Tiger King’s Carole Baskin: ‘I’ve been made a villain because I’m a woman’
In the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency, much of the world’s attention was focused on the violent storming of the US Capitol, and whether Trump might be removed from office a week or two early. But for Carole Baskin, the hippyish 60-year-old thrust into fame last year by the release of the seven-part docuseries, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, there was a more pressing question afoot: whether Trump would issue a presidential pardon to Joseph Maldonado-Passage (aka Joe Exotic), the mulleted, polygamous, uber-eccentric zoo owner convicted in 2019 of plotting to murder her.
By January, a controversial online campaign to “Free Joe” had already garnered thousands of supporters; Trump, ever-keen to please his base, at one point joked that he would “take a look” at the idea. He ultimately decided against it –- but it certainly made a stressful few weeks at the Baskin household in Tampa, Florida.
“It was concerning,” Baskin tells me now. “I never would have thought any president before or after would have even considered such a thing. But given all of the chaos in our country at that time, it would have been a diversion that might have served him well.”
In a pale floral dress, Baskin is speaking to me over Zoom from her home office, surrounded by filing cabinets. In Tiger King, Baskin is cast as something of a villainess, secretly pulling the strings; a Lady Macbeth-like character whose sunny exterior hides a ruthless personality. She’s often accompanied on-screen with slightly sinister background music, with unnerving close-ups of her smiling face.
But on my laptop screen, away from Netflix’s editing pen, Baskin is cheerful, mild-mannered, with a surprisingly self-deprecating humour. At one point, her house cat Pearlie (one of two feral cats adopted by Baskin and her husband, Howard) leaps onto her lap to be stroked.
Life since March 2020 has been fairly unusual for all of us, but for Baskin more than most. That was the month Tiger King made her globally famous. Watched by 64 million households in its first month, it followed the bizarre world of Exotic, the eponymous tiger king, who owned more than 200 large cats (some of which he mistreated and killed, according to prosecutors) at his zoo in Oklahoma.
Attention in the series soon turns to Exotic’s long-running feud with Baskin, founder of Florida’s Big Cat Rescue Centre, the aim of which is to “end abuse of big cats in captivity”. In one of many online videos, Exotic dressed a blow-up doll as Baskin and shot it in the head. He also repeatedly accused Baskin of having murdered her ex-husband, Don Lewis, who disappeared one morning in August 1997; his van was found two days later at a small airport 40 miles away. Exotic even suggests that Baskin may have fed her husband’s body to her cats. In a bizarre twist, Exotic eventually tried to hire a hitman to murder Baskin, but was caught by the FBI.
He is now serving 22 years in prison. Last month, he petitioned a court for early release after being diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer. In an Instagram post, he claimed Baskin would “celebrate” his diagnosis.
“I would hope anybody who has cancer would have a speedy relief,” Baskin says. “That’s a horrible disease and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” But, she adds, “I think he is where he belongs [in prison]. And I think he belongs there for the next 20 years. I would stand by that.
“When people watched Tiger King, they only saw what was put in front of them by producers. If you think about [Exotic’s] trial, not even his own mother came on his behalf. Not one person in his family or friends came to court for him. That should tell you something.”
Baskin’s life after Tiger King was transformed by a torrent of abuse, including dozens of death threats every day, and endless voicemails from raspy-voiced men calling her a “f---ing murderer”, and promising to leave a “bullet between your eyes”. Some callers pretend to be first husband, Don. She now hires a bodyguard at public events.
She thinks misogyny played a central role. “Most of the people who have threatened me, or who are just so hateful to me online, are men. It just seems too convenient that there’s all of these men who are abusing all of these animals and people, and then there’s this one woman saying you can’t act like that, you can’t treat animals that way, and that was the person that everybody decided to make into the villain. That’s absurd to me.”
Now, she is fighting back with her own TV series, Carol Baskin’s Cage Fight, available to stream in the UK via Discovery+, in which she teams up with a retired homicide detective and goes after people she suspects of mistreating big cats. In one episode Baskin tracks down Exotic’s estranged niece, Chealsi, who tells Baskin she is horrified by her uncle’s behaviour. In another scene, she visits Exotic’s now-abandoned zoo, trudging through the overgrown shrubbery to inspect metal cages in which tigers used to be kept. On the zoo’s shed, somebody had graffitied the message, “If Carol killed her husband, clap your hands.”
Baskin seems genuinely excited about her new series, but I can’t help feeling it might end up overshadowed by Netflix’s Tiger King 2, which, as luck would have it, was also released this week. Baskin says she only took part in the first series because she was led to believe it was a documentary about the abuse of big cats. This time around, she is emphatically not involved, and is even suing Netflix for using footage of her.
Even so, Baskin’s name comes up – a lot. Episodes two and three of the new series resurrect the theory that Baskin murdered her husband; producers even enlist the help of amateur sleuths trying to find the ‘truth’. “It’s just shocking to me that they would continue to try and trash my name,” she says. “I feel like there’s some kind of personal vendetta there. They could tell a really crazy story about these crazy people exploiting big cats, without trying to make me into a murderer.” Baskin says she “gave [producers] all of the evidence to prove that so many of the things that they were saying were not true”, adding that she was never considered a suspect by police.
There is much turmoil in Baskin’s life, but she retains a striking capacity for fun. With public tours cancelled last year due to Covid, her sanctuary lost $1 million in expected revenue – money she tried to make back by appearing on Dancing with the Stars (the US version of Strictly Come Dancing), in which she danced in animal-print costumes to songs like Eye of the Tiger and What’s new Pussycat?.
She has also made more than $600,000 on Cameo, an app through which celebrities record videos for fans. A minute-long message from Baskin costs about £250; she has recorded four to eight every day since becoming famous. She’s aware that she’s often the butt of the joke in these videos. Last summer, an internet prankster tricked Baskin into sending her regards to “Rolf Harris” and his “best friend, Jimmy Savile”; and earlier this month, the comedian Daisy May Cooper paid Baskin to intervene in a dispute with her publisher. “Apparently I’m involved in some book dispute,” Baskin says with a cheerful shrug, “I didn’t understand either side of that – but I’m in it.”
But as I say goodbye, I get the sense that Baskin might be the one having the last laugh.
Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight is on Discovery+
