The co-directors and writers of Tiger King, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, have responded to Carole Baskin‘s disappointment and annoyance at how she was portrayed in the frankly chaotic documentary series. And that’s putting it lightly because Goode absolutely torched her and every single big cat lover in the series.
After the documentary premiered, Baskin posted a statement to her website refuting the rumour that she murdered her second husband, Don Lewis. She shared her disappointment that Goode and Chaiklin had not delivered “the big cat version of Blackfish (the documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld)” – which they had apparently pitched to her five years ago – but instead created a doco “as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers.”
She said episode three, which was devoted to the rumour, focused on the “lies and innuendos from people who are not credible”, including Lewis’ first wife and daughters.
“The series presents this without any regard for the truth or in most cases even giving me an opportunity before publication to rebut the absurd claims. They did not care about the truth. The unsavoury lives are better for getting viewers,” she wrote.
Over the weekend, the statement was updated to include a video message from Howard Baskin, Carole’s husband. Howard shared his deep disappointment that Tiger King wasn’t a meaningful documentary about the mistreatment of tigers in private zoos.
“In a way, this series is about con artists. People like Joe Exotic and Doc Antle who con people out of their money by convincing them that paying to pet tiger cubs somehow helps conservation,” Howard said. “In my view, the biggest con artist of them all is Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin. I believe they are devoid of integrity, don’t care about the animals and clearly, clearly do not care about the truth. As far as I can tell their goal was to make something as inflammatory and salacious as possible so that Netflix would pay them millions for it. ”
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Goode and Chaiklin responded to the statement.
Chaiklin was super diplomatic in her answer, telling the Times that like with “any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change.”
“We could have never known when we started this project that it was going to land where it did,” she said.
Goode, who appears in the documentary, was not so diplomatic. In fact, he really just went in on Baskin and all of the subjects of Tiger King. Firstly, he said that Baskin was well aware that Tiger King was not a Blackfish sort of documentary, because she did openly discuss her childhood, her past marriages, and the disappearance of Lewis. “She certainly wasn’t coerced,” Goode said.
But wait, there’s more.
“The other thing I would say about all these people is that there was a lack of intellectual curiosity to really go and understand or even see these animals in the wild,” Goode continued. “Certainly, Carole really had no interest in seeing an animal in the wild…. The lack of education, frankly, was really interesting – how they had built their own little utopias and really were only interested in that world and the rules they had created.”
WOOF.
Doc Antle, who founded the Myrtle Beach Safari, also had his say, calling the documentary “sensationalised entertainment with paid participants” in a post on Instagram that has since disappeared. Chaiklin said they paid for a “few locations here or there and a couple of life right deals” because at one point there were around eight other documentaries getting about. But, “we do not pay people for interviews.”
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is streaming now on Netflix.
