General Hospital’s Bryan Craig Leaves Our Jaws On the Floor as He Shares the Terrifying, ‘Traumatic Experience’ He Was ‘Lucky’ to Survive
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Life in Port Charles is, more often than not, no easy thing, but sometimes real life can make even General Hospital seem tame in comparison. That’s the lesson we learned when Bryan Craig (Morgan) spoke with Maurice Benard (Sonny) for a special live version of State of Mind during the GH Fan Club Weekend.
The two started the interview hard when Craig opened up about dating a narcissist. And believe us when we say everyone’s jaws were on the floor as he unwound the incredible story that sounded like it was ripped right out of a movie plot.
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It all started, Craig says, during the pandemic when he moved to Mexico with his girlfriend at the time. He speaks a bit about dating a narcissist and how it started out great, but little things, over time “chip away at you, and you feel like you can’t do anything right.”“I don’t want to say love is blind,” he tells Benard, “because that sounds really cliche but it is. And I didn’t really know what was happening when I was experiencing that. I was just like, ‘Wow, this person knows how to take my confidence completely away.’ It was in increments, little increments that she would do it.”
Maybe if it hadn’t been during the pandemic when, as he puts it, “the world was upside down,” he wouldn’t have agreed to move with her to Mexico, “but either way, I bought the ticket, I took the ride. I fell head over heels in love with that girl and I moved out there, not really knowing her.”
Craig admits that there were all kinds of red flags that he ignored, from her being kind of mean, to it being mostly a one-sided relationship as he surprised her with little gestures, while she didn’t even bother to get him a Christmas gift.
Then, he tells Benard, “it got way worse than that. I started seeing red flags on a different level.” He’d be on her computer as they were trying to start up a business and messages would pop up from guys asking when they’d be going on trips and asking when she was available. Worse, he stumbled across a ton of, let’s just say explicit videos of her with older gentlemen.
She gave him evasive answers when he questioned her about it, but “there I was, feeling a little stuck. And also, at this point, mind you, it was the pandemic. So we were quarantined. Four or five months feels like two years. … So four or five months in, is when I started seeing that stuff.”
It came to something of a head around her birthday (which was also around New Year’s), when Craig booked a trip to Tulum for the two of them and a number of his friends to celebrate.
“This is where it gets [BLEEPING] crazy,” he tells Benard, along with the show’s audience. “We get on the plane for the trip and we’re in the air for maybe 30 minutes, and we’re sitting with the row in between us. And she turns to me and she goes, ‘Hey, when we land, I’m gonna get in a cab and go my way. You’re going to get in a cab and go your way and you’re never to speak to me, find me, call, text me ever again.’”
Craig, of course thought she was kidding, and was amused at first. But no, she was deadly serious. They landed and went their separate ways, but luckily Craig had his friends to lean on as he tried to process and mourn what happened. But it didn’t end there. Because he did see her again one night while they were both out at a party.
He’d had more than a few drinks when he saw her and went over, only to be told coldly and calmly to go away and stay away. Then, a bit later in the night, he saw her with another guy and he ran after them. “She’s walking away with this guy into another part of the house,” he told an amazed Benard, “and I’m sitting there with two of my friends and I’m just so heartbroken.”
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He didn’t get far in running after them, though, before he was “tackled from the left, the right, the back by three giant guys with rifles and knives.” They beat him, put rifles to his head, a knife to his throat, choked him and carried him out into the woods where they dumped him at three in the morning.
“It’s pitch black,” he recalls, “and I had to walk through the jungle, probably a mile and a half to find the hotel at like four in the morning with the [BLEEP] kicked out of me.”
He didn’t dare go back to the home he’d shared with his ex. Instead, he got a flight home and stayed with his parents — one of the few times in his life he moved back in. The whole experience sounds like a wild movie, but it left him understandably traumatized. He went to therapy and for a time would wake up at night screaming from night terrors. “I don’t even remember what stuff we worked on through that,” he admits, “but it was just a really traumatic experience.”
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“I did some digging,” he tells Benard, and found out that his ex worked for “a very dangerous cartel and did sex work for them, and I was very, very, very much in danger, and [I was] lucky that I got out with my life.”
We’re just glad Craig got out of that alive, but we are so very sorry that he ever went through that kind of trauma. While danger’s fun enough to watch on General Hospital, that’s not the type of thing we ever expect to hear about in the real world!