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Tiger King first aired on Netflix on March 20 last year, and instantly became a worldwide sensation.
It was watched by around 64 million households in the first month alone, and the likes of Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin became household names.
Joe Exotic is currently pushing for a pardon in President Donald Trump’s final few days in office, and Carole Baskin has used the post-show fame to appear on Dancing with the Stars, among other things.
Controversy has always followed her, though, especially when it comes to the disappearance of her then-husband, Don Lewis, back in 1997.
Lewis’ family sure thinks she had something to do with his disappearance (and almost certain death) and even took out a series of adverts encouraging anybody with information to come forward.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Baskin has opened up about life post-Tiger King, and went into greater detail about her life with Lewis:
Theirs was a volatile marriage. They’d met in 1981, when the 19-year-old Baskin was walking barefoot along the side of the road in Tampa having thrown a potato at her allegedly abusive first husband, Michael Murdock [below]. Lewis, cruising by, convinced her to get in the car by offering her a gun to point at him in case he did anything untoward.
Lewis was, she says, an unpredictable but charismatic man. He was also married, so Baskin – who’d had Jamie, then a baby, with Murdock – became his latest extramarital affair. They were together for the next decade, on and off, and went into business together buying and selling houses, before marrying in 1991 and launching Big Cat Rescue the following year. Not that it made him faithful. At all. He sounds like a sex addict.
Baskin spoke of his “strong libido”, adding that even though they had sex multiple times a day, he still had girlfriends on the side.
She says that Lewis often went to Costa Rica to see these other women, timing his trips to coincide with her menstrual cycle, telling her she would become “grouchy”.
In the year of his disappearance, their relationship had really frayed:
According to Baskin, Lewis [below] became increasingly erratic, wasting most of a million dollars she lent him to invest, and was losing his faculties.
‘A volunteer came up to me one day and said, “It’s amazing you’re able to run this sanctuary and deal with a husband who has Alzheimer’s…” I bought a load of books [about the disease], I showed Don. He had started getting stuck in dumpsters, defecating behind buildings, really crazy stuff. I was trying to get him medical help, but every time I did, people were in the way. I believe they were taking advantage of him and didn’t want him to get help.’
On the morning of August 18, 1997, Lewis left home and was never seen again, with his van later found at an airport around 60 kilometres away, although there was no evidence that he ever took to the air.
Baskin said she offered to take a lie-detector test, which the show’s producers deny:
‘Every time there’s a hurricane I think something will wash out of the Gulf that will prove the thing he was most likely doing at the time was the thing that would end up killing him.’ She means a plane crash.
You can read the full interview here, but let’s finish with what she thinks of Joe Exotic, her arch-nemesis:
‘I don’t have any harsh feelings about him,’ she says. ‘If he had a true come-to Jesus moment, then I would be all forgiving. But I don’t think change is possible with him. All he’s saying is he was framed, and he doesn’t belong there, and he doesn’t take any responsibility for the things that he did to those animals.’
I imagine Joe Exotic’s response would be about two words long, the first of which would be ‘that’…
[source:telegraph]
