Remember in lockdown 1.0 when our minds were utterly blown by the Hollywood Blockbuster-worthy shenanigans between Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and Tiger King’s merry band of misfits?
‘Merry band’ might be putting it lightly, to be fair: the genuinely unbelievable narrative arc of Netflix’ most explosive true crime series to date featured a cast of some of America’s most underhand criminals, drug addicts, hitmen for hire, black-market dealers and a whole load of abused animals (the real victims of all those theatrics, let’s not forget). Oh, and one woman who had her arm ripped off by a tiger ON FILM.
It would have the entire world on tenterhooks at the best of times, but during early lockdown when leaving the house for fun was literally illegal, it became a global phenomenon.
One such example of bat-shit craziness underpinning the plot progression of series one was the fact that Carole Baskin’s ex-husband, Don Lewis, was declared formerly dead in 2002, five years after going missing. The Tiger King himself and Carole’s arch nemesis Joe (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage) had always been outspoken in his accusations that Carole herself had murdered Don and fed him to her own tigers at her site Big Cat Rescue.
But cue the plot twist of the actual century because CAROL’S HUSBAND DON HAS BEEN FOUND ALIVE AND WELL, LIVING IN COSTA RICA.
And not only that, this monumental turn of events actually happened way back in 2022, and somehow the entire world just… missed it?
Excuse the pun but, that is literally wild.
What happened to Carole Baskin’s husband Don Lewis?
According to the action of Tiger King, Don Lewis went missing after just six years of marriage to Carole and five years later was declared dead by US authorities. Despite Joe claiming she’d had Don murdered and fed to her big cats, Carole always maintained her innocence and last year went onto ITV’s This Morning to tell our very own Phil and Holly that she’d been contacted by Homeland Security to give an update on his whereabouts and, spoiler alert, it appears he isn’t dead after all. Strangely, this news didn't get picked up until one Twitter user shared it this week.
‘They said my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica. And yet all of this drama has been made about me having something to do with his disappearance, when Homeland Security has known where he is,’ she told the daytime telly hosts. ‘I didn’t think he was capable of supporting himself. He took about a million dollars down to Costa Rica, I had agreed to let him do that so he could prove to himself that he could make a living.’
However despite what she’s told British press, according to Cosmo UK Don is still legally documented as dead and has yet to make a statement himself.
What happened with Carole Baskin on Dancing With The Stars?
After her rise to fame in 2020, Carole made the perfect fodder to go on other reality series and it wasn’t long before she was making her dancefloor debut on America’s version of Strictly Come Dancing in September that year.
In yet another frankly unbelievable turn of events, a television ad aired during the show’s commercial break, reportedly paid for by Don’s family, asking for information on his whereabouts.
‘Don Lewis mysteriously disappeared in 1997,’ said the family lawyer in the typically American info-mercial style ad. ‘His family deserves answers; they deserve justice. Do you know who did this or if Carole Baskin was involved?’
Whew.
In an interview with UK website Metro.co.uk, Carole dismissed the move saying, ‘Someone - a reporter I won’t name - made sure that I knew about it 10 minutes before going out on the dance floor tonight, and you can see that it did not keep me from bringing the best performance of my two weeks of learning.’
At this point we’re unconvinced that the whole Don Lewis storyline isn’t entirely fabricated, given the precedent Tiger King set for outrageousness from the get go.