Comic Spoilers (and Potential But Unlikely TV Series Spoilers) Below
When Rick Grimes and the rest of The Walking Dead survivors walked into the Alexandra Safe Zone in Season 5 of the television series, we were never provided much of a backstory on the location. It was ran by Deanna Monroe, a former congresswoman from Ohio, who was based on a comics character by the name of Douglas Monroe (who was also a former Ohio congressman). In the TV series, Deanna Monroe and her family were led to the Alexandria Safe Zone by the army and were told that the military would come back and get them afterward. The army never returned, so Deanna and her family engineered the construction of the walls and formed a community within the Safe Zone.
There’s a slightly different version of that in the comics, one that involves a shadowy man by the name of Alexander Davidson. In the comics, it was actually Davidson who founded the Safe Zone. Davidson worked as a security liaison in the White House, and brought his best friend Douglas Monroe into the Safe Zone.
In the comics, Davidson is mentioned but never seen. By the time Rick had reached the Alexandria Safe Zone, Davidson was already out of the picture. In fact, it was Douglas Monroe who had exiled the founder because Davidson had been using his position as leader of the community to compel women to sleep with him. It wasn’t exactly “rape,” but basically, if they didn’t do what he wanted, then Davidson gave them the worst, most dangerous jobs in the community. After his exile, Davidson was presumed dead (of course, there is the the possibility that his exiled character may reappear in the comics or another version of him may show up later in the series, though both possibilities seem unlikely).
There are a also a couple of echoes of Alexander Davidson in Dawn Lerner, the Season 5 leader of a group of police officers residing at Grady Memorial Hospital. While Dawn didn’t use her position to procure sexual favors, she did give those she disliked the worst jobs. Interestingly, in another parallel, in the comics, a woman named Beth committed suicide rather than sleep with Davidson, while it was Dawn who ultimately killed the Beth we know from the TV series.
