With a huge amount of people now having watched Netflix's Tiger King in its entirety, more and more are attempting to delve into exactly what happened.
There are a number of questions left unanswered in the show, most notably around Carole Baskin. Baskin is a self-proclaimed animal right activists, but there were doubts surrounding her motivations for 'rescuing' the big cats in her care.
What's more, the disappearance of her first husband was a huge question mark in the seven-episode series.
Baskin has now taken to the internet to discredit the way she was portrayed in Tiger King. In a lengthy post on the Big Cat Rescue website, she attempts to refute a number of claims made in the series.
She says that she agreed to do the documentary under false pretences, when she was told it would br an expose on road side zoos:
When the directors of the Netflix documentary Tiger King came to us five years ago they said they wanted to make the big cat version of Blackfish (the documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld) that would expose the misery caused by the rampant breeding of big cat cubs for cub petting exploitation and the awful life the cats lead in roadside zoos and back yards if they survive.
There are not words for how disappointing it is to see that the series not only does not do any of that, but has had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers...
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 truth. The unsavoury lies are better for getting viewers.
She also goes into great detail to discredit claims that she was involved in the disappearance of her first husband. Don Lewis vanished in 1997 and many have claimed that Baskin had something to with his disappearance. Some even claim that she fed his body to tigers, something that is delved into in the documentary.
Baskin says that the whole thing was sensationalised, with some key information omitted by the filmmakers.
She also believes that the suggestion she used a meat grinder to dispose of the body was ridiculous, with the machine shown in the show much larger than the one she had available at the time, while his links to organised crime in Costa Rica may also have been a factor.
Don spent one week per month in Costa Rica. Don was a man who wanted to have sex daily. He would go to Costa Rica during the week I was having my menstrual cycle. I accepted this as something I had to live with...
Don had told me about people going to Costa Rica and disappearing. Our Costa Rican attorney, Roger Petersen, said the Helicopter Brothers were the local version of the mafia and Don was loaning them money...
The entire discussion of whether Don’s small planes could fly to Costa Rica was totally irrelevant. The planes could not fly that far and no one ever suggested they could. Don had purchased a number of properties in Costa Rica and after his disappearance one of the caretakers called and told me there were people reporting seeing him there.
That is the only reason I urged the police to investigate there. But the series seems to imply I was suggesting he flew one of his planes there...
As Gladys and the daughters did everything they could to make life difficult for me after Don disappeared, they spread this rumour that they thought I had ground Don up and fed him to the cats.
And the media loved it. The meat grinder shown in the video was enormous. Our meat grinder was one of those little tabletop, hand crank things, like you’d have in your kitchen at home.
Baskin also attempts to discredit a number of people interviewed in the show, and we would encourage you to read it to make up your own mind on where you stand on all of this.
