Tiger King star Carole Baskin responds to accusations that she fed her husband to tigers
Carole Baskin of Big Cat Rescue. (Netflix)
Tiger King star Carole Baskin has said that claims she fed her husband’s body to the big cats at her sanctuary are “ludicrous”.
Netflix’s new true crime documentary Tiger King is about an Oklahoma tiger breeder called Joe Exotic, a proud “gun-toting gay redneck” and a polygamist who has had several concurrent husbands, who was the self-proclaimed king of the shady exotic animal underworld.
Exotic was sentenced last year to 22 years in prison for attempting to have his arch nemesis and animal rights activist Carole Baskin, of animal sanctuary Big Cat Rescue, murdered.
The documentary has been watched by millions since its release last week, and theories have been spreading like wildfire across social media.
But one of the most prominent rumours, fuelled by the show itself, is that Baskin killed her husband and fed him to the big cats in her sanctuary.
Wow the amount of texts I’ve gotten about Tiger King since I tweeted about it all have mentioned their belief that Carol killed her husband! What are your thoughts? Do you think Carol killed him?
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) March 23, 2020
Baskin’s then-husband Don went missing 21 years ago, and various interviewees in Tiger King accuse her of killing him. She was never charged with any crime in relation to her husband’s disappearance.
Now Baskin has hit back at the rumours, calling them “ludicrous”, in a lengthy post on her website.
She wrote that the series “had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers”.
Baskin continued: “As part of that, it has a segment devoted to suggesting, with lies and innuendos from people who are not credible, that I had a role in the disappearance of my husband Don 21 years ago.
“The series presents this without any regard for the truth or in most cases even giving me an opportunity before publication to rebut the absurd claims. They did not care about truth. The unsavory lies are better for getting viewers.”
Further into the post, she includes a picture of a small, hand-operated meat grinder.
She wrote: “The Meat Grinder. This is the most ludicrous of all the lies.”
Baskin said that Don’s ex-wife and their daughters “did everything they could to make life difficult for me after Don disappeared, they spread this rumor that they thought I had ground Don up and fed him to the cats. And the media loved it.
“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, like the one pictured here… The idea that a human body and skeleton could be put through it is idiotic.
“But the Netflix directors did not care. They just showed a bigger grinder.”
