No single man in all of history has been responsible for so much destruction. One of the few hundred survivors of the News Year's Massacre in which the space colony V-L7DBC2068 was destroyed, Donovan suffered mild brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. Little else is known about the man other than that fact.

What IS known is that after the tragedy, he became a staunch proponent of revenge, blaming the Earth Sphere for the disaster. He became something of a hero among other survivors as well as those who had lost family or friends in the New Year's Massacre, many of whom were soldiers in the Venus Military Force. Insane from either grief or brain damage, it was Donovan that orchaestrated the theft of an incomplete Erinyes cruiser; ultimately taking the ship, a handful of mobile suits, and 50 soldiers from Venus to Earth orbit, where he led the ship on a suicide attack on the resource satellite MO-II. The attack successfully destabilized the asteroid and sent it crashing to Earth in an event later known as the Ides tragedy. Over half a billion deaths would ultimately be attributed to the disaster, several orders of magnitude more than the six million killed on V-L7DBC2068.