If you haven’t watched the new Netflix documentary series Tiger King yet, then do yourself a favour and get involved, but also be warned – there are spoilers ahead. Tiger King’s anti-hero Carole Baskin has shared her thoughts on the series, and it’s safe to say, the directors weren’t having a bar of it.
Hear about Tiger King, the Netflix series that has everyone talking below:
After Tiger King hit Netflix, Baskin posted a statement to her website addressing suggestions she had murdered her second husband, Don Lewis.
Carole Baskin claimed Tiger King directors approached her five years ago and said “they wanted to make the big cat version of Blackfish (the documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld) that would expose the misery caused by the rampant breeding of big cat cubs for cub petting exploitations and the awful life the cats lead in roadside zoos and backyards if they survive.”
She also said that Tiger King “had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers.”
In a video posted after the statement, Howard Baskin said “the biggest con artist of them all” is Tiger King directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin. “I believe they are devoid of integrity, don’t care about the animals and clearly, clearly do not care about the truth. As far as I can tell their goal was to make something as inflammatory and salacious as possible so that Netflix would pay them millions for it.”
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Goode and Chaiklin spared zero sympathy for the Baskins. Chaiklin said “with any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change, and we followed it as any good storyteller does,” however Goode was more straightforward.
“Carole talked about her personal life, her childhood, abuse from her first and second husband, the disappearance of her ex, Don Lewis. She knew that this was not just…it’s not a Blackfish because of the thing she spoke about.”
“She certainly wasn’t coerced. The other thing I would say about all these people is that there was a lack of intellectual curiosity to really go and understand or even see these animals in the wild. Certainly, Carole really had no interest in seeing an animal in the wild…The lack of education, frankly, was really interesting – how they had built their own little utopias and really were only interested in that world and the rules they had created.”
Goode has a point. The most enlightening part of Tiger King was seeing the stark reality of the situation, and how the cruelty to both animals and humans played out in such a raw and uncut way. It mightn’t have painted Carole Baskin in the best light, but it made us ask some very important questions.