Carole Baskin has confirmed she won't be taking part in a second series of Tiger King after feeling she was betrayed by the show's producers.
Carole Baskin told RadioTimes.com that the team behind Tiger King, directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, asked her to take part in a second series, but she flatly refused.
She said: 'It was just a few weeks ago that Rebecca Chaiklin had reached out asking if we could clear the air. I have been speaking about how we had been so misled into thinking this was going to be the Blackfish for big cats and then it turned out to be the freak show that they produced.
'So when she said she wanted to clear the air, I felt like, you know, that’s just absolutely ridiculous. It was so obvious that I had been betrayed by them. Why would she ever think that I would be willing to speak to them again. And so I told her to just lose my number.'
Carole Baskin also said Chaiklin had attempted to contact her current husband, Howard Baskin, adding: 'He said, "If you guys want to redeem yourselves for all of the horrible things that you made people believe about us that just weren’t true, then your season two will show that but we don’t want any part of it".'
Big Cat Rescue's Carole Baskin already had refused to take part in a reunion episode{
Carole - an animal rights activist - has been clear on her feelings about the smash Netflix series, which follows the rivalry between her and zoo keeper Joe Exotic, calling it ‘salacious and sensational’ on Big Cat Rescue's website. (Spoiler alert: Joe is now behind bars for 22 years for 17 counts of animal abuse and a murder-for-hire plot.)
Co-directors and writers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin previously told the Los Angeles Times that they were ‘completely forthright’ with the subjects of the show. ‘I would just say we were completely forthright with the characters,’ Chaiklin said. ‘With any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change, and we followed it as any good storyteller does. We could have never known when we started this project that it was going to land where it did.’
‘Carole talked about her personal life, her childhood, abuse from her first and second husband, the disappearance of her ex, Don Lewis,’ Goode added. ‘She knew that this was not just about … it’s not a Blackfish because of the things she spoke about. She certainly wasn’t coerced.’
Carole wrote that the filmmakers first approached her back in 2015 ‘saying they wanted to make the big-cat version of Blackfish (the documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld)… and expose the misery caused by the rampant breeding of big cat cubs for cub petting exploitation and the awful life the cats lead in roadside zoos and back yards.’
Baskin added that instead the series ‘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 in 1997.’ She calls this claim ‘absurd’, and denies any suggestion that she had anything to do with her husband’s disappearance.
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