'Tiger King': Is Carole King really the Mother Teresa of cats? Fans of Netflix show feel she is a 'petty b***h'
Spoiler Alert for 'Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness'
The cat is out of the bag. Netflix's bizarre documentary 'Tiger King' became an overnight sensation but left a string of questions in mind. As viewers from across the globe watched the seven-episode miniseries, two characters stayed with them.
The series revolves around the stranger-than-fiction world of big cat owners — and the "worst kind of love story" or a murder-for-hire plot between former Oklahoma zoo operator Joseph Maldonado-Passage or 'Joe Exotic' and animal rights activist Carole Baskin.
In the series, Carole is introduced as the "Mother Teresa of cats." The question is: is that really true or just another way to put someone undeserving on a pedestal? Along with her then-husband Don Lewis, she founded Big Cat Rescue, an animal sanctuary near Tampa for big cats, in 1992.
"I really believe in life that you can only be good at one thing. With saving the cats, it's one thing that I can fix if I can just stay focused on that. So I don't read the newspaper, I don't watch television unless there's a cat involved," she says.
In her introduction, she gushes about how tigers can go from being harmless to ferocious animals who would tear your skin apart. "I live, eat and breathe ending the captivity of wild cats. And I know that I'm gonna see this through to the end," she says. Talking about what makes her different, she says, "What really sets apart a Big Cat Rescue from a zoo is that we are fixing the problem, they are creating the problem."
The series, however, soon paints her as a shady villain, no better than the big cat abusers, drug kingpins, and cult leaders she wished to shut down. While the story should have dived into Exotic's ploy that got him sentenced to 22 years in prison, viewers found a new conspiracy theory. Fans were initially convinced that Carole killed her ex-husband Lewis and fed him to her big cats, they now also believe that one of Joe's ally-turned-opponent, Jeff Lowe, is Carole's abusive ex-husband and she hired him to frame Joe.
With all the allegations and misconstrued comments about how fans are simply focusing on her former husband's 1997 disappearance, Carole feels betrayed by the 'Tiger King' makers.
“I just feel so angry that people have totally missed the point,” she told the Tampa Bay Times in her first interview since the series aired. “And the point is these cubs are being abused and exploited and the public is enabling that.”
Moreover, the death threats floating around on social media have terrified her to such an extent that she doesn't want to step out of her house. Reportedly, she has seen drones flying over her home and over 30 people lingering around the main gates.
“There’s almost no way to describe the intensity of the feeling of betrayal,” her new husband Howard Baskin said.
A Reddit user, who claims to be an intern at Big Cat Rescue, opened up about Carole's representation in the documentary. "I have watched the whole thing. The most surprising to me was how many people Joe got to vote for him as governor. The most misrepresented was Carole. They do not show her for who she really is," the user wrote.
Another one added, "She and her followers stalked him for years and put his traveling show out of business that made him hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. I don't agree with Joe or any of his actions but I can understand how mad he would be at someone who cost him a large part of his income and stalked him and sends people to his property to break in after hours to film things or whatever."
One posted, "I still am not sure about Carol's husband, but I definitely did get the vibes that the show was biased towards the "she totally did it" angle. Admittedly, it doesn't look good for her haha." Another added, "Yeah literally everything they showed involving her husband's disappearance and the circumstances afterward made her seem pretty guilty. And when she described the various accusations about her killing him or feeding him to the tigers, she did this weird eye roll thing that made her seem like she was lying."
Many viewers were correct in saying that one is worse than the other. "From the few episodes I've seen it looks like two nutjobs going at each other and I'm not yet convinced that this isn't the case, despite one being worse than the other," one comment read and another said, "I don't think the documentary tried to say BCR is as exploitive. I think the documentary painted Carol as a petty bitch, which I believe she is," adding, "She wants to save cats sure... But her ego is more important or she wouldn't have engaged in the feud the way she did. She's just as narcissistic and displays it in a different way. BCR was totally portrayed better than GW multiple times and multiple ways."
With all the scandals, the Netflix miniseries seems to have sparked quite an outrage on the Internet and it is hard to take sides. One thing, however, is sure that comparing Carole King to Mother Teresa (even for cats) is akin to blasphemy.