Special Agent John Cates and Dr. Karen Wexler are fictional characters and a divorced couple from the original ABC Daytime soap opera, General Hospital.
Storylines[]
In 1992, a gang of thugs broke into Kelly's and roughed up the owner, Ruby Anderson while attempting to rob the diner. Jagger Cates - then known as "Jagger" - was one of the thugs, but was shot when he tried to protect Ruby. While he is recovering, he stays at General Hospital. While he is there, the police threaten to arrest him if he doesn't turn in the rest of the gang.
Jagger refuses and while trying to escape the hospital while avoiding arrest, he meets Karen. On the roof of the hospital, Jagger is unable to take the ladder down because he is scared of heights, and Karen Wexler finds him and convinces him to stop his escape.
Ruby gives him a job bussing at Kelly's, and Jagger and Karen become friends. He develops feelings for Karen, but she was involved with Jason Quartermaine. Brenda Barrett also wanted Jagger, and she schemed to keep Jagger and Karen apart.
Eventually, Jagger and Karen got together only to have Karen remember that she was molested by her mother Rhonda Wexler's boyfriend, Ray Conway. They broke up when she got into pills, working as an underage stripper at Sonny Corinthos' The Paradise Lounge and had an affair with him.
She and Jagger got back together, and got married when he got accepted into the police academy in Chicago. Dr. Alan Quartermaine offered to pay Karen's expenses through medical school. They came back for brief visit when Jagger's brother Stone Cates was dying. Sometime after that they moved to San Francisco where Jagger became an undercover cop.
That same year, Karen returned to Port Charles as an intern at GH, leaving Jagger behind in San Francisco. The physical distance between them soon led to a much more painful distance. Karen went back to San Francisco to see Jagger, thinking it would help their marriage and divert her burgeoning feelings for Joe Scanlon. There she found out that Jagger had been having an affair. Their marriage crumbled and they were divorced in the winter of 1997.
In 2003, Karen dies after she falls in the street and a car hits her.
On March 5, 2024, having returned to town with the intention of first saving Sonny Corinthos, then taking him down; FBI Special Agent Jagger Cates (now going by John) lays into Sonny after a botched plan to lure out the mystery shooter. He threatens to take Ava Jerome and Sonny into federal custody if they don't co-operate. Commissioner Anna Devane backs him up.
Sonny says this has nothing to do with the case.
"It's about Karen."
As he goads him, John loses his cool and tells the mobster to tell the others what he did. John explains how great his high school girlfriend Karen was. She was a victim of sexual abuse and Sonny exploited that to make her a stripper even though she was underage. He also fed her drugs and had sex with her.
He tells the ladies that that's the man they have been defending. Sonny admits he encouraged her and if he could do it all over again, he would do it differently. He gave her somewhere to go and he was there to help her. Sonny claims he was only trying to help her because he knew what it was like to be powerless. He accuses John of hating him because he knew Karen in ways he didn't.
“You are like the pied piper from hell,” John tells him, accusing him of exploiting damaged children like Karen and Stone. He accuses him of exploiting his brother to gain respectability as a philanthropist. Sonny says he loved him. John says that may be true, but he was still an investment. Robin practically canonized him to the people of Port Charles.
Cates leaves - but it's not over.
