What Happened to JT Hellstrom on ‘Young and the Restless’? (VIDEO)

JT Hellstrom’s name comes up often on The Young and the Restless, but where is he, what happened to him and is he dead or alive on the CBS soap opera?

This is a transcript of our new Y&R video about why we keep hearing JT’s name, whether he’s coming back and what really happened to him. Be sure to check the video down below.

Check out all our soap spoilers podcasts here and be sure to follow us on YouTube as well. 

What Happened to JT Hellstrom on The Young and the Restless?

Hey there CBS Soap Opera fans. This is Soap Dirt on YouTube. And we wanna talk about something right now, somebody who’s been name-dropped on Y&R recently. Because of that, we have every reason to think that he’s gonna be back.

And so we’re gonna talk about JT Hellstrom. We’re gonna dig into this. Everybody wants to know, what happened to JT Hellstrom? Is JT alive? Where is JT? And did JT die? And then there’s a whole bunch of questions from people that don’t quite remember the history.

The big controversial scenes were in like Spring and Summer of 2018, although the stuff with him continued for a while. So we’re gonna dig in and talk about that and why he’s being mentioned and why it looks like they’ll bring Thad Luckinbill as JT Hellstrom.

If you didn’t know this… The first thing to know is that Thad Luckinbill is in real life, married to Amelia Heinle, who plays Victoria Newman. So they place ex-spouses on Young and the Restless and their real-life spouses.

They did split up for a while, but then they reconciled, they’ve got kids together. It’s all very cute. They actually met on the set. Very nice. And so right now, JT is being name-dropped. Now let’s talk about why.

Audra Charles Plots to Bring Victoria’s Ex to Town on Y&R

The people dropping his name are Audra Charles and Elena Dawson. And it seems strange for Audra to be bringing up JT. This is not somebody she’s ever met. Not somebody that I remember Elena ever meeting. But they’ve all heard about him.

But the kicker is that Victoria Newman is busy trying to get into Nate Hastings pants. And they almost did it on her office desk. Then she’s inviting him to this business trip. So it just seems inevitable that she is going to hit the hay with him, which is what she wants.

The problem is that Elena loves him and wants him. And Audra also wants him, although she hasn’t made that obvious to him yet, but she’s kind of playing a long game. So, she knows that she needs to get both Victoria out of the way and Elena out of the way.

And getting Elena out of the way should be pretty easy if he cheats with Victoria. But then Victoria’s a problem and JT Hellstrom is the answer to that, as far as Audra is concerned. Audra mentioned JT to Elena Dawson as a potential guest for her medical podcast.

And why would JT belong on a medical podcast? Well, that’s because when he exited the show, he had a very serious medical crisis. He had a brain tumor that was causing him to behave badly.

However, if you ask longtime Young and the Restless fans, the person they think that might have had a brain tumor is the showrunner that decided to take JT Hellstrom’s character and ruin it.

Mal Young Ruined JT Hellstrom on Young and Restless

If you remember JT from back in the day, he’s a good guy. He and Victoria share a son, Reed Hellstrom. He is in his early twenties at this point. I think they’ve SORAS’d him a couple of times. But JT loved Victoria.

But he had the same kind of issues with Victoria that a lot of people do. That’s her invasive and nosy family. And then Mal Young, if you remember that name, was the British soap producer CBS hired as they geared up to fire Jill Farren Phelps and Chuck Pratt.

He was the head writer and Phelps was the showrunner. And CBS showed signs of cutting Jill and Chuck out. They brought Mal Young first over as a supervising producer. It was a weird, almost kind of like a made-up credit, like consulting producer maybe.

He worked on some big soaps over in England. And Y&R fans were pretty excited because a lot of people did not like Jill or Chuck. Pratt wrote all the big fiery disasters, fires and explosions. People even called them “Prattastrophes”.

So Mal Young took the reins after they got rid of the other two. Then, they made him head writer and producer. So he was the showrunner.  And he brought JT Hellstrom back and wrote him as an abusive partner to Victoria.

Victoria and JT started dating again. Then he started abusing her verbally, physically. And fans were outraged because this was so out of character for JT. And it really ticked off Young and the Restless viewers.

Nikki Newman Killed Ex-son-in-Law on Y&R on CBS

All this escalated to the point that JT forced his way into Victoria’s house and he attacked her. And then Nikki Newman hit him in the head with a fireplace poker.

And she and Phyllis Summers, who at that time was played by Gina Tognoni, and Sharon Newman had helped with it. The four ladies took his body to Chancellor Park where they were doing some construction.

And they buried him because they thought they had killed him. And they were like, “Oh, well he’s an abuser.” That was in April of 2018, and that was fully in the tenure of Mal Young. This is at the time when he was sidelining legacy characters like Victor Newman.

He’d pretty much written Doug Davidson off the show as Paul Williams. And people were so frustrated. Then they decided to make it that he had a brain tumor. He dug his way out of the grave and came back to torment them, and the torment went on for quite a while.

And then they figured out he had a brain tumor. And they took out the brain tumor and they offered him a potential deal where he could plead kind of temporary insanity because of this tumor and what it was doing to his brain.

Thad Luckinbill Written off of The Young and the Restless

JT refused an insanity plea and said, “No. I want to plead guilty. I’m gonna go to prison.” And the reason that they went that route was because Thad Luckinbill had not planned to stay indefinitely on Young and the Restless.

He’s a very busy producer in his own right. And that’s what he spends a lot of his time doing. So he couldn’t stay at the soap forever. But they just wrecked his character, even though they kinda halfway redeemed him with his brain tumor story.

So the bottom line is now he went to prison and we have to assume that he’s out. Audra hired a private investigator to try and find him. So clearly he’s not still in prison or he’d be very easy to find.

Although depending on when he got out, he should have been on parole. That should also make him easy to find. But because they keep mentioning his name, it seems inevitable that they are going to bring JT Hellstrom back.

So if you have been wondering, is JT Hellstrom alive? Yes. He survived being hit in the head by Nikki and being buried, and then he dug his way out. He’s alive, but he went off to prison.

Why Did JT Hellstrom Leave Young & Restless?

If you wanna know what happened to JT Hellstrom, that’s what happened. He was the victim of bad writing more than anything that ruined his character and set him up as an abuser. And thankfully that was eventually resolved.

But it was just so horrible to watch if you’re a fan of JT and Victoria and their dynamic. It was just awful. And if you don’t remember, Mal Young himself was fired, which a lot of Young and the Restless fans cheered at that.

Because people initially thought, “Oh, fresh new blood. Get rid of Jill. Get rid of Chuck.” And then it was like, Ooh, maybe we’d shoulda stuck with the devils we knew instead of bringing in somebody new.

So if you were wondering is JT Hellstrom coming back? It seems likely that he could come back just because his name has been dropped a lot. And the question is whether Victoria would want to rekindle with him.

Even though she understands there was a medical reason for what he did, he still abused her. And so it seems like she would still have some sort of psychological issues with that. Some PTSD.

So it’s not clear why Audra would think that JT coming back to town would lure Victoria’s attention away from Nate. But that seems to be what they’re doing. We will let you know in our Comings and Goings updates when we get official word on Thad Luckinbill’s return.

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