As the coronavirus quarantine continues, many of us have a lot more time to kill than usual. For Carole Baskin, she’s killing time by explaining, once again, that she definitely didn’t kill anybody.
Though Tiger King centered around the unbelievable exploits of Oklahoma zookeeper Joe Exotic, most viewers came away from the series with one question: did Carole kill her husband (and feed him to the tigers)?
Kinda sexist when you think about it, huh?
Related: Joe Exotic Nearly Became The ‘Wolf King’!
The series opened up a rabbit hole of people getting interested in the cold case disappearance of Baskin’s second husband Don Lewis. The show’s popularity even prompted a Florida sheriff’s office to ask the public for leads in the investigation.
Meanwhile, Carole herself said she’s afraid to leave the house because of the death threats she’s been receiving. (Even Cardi B has taken up Joe’s refrain of calling Carole a “bitch”).
So what does the animal lover do? For starters she wrote a lengthy response to the allegations made in the docuseries and posted it to the Big Cat Rescue website.
Well, that website has gotten a major upgrade. The 58-year-old has recorded a series of videos to complement her original post, because “apparently people can’t or won’t read.”
The shade!
One of the aspects of the series that made Carole look particularly greedy and insensitive was her “going after” Joe’s mother. In reality, Baskin says that’s “not how it happened.” She explained:
“When we went after Joe for exploiting our name and our photos, we got the judgment against him and he had put the zoo back into his mother’s name to keep us from being able to collect on the judgment. So we had to name her in order to set things right. Later, she came forward and admitted that all of it was done fraudulently, Joe put her up to it, and we released her from the lawsuit. All of that nonsense you saw about her crying in her living room and blaming it all on me had to have been something that either Joe or the producers of Tiger King had orchestrated, because we released her from the lawsuit.”
Echoing claims made by Joe’s niece Chealsi Putman, Carole insisted that Joe was the one who truly mistreated his mother — and she said that she knows for a fact Joe’s siblings hate him for it!
“I don’t know why you didn’t get to see that footage and I hope somebody actually will reach out to his brothers and sisters because they know Joe, and they know what a cruel person he has been for his entire life. THey won’t be telling you that he changed, or that he let money go to his head, or any of those kinds of things. They know that when he was younger he was shooting animals and pretending to bring them back to life.”
Uhh… what!? Pretending to bring them back to life? We need to know more!
The major claim that stems from the series, of course, is that Carole is responsible for the disappearance (and death) of her husband Don. In a long video about their relationship, she described him as someone who “could barely read or write”, and that she wished she had handled their relationship differently:
“I met Don Lewis when I was 19 in 1981, and he was 22 or 23 years my senior. … If I had been the person I am today, I absolutely would have ended it. But I was a 19 year old kid. I was stupid, and I was desperate for somebody who loved me, and I thought he did.”
She described Don as a philanderer, and even claimed that his wife Gladys asked him for a divorce because he had sexually assaulted his niece, who was a minor. (“I felt like the way that I was so smitten by him, that surely it was consensual like Don had said that it was,” she admitted).
Related: Watch The HILARIOUS Honest Trailer For Tiger King!
Before his disappearance, she maintained he was irrational and erratic, and that more than once she had to drive around town because he had a habit of rooting through dumpsters and getting himself stuck.
She also cited a video from the sheriff’s office that refuted the popular claims she put her husband through a meat grinder or put his body in the septic tank. (TLDR: neither of those things were available on her property at the time of Don’s disappearance.)
The videos are super thorough and address many other points from the series, such as Big Cat Rescue keeping the cats in cages comparable to Joe’s zoo (not true, according to Carole) or that they don’t pay their workers (the staff is paid for “boring” jobs, while volunteers are happy to work with the cats for free).
It’s a LOT of info, but we’re starting to think this cat lady has some good points! What do U think, Perezcious readers? Are you convinced?
Ch-ch-check out more of her videos (below) — if not for Carole spilling the tea, then for her rotating cat-themed accessories!
[Image via Carole Baskin/YouTube]
The post ICYMI: Carole Baskin Recorded A Series Of Videos Refuting <i>Tiger King</i> Claims appeared first on Perez Hilton.