‘Tiger King’ star Carole Baskin says docuseries is ‘salacious and sensational’
One person was not happy about their portrayal in “Tiger King,” the wildly popular Netflix series.
Animal activist Carole Baskin slammed the true crime docuseries in a recent blog post, saying that it spread “unsavory lies.”
“There are not words for how disappointing it is to see that the series... had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers,’” she wrote Sunday.
The docuseries, which exposes the world of exotic animal collectors, focuses on former zoo operator Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, who was arrested in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in 2018 and was sentenced in January to 22 years in federal prison for hiring two people to try to kill Baskin, who won a million-dollar judgment against him.
He was also convicted of eight counts of falsifying wildlife records, and nine counts of violating the Endangered Species Act, including killing five tigers to make room for other big cats.
“Tiger King” co-directors and writers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin took issue with Baskin’s claims.
“I would just say we were completely forthright with the characters,” Chaiklin told the Los Angeles Times. “With any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change, and we followed it as any good storyteller does.”
“She certainly wasn’t coerced,” Goode added.
Baskin, CEO of Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue, says the series is fraught with inaccuracies.
Here are some of her disputes with the series, including how the show portrays the mysterious disappearance of her millionaire hubby Don Lewis in 1997:
On Anne McQueen, Lewis’ executive assistant...
The docuseries portrayed Anne McQueen as Lewis’ right-hand woman, a characterization that Baskin took issue with:
“A few months before his disappearance, we caught her embezzling roughly $600,000 in properties by buying them with our funds and putting them in her name,” she wrote on her blog. “A court ordered her to return them. Not the best sign of integrity, credibility, someone to believe.”
McQueen was never formally charged, but Baskin included a court docket from a 1997 closed guardianship case of Lewis to accompany her claim.
On the restraining order
Baskin explains that Lewis often traveled to Costa Rica during the week of her menstrual cycle. She would use that time to clear “the property [of] as much of the junk as I could.”
When Lewis found out about this, he called the police and filed for a restraining order, which a judge later denied.
“Later, when Anne was forced to return the embezzled properties, at the end of the negotiations, with the matter now closed, she opened up and told me that she knew all along that the only reason Don applied for the restraining order was to stop me from removing the junk,” Baskin wrote on the blog.
Episode about her husband’s death
What really burns Baskin is how she is portrayed in the series regarding her husband’s death.
Although the series focuses on her rivalries with Joe Exotic, an episode about Lewis’ death implies that she killed her husband.
Baskin not only refutes this assumption but says the show exaggerated a few elements, namely the claim that she put Lewis’ body in a meat grinder.
“The meat grinder shown in the video was enormous. Our meat grinder was one of those little tabletop, hand-crank things, like you’d have in your kitchen at home,” Baskin wrote.
“Don was not easy to live with and like most couples, we had our moments,” she later continued. “But I never threatened him and I certainly had nothing to do with his disappearance.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘Tiger King’ star Carole Baskin says docuseries is ‘salacious and sensational’."
