your risk. Never give up leverage, and gain more if you can. And often times to beat the odds, you have to cheat.
    Mulder uses leverage to get what he wants out of people. He is not a manipulator, but he is a master of gathering intel. If you have something to hide, he will find it out, and he will exploit it when the time is right for his agenda.
  • Upon hiring into BAAL, he quickly rose up the ranks of the marketing department (mostly by exploiting the weakness of his coworkers), and garnered the attention of Webster. Webster saw Mulder’s drive and ruthlessness as a valuable asset for his grand scheme, and quickly recruited him with promises of promotion. Mulder bought right in.
  • However, when Webster needed people to be guinea pigs for the experiments, Mulder declined. The experiments were unproven, and there was just too much risk involved. Instead, he suggested a way to find the right person for the experiment: put a small sample of some of their experimental compounds in the food at a companywide luncheon, and use the people who react the strongest to the food.