Between his over-the-top music videos and deep love for exotic animals, Joe Exotic seems like a big enough character to carry Netflix’s Tiger King on his own — until you meet Carole Baskin.
First, viewers meet her from Exotic’s perspective: She’s his rival that ultimately landed him 22 years in jail because, well, he was convicted of trying to hire someone to kill her. But the Netflix docuseries also sheds lights on Baskin’s own story involving her husband’s questionable disappearance in 1997.
While the seven-episode series explored Baskin and Exotic’s wild world in the big cat industry, there’s still so much left to uncover. Here’s everything you need to know about Baskin’s story, where she is know, and what she has to say about the Netflix docuseries.
At 19 years old, Baskin met Tampa millionaire Don Lewis. Ten years later, Lewis left his wife and children, and married Baskin. During their first few years of marriage, Baskin’s interest in big cats blossomed, and the two turned a 40 acre plot of land into Wildlife on Easy Street, a big cat sanctuary that eventually housed 200 cats of 17 species in the late 1990s.
Then Lewis, who at the time was regularly making solo trips to Costa Rica, vanished without a trace on August 18, 1997. While Baskin cooperated with police, they were left without any answers — yet his children (and now many Netflix viewers) speculate that Baskin was involved in his disappearance.
Lewis’ children even speculate that Baskin may have fed him to her tigers. “It’s a perfect scenario to dispose of someone,” his oldest child, Donna Pettis, told People in 1998. “We were upset that the cops didn’t test the DNA on the meat grinder.”
To this day, Baskin maintains her innocence: “My tigers eat meat; they don’t eat people,” she told People . “There would be bones and remains of my husband out there. I’m amazed that people would even think such a thing.” He was officially declared to be dead in 2002.
But Baskin’s story doesn’t stop there: She spent the last two decades embroiled with Exotic over their different views on big cat care. Exotic, for starters, believed that it was important for the public to interact with baby lions and tigers to get a better appreciation for the exotic animals; Baskin clearly disagreed.
At one point, Exotic even made an entire music video to a song aptly named “Here Kitty Kitty,” which focused on the rumors surrounding Baskin’s husband’s disappearance.
Things took a turn in 2011 when Baskin secured a million-dollar judgment against Exotic and his exotic animal park. Shortly after, Exotic posted public threats against Baskin on Facebook and YouTube, eventually leading him to promise to pay an undercover FBI agent $3,000 for her death in November 2017. Following his arrest in 2018, he was later sentenced to 22 years in prison for a murder-for-hire scheme, as well as violating the Endangered Species Act for killing five tigers in 2017.
Wildlife on Easy Street, the sanctuary that Baskin started with her late husband, evolved into Big Cat Rescue. The mission remains the same: “to provide the best home we can for the cats in our care, end abuse of big cats in captivity, and prevent extinction of big cats in the wild.”
Along with her husband Howard Baskin, she works with animal rights organizations like PETA to end the private ownership of big cats, a.k.a. exactly what Exotic was doing. Currently, Big Cat Rescue is home to more than 80 lions, tigers, bobcats, cougars, and other species.
