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Carole Baskin is not loving the way producers made her look on Netflix’s breakout hit Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. The 58-year-old animal rights activist said she believed that the documentary would help advance the causes she cares about. Instead, Baskin’s been turned into an internet meme and most people are very convinced she murdered her husband and fed him to tigers.

Besides the shocking murder allegations, plenty of viewers also accused Baskin of being no better than Joe Exotic and some of the other big cat breeders on the documentary when it came to profiting off animals. So the Big Cat Rescue founder wrote a lengthy blog post to set the record straight.

Carole Baskin
Carole Baskin | Netflix

Carole Baskin accused producers of perpetrating ‘unsavory lies’ to get viewers

Tiger King is one of the wildest, most original documentaries ever produced, which is part of why it’s become so popular so quickly after release. But Baskin rejects the way she’s portrayed on the show and insists it was done to make her look bad — and to get more viewers.

In the blog post, she said the documentary, “had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers,” including the assertions that she murdered her husband Don in 1997.

“The series presents this [murder accusation] 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 unsavory lies are better for getting viewers.”

She stressed the difference between big cat breeders and sanctuary owners

Even though Carole Baskin makes money from her business, she insists that her approach differs from Joe Exotic and other independent zoo owners featured in the documentary.

“At the sanctuary, we take in abandoned, abused, confiscated, and orphaned cats and give them a permanent home,” Baskin wrote. “A sanctuary does not breed, buy, sell, allow people to touch the cats, or put them through the stress of traveling offsite. It is basically a retirement home.”

She goes on to explain that she wishes places like Big Cat Rescue didn’t exist, but they will as long as people keep breeding tiger cubs for petting and photos. Baskin insists that she’s trying solve the problem they create.

Baskin claimed the documentary twisted reality

Joe Exotic went undercover and took a tour at Big Cat Rescue to prove that her facility was sub-par. While there, he took photos of big cats in cages and claimed Baskin was mistreating the animals in her care. But she refuted those accusations.

“[People] have gotten the impression that our enclosures are small because they showed a picture of a tiny part of a large enclosure that Joe Exotic falsely claims is the entire enclosure,” Baskin wrote. “Our smallest enclosure is the size of a small house, about 1200 sf, and our largest is over two acres, all in a natural setting full of foliage.”

She went on to explain that Joe Exotic’s enclosures were much smaller than hers, calling them “prison cells.” Baskin also slammed her rivals’ use of expired Walmart meat to feed his cats.

Someone in the documentary is lying

The Big Cat Rescue owner insists that the documentary makers twisted the truth and made her look guilty of being no better than Joe Exotic. However, her extremely detailed blog post goes point by point defending herself and her facility. Most of all, Baskin is horrified by the claims that she murdered her husband Don — especially now that the case is apparently being investigated again.

Someone is lying in this situation. It’ll take more than a Netflix documentary to figure out the truth of Carole Baskin’s wild life.

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