Carole Baskin, the anti-animal cruelty activist, made famous this spring by Netflix’s wildly popular Tiger King documentary, is apparently getting her own TV show. The founder and operator of the Big Cat Rescue animal sanctuary made a career battling potential perpetrators of abuse against big cats, including the now-infamous “Tiger King” himself, Joe Exotic.
While Baskin’s work in animal rights goes back decades, she shot into the international limelight with the release of Tiger King, which chronicled her years-long feud with Exotic and his various big cat projects. The documentary also went in-depth on the mysterious disappearance and presumed death of Baskin’s former husband, Don Lewis. Lewis’s family has suggested Baskin partially orchestrated the death. Most recently, Baskin made her Dancing with the Stars debut on September 14th, in a choreographed pasodoble dance set to the hit 1980s song Eye of the Tiger.
According to a report from Variety, Baskin and her new husband Howard are currently developing a show with Thinkfactory Media, aiming to bring light to the history of animal rights violations from different prominent figures and groups. Thinkfactory Media CEO Adam Reed described Carol and Howard as “fun, intense, unpredictable, wildly driven, and, oh yeah, they’ve very recently become pop-culture sensations” in a statement regarding the project, which is reportedly being shopped to different networks and streaming services.
While Baskin’s celebrity has certainly elevated to high levels for the past six months, she remains a somewhat controversial figure. The apparent similarities between Big Cat Rescue and the private zoos Baskin fights against have been called into question by many. In contrast, others believe she likely caused her former husband’s disappearance, despite a lack of concrete evidence. On the other side, many have come out in defense of Baskin in the wake of Tiger King, criticizing viewers for attacking her while at the same time celebrating many of the men featured in the documentary who have explicitly committed crimes.
Whatever your thoughts on Baskin, she’s undoubtedly a charismatic and fascinating figure, and any project featuring her is likely to draw significant attention from fans of Tiger King. In the meantime, Don Lewis’s family continues to search for answers about his disappearance over twenty years later. A TV ad spot run by the family during Baskin’s Dancing with the Stars debut offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone with information on Lewis’s whereabouts.
Source: Variety