There’s a major new update in the mystery surrounding Tiger King star Carole Baskin’s first husband. Earlier this week, comments that Baskin made during a late 2021 television appearance seem to indicate that her former husband, Don Lewis, might actually be alive after all, after having been missing since 1997. The nature of Lewis’ disappearance was a key component of Netflix’s Tiger King documentary series, with Baskin’s rival, Joe Exotic, insinuating multiple times that she had fed her husband to her big cats. But in 2021, Baskin told ITV’s This Morning that the Department of Homeland Security had contacted her to reveal Lewis’ whereabouts — and that he has been quietly living in Costa Rica.
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“They said my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica,” Baskin told the outlet at the time. “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.”
“I didn’t think he was capable of supporting himself,” Baskin added. “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.”
According to Baskin, the first inkling of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation actually appeared in Tiger King 2, the follow-up to the series that premiered in late 2021.
“One of the really exciting things that came out of Tiger King 2 is that they produced a letter from Homeland Security and it says that a special agent in charge with the FBI at Homeland Security reached out to the sheriff’s detective George [Jorge] Fernandez, which means this had to have happened after 2002, because Homeland Security wasn’t even around until 2002,” Baskin revealed.
Why didn’t Carole Baskin return for Tiger King 2?
Despite that positive development hidden within the sequel series, Baskin herself did not make an appearance in Tiger King 2, and even attempted to sue Netflix to stop its release.
“My family would absolutely not have participated at all if they knew that we were going to be betrayed that way,” Baskin previously told ComicBook.com. “But I feel like everything happens for the good, and that even though it was really hard to live through so much of that right after Tiger King because people were so misled, they felt like they had the absolute right to make things right because they thought that I was this horrible person that should be brought to justice and that Joe should be freed.”
What do you think of this new update surrounding the whereabouts of Carole Baskin’s ex-husband? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
