Valerie Malone
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Valerie Malone was a character in FOX's popular TV series Beverly Hills 90210. She was played by actress Tiffani Thiessen. She first appeared in the fifth season, replacing Shannen Doherty's character, Brenda Walsh, after the actress was fired for alleged unprofessional behavior. Valerie is affectionately referred to in the series as "Val."
Valerie's family were neighbors of the Walshes back in Minnesota. Brenda, Brandon, and Valerie grew up together. Problems in the Malone family had been escalaing for many years, mostly in secret, but it wasn't until Valerie's father was found dead in the bathroom of his home, an apparent suicide via gunshot wound to the head, that the family's issues seemed to come to light. This marked the catalyst that lead to Valerie's transfer to Beverly Hills, where she would live with the Walshes.
Valerie came off to the gang as a naive, but fun, young woman; however, the first episode she appeared in ended with her rolling a marijuana cigarette in Brenda's old bedroom and talking to a friend over the phone back in Minnesota about the possibility of getting involved with Steve Sanders for his money, as well as boasting her ability to act as though she's more innocent than she actually is.
Romantic interest in Valerie came quick, often, and usually all at once, leading to many situations where male members of the series became contentious over their similar affections for her. This started with Valerie dating Steve while sleeping with Dylan McKay. Despite the annoyance it provided her, Valerie would constantly act as an enabler to Dylan's addictive behaviors, which re-surfaced after he had been conned out of his fortune.
Kelly Taylor discovered Valerie's continued affair with Dylan while dating Steve, and while the other members of the gang gave Valerie the benefit of the doubt, Kelly and Valerie would remain constant enemies throughout the entire series, save for Valerie's final episode, where they reconcile, and very rare moments in between, including one during the West Beverly Hills High School reunion where Kelly is disturbed by an encounter with Ross Weber, a former upperclassmen that had taken her virginity in a disrespectful way, though Kelly was willing; at the reunion he acted like it never happened, which greatly distressed Kelly, who revelead to Valerie the details of the encounter. Val ultimately confronted Ross, indirectly reprimanding him for his ungentlemenly behavior and chased him away. Kelly toasted Valerie's act of retribution with a glass of champagne.
Valerie assisted in the rescue of Dylan's younger sister, who had been taken out of the country by the couple that conned Dylan out of his money. With Dylan's money returned, Valerie was paid off for her involvement in the rescue and used the money to purchase the Peach Pit After Dark, a club that had previously been opened behind the Peach Pit diner with Dylan's help.
She had a great affinity for money, often considering financial status as the most important factor in a relationship. She had an affair with an older gentlemen and pretended to be pregnant in order to extort money from him. This lead to the dissolution of all her freindships in Beverly Hills and her ejection from the Walsh household on the day of the gang's graduation from college. A distraught Valerie drove to a cliff to commit suicide, but before she could jump, Brandon rescued her after a suicide letter had been found on her bed. Later, after beginning a minor romantic interest in the seemingly poor Noah Hunter, she became angered to find that he was rich; it wasn't until she learned of his family's wealth that she and he began a serious relationship. Her most serious realtionship, however, was with David Silver. Their relationship broke up over the issue of Valerie's stoic nature; David was frightened by Valerie's calmness when she took him to the site of her attempted suicide jump in order to detour him from committing suicide as a result of his personal problems. She stepped to the edge of the unstable cliff and was unafraid during the whole ordeal. The last straw came when David was put off by Valerie's cold-heartedness when she refused to act as a bone marrow donor for an old man she'd learned was a child molester who only stopped his incestuous actions because he'd become too weak; David was the only person at the time that Valerie had revleaed one of her many shocking secrets to: that as a child, she'd been constantly molested by her father until the time of his death.
Later in the series, Valerie's behavior began to become more and more reckless. After breaking up with Noah, she slept with her mother's younger fiancee (a cop) and engaged in an unsafe sexual encounter with a man she would find out later was infected with HIV. At one point in time, Valerie awoke from a stupor to find she had been drugged. It is found that Noah Hunter, her ex-boyfriend, is the man she slept with, but he denies that it was rape. Chemical tests prove she was provided Rohypnol, the date rape drug (a.k.a., a roofie), but court proceedings followed, and the gang is divided when Brandon and David are the only ones to defend her, with everyone else believing her to have slept with Noah on purpose, using the court system to extort him of money. It is later discovered by a drug-addicted Donna Martin that Noah's brother had slipped Valerie the roofie in order to sleep with her, but Noah left with Valerie that night before he could.
As Noah battled alcoholism and also began to act recklessly, stresses mounted for Valerie before her next shocking secret ultimately was revealed: her father was not a victim of suicide but rather was murdered. A young Valerie shot her father to death in order to stop his incestuous behavior. From this point on in the series, Valerie would contend with the option of turning herself in. She summons her mother, Abbey Malone (played by singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas) to California for moral support, but found none when her mother refused to involve herself in the matter further, having reached her fill of the subject after having to confront her husband with the question about whether or not he'd been "having sex with our daughter."
Brandon eventually moved away and Valerie was left with the harsh reality that he was the only reason she continued to be a part of their group. Abbey returned home and Valerie made several attempts to turn herself in, but was dissuaded each time by Matt Durning and David Silver. Ultimately, she would go to the police to turn herself in but before she could, was stopped by her Mother who returned to finally console her daughter, admit that she was to blame for being too ashamed to delve deeper into the issue to stop it, and forgave her for the murder of her husband.
It was actually during Thanksgiving that Valerie realized that Brandon was the key to her relationship with the rest of the gang and that, with Brandon gone, she longer had any ties that bind. Val's feud with Kelly reached a head when Valerie invited everyone to a Thanksgiving dinner she would host at the Walsh house but, while packing away Brandon's remaining property to ship to him in Washington, D.C., Kelly and Val come across the letter Val had written Brandon; it was made during Brandon and Kelly's engagement and was the reason the wedding did not happen. This fact turned the gang against her, and Kelly drew everone away from Val to attend her own Thanksgiving dinner. A sympathetic David confronted Kelly and revealed that all of Val's behavior stemmed from the until-then secret that Val was a victim of child sexual abuse that lead her to commit murder. Kelly attmepted to reconcile with Val, but she was heatedly refuted. Ultimately, Kelly kept the secret but hosted the Thanksgiving dinner at the Walsh house in order to include Valerie in the festivities. The two reconciled and Kelly asked for assistance in loading the boxes in the house into her car so she could ship them to Brandon in Washington. It was then that Valerie provided one more shocking surprise: the boxes did not belong to Brandon; they belonged to her. After dinner, she toasted her friends, thanking them for their friendship, and then moved back home to live with her mother.
Valerie was not seen in the series again until the finale, where she arrived in time to rejuvenate Donna's boring bachlorette party (her wedding gift was a pack of condoms). She unraveled a picture of a naked man with David's face on it and a bull's eye over his penis, on which Mrs. Teasley, their former principal, hit the target dead on. In the finale, it is revelaed that Valerie is involved in a serious relationship back in Buffalo.
