A little over a year ago, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness hit Netflix and turned people like Joe Exotic, Jeff Lowe, and Doc Antle into household names. Though the Netflix docuseries primarily focuses on Exotic and his imprisonment stemming from 17 federal animal cruelty charges, it also features a wide arrange of others throughout its seven episodes. One of those people is Carole Baskin, someone who has been increasingly vocal about how the show portrayed her and her operation.
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Despite that, Baskin tells us she’d do the experience all over again, even though she feels betrayed by how to producers of the Netflix show portrayed her on the docuseries. We asked the activist-turned-Dancing with the Stars contestant if she’d still agree to appear on the show given everything she now knows.
“If you ask me that you’ll get a different answer than if you ask my family that. My family would absolutely not have participated at all if they knew that we were going to be betrayed that way,” she says. “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.”
Baskin adds, “So even though that was difficult, I think the interest will be that our federal bill passes and it will ban the cub petting that people saw in Tiger King. It will ban ripping those cubs away from their mothers the way they saw that in Tiger King and the public is all for ending that kind of abuse. And I don’t think the public even knew that abuse existed for the most part before Tiger King so to me, it was worthwhile.”
That bill is the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which would make it illegal to own big cats like lions and tigers. That bill initially passed the United States House of Representatives last December, but a new Congress was sworn in before it could be sent to the Senate chambers. That means Baskin and other big cat lobbiers are back the ground zero with the bill, hoping to get in front of a Congressional committee as soon a possible.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is now streaming on Netflix.
