Hey all you cool cats and kittens. Oh no! I knew
it! I knew we wouldn't get 10 seconds in without
you doing the voice. I had to. It is physically
impossible to see the name Carole Baskin and
not hear that specific, uh... slightly high pitched
floral crown greeting. It's embedded in our cultural
DNA at this point. It really is. It's the official
soundtrack of the early pandemic, isn't it? You
hear that phrase and suddenly it's March 2020.
You're wiping down your groceries with Clorox
wipes. You're trying to make a sourdough starter.
And you are absolutely 100 percent glued to a
docuseries about redneck tiger breeders. It was
a total fever dream. But here's my question.
And I want to be honest with you right off the
bat. Are we really doing a deep dive on a meme?
Because I feel like we all lived through the
Tiger King hype cycle. We laughed, we made the
jokes about the sardine oil, and then, you know,
we moved on. Is there actually enough substance
here for a full conversation, or are we just
rehashing old tabloid fodder? That is exactly
why we are doing this, because the mimification
of Carole Baskin. Completely swallowed the actual
story. It buried it. You think so? Absolutely.
When you strip away the dramatic Netflix editing
and the music videos and all the internet conspiracy
theories, you are left with a biography that
is startlingly dark, legally dense, and believe
it or not, surprisingly consequential. Consequential
how? I mean, beyond being a pop culture footnote.
Well, think about it this way. We treat her like
a joke character, right? But this is a woman
who went from being a teenage runaway slipping
under cars to passing federal legislation that
dismantled an entire American industry. OK, well,
you put it like that. That arc from homelessness
to literally a White House signing ceremony is
wild. And it gets completely buried under the
did she or didn't she kill her husband discourse.
That's a fair point. I think most people, and
I'd include myself in this, know maybe two things
about her. She hates Joe Exotic and her husband
Don vanished under mysterious circumstances.
The rest is just a blur of leopard print. Precisely.
So the mission today is to step out of the Tiger
King editing room. We are going to look at the
raw source material. We're talking court filings,
real estate records, legislative history and
her own biographical accounts. We're going to
try and figure out who Carole Baskin actually
is when the cameras aren't rolling. And I've
looked at the stack of notes you sent over for
this. I have to say. The early life stuff, I
was not prepared for that. It's gritty. It feels
less like a quirky documentary and more like
a survival thriller. It creates a psychological
profile that I think explains everything that
comes later. You can't really understand why
she fights so hard for big cats until you understand
what happened to her in 1975. So let's start
there. Before the cats, before the millions,
before Joe Exotic. Who was Carole Ann Stairs?
Okay. So she was born in 1961 on an Air Force
base in Texas. But the story really starts in
Florida when she's just 14 years old. And this
is a heavy place to begin, but it's the cornerstone
of her entire identity. She reports being gang
raped by three men who lived across the street
from her family home. 14. My God. 14. And here
is the part that seems to have just hardened
her against the world. She claims she received
zero emotional support from her family afterward.
Zero. She was in a strictly religious, very conservative
household. And the sources suggest the attitude
was very much don't talk about it. You know,
sweep it under the rug. This is shameful. We
don't air our dirty laundry. I mean, that's isolating
in a way I can't even begin to quantify. You're
a child. You go through this horrific, life -altering
trauma. And the people who are supposed to be
your safety net just let you free fall. They
cut the net. And so she reacted the way a lot
of traumatized teenagers react. She ran. She
just bolted. She dropped out of high school.
She left home with an employee from the local
roller rink. And this wasn't a gap year adventure.
This was pure survival mode. The details in the
research about this period are so intense. She
wasn't just staying with friends. She was hitchhiking
up and down the East Coast between Florida and
Maine. Back and forth, sleeping under parked
cars to stay out of the rain, scrounging for
food. It's a really... bleak picture. But there's
one detail from this era, what I call the Datsun
truck era, that I think is the key to unlocking
her entire psyche. I know exactly the one you
mean. She eventually saves up enough money to
buy this beat up old truck and she sleeps in
the back of it. But she's not alone. She is sleeping
in the back of a Datsun truck, homeless with
her pet cat. It's such a cinematic image, isn't
it? A teenage girl who feels unsafe in the world
of men and betrayed by her family. curling up
with a predator, albeit a very small one. It
establishes the binary that I think defines her
entire life. Humans are dangerous, they're unreliable,
they're judgmental, cats are safe, they're accepting,
they're loyal. if you look at her life through
that one lens the obsession with the sanctuary
makes perfect logical sense she isn't just saving
tigers she's surrounding herself with the only
being she feels she can actually trust right
it's like she's building a fortress against the
world she escaped exactly a fortress full of
predators who she sees as victims just like herself
but you know you can't live in a truck forever
she eventually lands back in tampa And this leads
directly to her first marriage, which, reading
about it, sounds like a complete disaster from
day one. It was absolutely a product of the times
and her extreme vulnerability. She's 17 years
old. She gets a job working at a department store.
She moves in with her boss, a man named Michael
Murdock. The power dynamic there is already screaming
red flag. A 17 -year -old employee, her older
male boss. A huge red flag. And she is very,
very blunt about this in her biography. She states
clearly that she never loved him, not even a
little bit. She married him in April 1979 for
one reason and one reason only. Her parents.
Her parents. They were deeply disappointed that
she was living in sin. That phrase, living in
sin, it really just anchors you in the cultural
pressure of the late 70s, especially in the Bible
Belt. She literally trapped herself in a loveless
marriage to appease the same parents who allegedly
ignored her trauma. And it backfired almost immediately.
She becomes a mother at 19, but she describes
the relationship as deeply abusive, possessive,
controlling, violent. Which brings us to 1981
and the incident that changed everything, the
potato incident. Okay, I have to pause here.
When I first saw the potato incident in the outline,
I thought it was a typo. You have to walk me
through this because it sounds completely absurd.
It sounds ridiculous, but in the moment, it must
have been terrifying. It's a night in October
1981. She's 19. She says Murdoch attacked her.
In her desperation to get away, she grabs the
nearest object she can find in the kitchen. A
potato. A potato. And she hurls it at him. It
apparently surprised him enough to buy her a
split second of confusion, and in that moment,
she bolts. It's literally fight or flight with
a potato. She runs out of the house. She has
no shoes on. She is barefoot. She is 19 years
old. And she is running down Nebraska Avenue
in Tampa in the middle of the night. Now, for
anyone who doesn't know Tampa, Nebraska Avenue
in the 80s was it was rough. It was known for
street crime, prostitution. It wasn't a place
you wanted to be walking alone at night, let
alone barefoot and fleeing an attack. And this
is where the movie script kicks in because a
car pulls over. A car pulls over and inside is
a man named Don Lewis. The Don Lewis, the man
who become the center of this decades long mystery.
What was he like back then? Was he already the
millionaire eccentric that we hear about? He
was a self -made man and significantly older
than her. He was already wealthy or at least
well on his way. And importantly, he was married.
Right. But he stops. He picks up this barefoot,
terrified girl off the street. And that single
encounter changes the entire trajectory of her
life forever. I think the popular narrative,
the one from Tiger King, is that she was a gold
digger. Yeah. That she saw a rich guy and latched
on. But the timeline doesn't really support that
simple a story, does it? It's much more complex.
They do start an affair. That's true. They are
both married to other people. But she doesn't
just sit around spending his money. She becomes,
in many ways, the architect of his growing fortune.
How so? Don Lewis was good at, let's say, spotting
opportunities. But Carol was apparently good
at executing the details. She had this incredibly
sharp, intuitive mind for systems and paperwork.
This is the part that really surprised me. She's
a high school dropout who'd been homeless. How
is she suddenly managing a complex real estate
empire? It seems she just had a knack for it.
By 1984, she's the one handling the business.
She's helping him buy and sell property. She's
navigating the complexities of tax deeds. She's
dealing with foreclosures. This requires a level
of financial and legal literacy that, frankly,
most people with MBAs struggle with. And she
learned it all on the fly. So she wasn't just
a passenger in his success. She was the co -pilot.
She was actively building the wealth. Absolutely.
She helped build the very wealth that would eventually
fund the sanctuary. They both divorced their
spouses. They married each other in 1991. And
the very next year, 1992, they buy a plot of
land and start a business called Wildlife on
Easy Street. Easy Street. The irony of that name,
given everything that happened there. It was
anything but. Now, we need to clarify something
really important here, because I think a lot
of people get this wrong. When they started Wildlife
on Easy Street, it wasn't a rescue, was it? It
was basically the exact kind of operation she
fights against now. This is the crucial arc of
activism that gets lost in the memes. You have
to understand where she started to understand
where she ended up. In 1992, they were breeders.
They were buying and selling exotic cats for
profit. So they were part of the problem. They
were the problem, by her current definition.
They had leopards, ocelots, all sorts of cats.
They even had a bizarre side hustle using llamas
to trim people's lawns. Wait, wait, llamas for
lawn trimming? You mentioned that, but I thought
you were kidding. Not kidding. It was a real
business. They are hustlers. They were trying
to monetize these animals in any way they possibly
could. They were part of the trade. They were
the people supplying the cubs that end up in
roadside zoos and private hands. So what changed?
What was the turning point? Did she just wake
up one day and have a moral epiphany? Or was
it a more gradual process? The sources point
to a major shift around 1996 or 1997. And it
seems to be the realization of the brutal math
of breeding. The math. Yeah. Think about it.
If you breed a tiger, you get cute, cuddly cubs.
Everybody wants to pay $100 to take a photo with
a cub. It's a cash cow for about 8 to 12 rents.
But that cute cub grows into a 500 -pound apex
predator in six months. It eats 40 pounds of
meat a day. becomes incredibly dangerous and
expensive, you can't keep it in your house. So
what do you do with it? You have to sell it.
You have to get rid of it. And once you sell
it, you lose all control of what happens to it.
That's what she realized. She was feeding a pipeline
of abuse. She started to see where her babies
were ending up, in tiny, rusted cages in someone's
backyard, in basements, or worse, killed for
their parts on the black market. So they made
a decision. They stopped all breeding. They transitioned
from a commercial zoo to a nonprofit sanctuary.
And this transition, this moral awakening, happens
to coincide almost perfectly with the complete
disintegration of her marriage to Don. The two
events are almost certainly linked. Don Lewis
was a businessman, first and foremost. Breeding
is profitable. Rescuing is a financial black
hole. You can just imagine the tension that creates
in a marriage. Let's talk about Don Lewis. Yeah.
Because the Internet and certainly Tiger King
has painted him as this sort of kindly, eccentric
old man who was murdered and fed to tigers. But
the documents from that time paint a picture
of a guy who was, well. Complicated is putting
it mildly. Complicated is a very generous word.
In her accounts, Carol claims he was sex obsessed.
She alleges he would regularly fly to Costa Rica
specifically to have affairs with younger women.
I remember that from the show. She even notes
this bizarre and humiliating detail that he would
time these trips to coincide with her menstrual
cycle. It's just a very specific and cruel detail
to include if it's not true. It's deeply personal.
What else? She also claims he was diagnosed with
bipolar disorder shortly before he disappeared.
She describes him as a severe hoarder, not just
a collector, but someone who would dumpster dive,
who would fill their 40 acre property with. Junk
vehicles, scrap metal, broken appliances. So
you have this pressure cooker environment, a
property filled with dozens of dangerous big
cats, piles of scrap metal, and a couple whose
marriage is actively imploding. Exactly. And
then comes the restraining order. This is the
smoking gun for everyone in the Carole Did It
camp. Right. July 1997. Don goes to a judge and
files a restraining order. And in it, he explicitly
writes that Carole threatened to kill him. This
is the second time she has threatened to kill
me. That's the quote. I mean, if you were a homicide
detective investigating the disappearance, that
is Exhibit A. It seems impossible to get around.
It looks incredibly damning on the surface. She
threatened to kill me. It's right there in black
and white. But we have to look at what the legal
system actually did with that claim. And what
was that? The judge rejected the order, threw
it out. Why? If someone goes to a court and says,
my wife is going to kill me. You'd think the
court would err on the side of caution. You would.
But Carol's counter argument, which the judge
apparently found more credible, was that the
dispute wasn't about a threat of violence at
all. It was about the hoarding. About the junk.
About the junk. She was clearing out his piles
of scrap metal and broken equipment while he
was away in Costa Rica. He got angry and she
claims filed the order as a legal maneuver to
stop her from throwing away his stuff. And the
judge bought that. It seems so. The judge didn't
see a credible threat to his life. This is the
most crucial part for me. Don continued to live
with her in the same house after the order was
rejected. That's the part that sticks for me,
too. If I genuinely believe my spouse is plotting
my murder, I am not sleeping under the same roof.
I'm at a Motel 6. I'm gone. 100%. It strongly
suggests the threat might have been a hyperbolic
statement made in anger or a strategic move in
a divorce negotiation that never happened. Because
it never got that far. It never got that far.
Because on August 18th, 1997, Don Lewis vanishes.
The disappearance. He leaves the house early
in the morning and just never comes back. His
van is found a couple of days later. His van
is found at a small executive airport in Pasco
County. The keys are inside. But there is no
flight plan filed, no record of him chartering
a plane, no sign of him on any manifest. He just
evaporates. And then the war begins, not just
the police investigation, but the battle over
the estate. Oh, it was vicious. On one side,
you have Carol. On the other, you have Don's
four adult children from his first marriage,
and they despised her. They believed she was
a gold digger from day one. And then she produces
the will. She produces the will. and a power
of attorney, which gives her control of the entire
estate in the event of his disappearance. The
children cried foul immediately. They claimed
the signature was forged. They said the language
about disappearance was suspicious. But she won,
right? The courts ultimately upheld the documents.
They did. After years of legal battles, the courts
ruled in her favor. She prevailed. She inherited
the bulk of the estate, which was valued at several
million dollars, including the all -important
sanctuary land. Don was declared legally dead
five years and one day after he vanished in 2002.
Okay, we have to address the meat grinder theory.
Tiger King spent so much time on this, the idea
that she killed him... put him through a meat
grinder and fed him to the tigers. It's the most
gruesome and therefore the most memorable theory.
It's the entire reason the sargine oil meme exists.
But let's look at the actual forensics. The Hillsborough
County Sheriff's Office searched the property
extensively. They looked at the meat grinders.
And what did they find? The meat grinders on
the property were commercial grade, yes, but
for grinding chicken and other meat for the smaller
cats. They were not giant industrial wood chipper
style machines. To put a grown man's body through
one of those, it's not physically plausible without
dismembering the body into tiny, tiny pieces
first. Which would leave a massive forensic mess.
Yeah. Blood, tissue. A huge mess. And they found
nothing, no human DNA, no blood evidence. And
trust me, looking for trace amounts of blood
in a sanctuary that processes thousands of pounds
of raw meat is hard. But luminol technology is
very good. They found nothing to suggest a murder
took place on that property. So despite the endless
memes, despite the catchy TikTok songs, the official
status of the Don Lewis case is? It is an open,
active cold case. There has never been any evidence
found of a crime. No suspect has ever been named.
No charges have ever been filed. So what about
that bombshell from Tiger King 2? I remember
seeing headlines everywhere. Don Lewis found
alive. They had a letter from Homeland Security
saying he was alive and well in Costa Rica. This
is a perfect example of why you have to actually
check your sources and not just trust a documentary's
dramatic reveal. A lawyer for Don's family produced
a letter, supposedly from Homeland Security,
claiming that federal agents had made contact
with Don in Costa Rica after his disappearance.
On the surface, it seemed like the... Except
for one tiny glaring problem that Carole Baskin
herself pointed out immediately. The letter discusses
events from 1997. The Department of Homeland
Security was created in November 2002 in response
to the 9 -11 attacks. Right. You cannot have
a letter from a federal government agency five
years before that agency even exists. It is a
chronological impossibility. So the letter was
a fake. Or just completely wrong. It was almost
certainly a misinterpretation of a document from
a different agency like customs or an outright
fabrication. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's
Office immediately shot it down. They released
a statement saying we have not received any communication
from federal officials that Mr. Lewis has been
located. So no, Don Lewis is not sipping mojitos
on a beach in Costa Rica. No, he is for all legal
and practical purposes deceased. So Carol is
now a wealthy widow. running a growing sanctuary
and dealing with this cloud of suspicion. And
what does she do? She doubles down on the activism.
She starts going after other big cat owners.
And that inevitably puts her on a collision course
with the mulleted one. Joe Exotic, the clash
of the titans, the irresistible force meeting
the immovable object. I think a lot of people
view their feud as just two eccentric, fame -hungry
people. hating each other, you know, like a standard
reality show beef. But it was actually deeply
strategic and ideological, wasn't it? It was
entirely economic and it started long before
the cameras showed up. Joe Exotic's entire business
model revolved around one thing. Traveling to
shopping malls with baby tigers. The cub petting
tour. Come pet a cub for 50 bucks. It was a cash
cow. It's how he funded his entire operation.
And Carol didn't just disagree with it. She attacked
that revenue stream directly. How? She launched
a digital insurgency. She had this army of online
volunteers, her big cat rescuers, who would track
where Joe was scheduled to appear. Then they
would bombard the mall management with emails
and phone calls. Do you know these animals are
abused? Do you know the safety risks involved?
Do you want this bad PR? That is incredibly effective.
Malls are massively risk -averse. They do not
want controversy. Not at all. And it worked.
The malls started canceling Joe's shows. He would
drive his whole crew halfway across the country,
set up his tent, and then get a call from management
kicking him out. He was bleeding money. This
wasn't just Carol's being mean. She was actively
bankrupting him. So Joe retaliates. Yeah. And
he doesn't do it subtly. He does it on his bizarre,
unhinged YouTube show. He films himself shooting
blow -up dolls dressed to look like her. He makes
endless, vile threats. But his biggest and ultimately
fatal mistake was the trademark infringement.
This is where the legal weeds get really interesting.
Explain this to me, because trademark infringement
sounds so boring and corporate. But in this story,
it's the move that cost him everything. It was
brilliant. Legally speaking, Joe realized that
the name Big Cat Rescue had a good reputation.
It was a well -known charity. People donated
to it. So he decided to steal it. He rebranded
his own roadside zoo and his traveling show.
He started calling it Big Cat Rescue Entertainment.
No way. Oh, yeah. He copied her logo design.
He even got a fake phone number with a Florida
area code that would secretly route calls to
his zoo in Oklahoma. That is diabolical. He was
literally catfishing her donors. He was trying
to create what the law calls consumer confusion.
He wanted people to Google Big Cat Rescue, find
him by mistake and give him their money. Or even
better for him, he wanted people to think her
legitimate sanctuary was the one bringing tiger
cubs to malls in order to destroy her reputation.
So she sues him. This isn't just YouTube drama
anymore. This is federal court. She sues him
for trademark infringement. And it is an open
and shut case. The evidence was overwhelming.
In 2013, a federal judge orders Joe to pay Carole
Baskin $1 million. $1 million. For a guy who
was already bleeding money and living out of
a trailer at a zoo, that's an impossible sum.
It was the financial death blow. He immediately
files for bankruptcy. But Joe, being Joe, tries
to cheat his way out of it. He signs over the
ownership. of the entire zoo property to his
mother for like $10. A classic fraudulent transfer.
To hide the asset. To make it look like he had
nothing for Carol to seize to pay the million
dollar debt. Exactly. And the courts really,
really frowned on that. It took years to unwind,
but eventually the judge ruled that the transfer
was illegal and void. And the remedy for that
fraud, the judge gave the land to Carole. This
is the part of the story that still feels like
it's from a movie script. The court literally
gave the Tiger King Park to his arch nemesis.
It is the ultimate, most savage irony. In June
of 2020, while Joe Exotic is sitting in federal
prison, Carol Baskin is legally handed the keys
to the GW Zoo in Wynwood, Oklahoma. So what does
she do with it? Is there a Big Cat Rescue Oklahoma
branch now? No. She didn't want the zoo. She
wanted to destroy the idea of the zoo. She sold
the property with a very strict legally binding
deed restriction. Which was? That the land can
never again be used as a zoo or to house exotic
animals of any kind ever again. She salted the
earth. She made sure another Joe Exotic could
never rise from those ashes. That is ruthless.
I mean, it's effective, but it's a ruthless final
move. It's perfectly consistent with her stated
mission. Her goal was to end that industry. Taking
the most famous roadside zoo in the world and
ensuring it could never be used for that purpose
again is the final nail in the coffin. We kind
of skipped over the why is Joe in prison part,
but I feel like that's the part everyone knows.
The mooter for hire plot. Right. After losing
the lawsuit and going bankrupt, he became obsessed
and desperate. He was convicted of attempting
to hire two different men, one of whom was an
undercover FBI agent to travel to Florida and
kill her. And he was sentenced to 22 years, later
resentenced to 21. Correct. But what's really
interesting is Carol's reaction to his conviction.
She wasn't out there doing victory laps or gloating.
She released a very sober statement pointing
out that this isn't about one bad apple. It's
about a corrupt orchard. She always, always pivots
back to the mission. This just proves why private
ownership of big cats is so dangerous and needs
to be banned. Which brings us to March 2020.
The documentary drops. The world shuts down.
And suddenly, overnight, Carole Baskin is one
of the most famous women on the planet. And not
in the way she ever wanted or expected. We talked
about the meme, but how did she react to what
she saw as a betrayal? Because the story is that
she thought she was participating in a very different
kind of documentary. Yes. The filmmakers, Eric
Good and Rebecca Chaiklin, pitched the project
to her and her husband Howard as the Blackfish
of Big Cats. For context, Blackfish was that
hugely influential documentary that exposed the
treatment of orcas at SeaWorld and basically
tanked their public image. Exactly. Carol thought
this was her moment. This was her chance to show
the whole world the cruelty behind the cub petting
industry she had been fighting for 20 years.
They told her the Joe Exotic feud and the Don
Lewis disappearance would just be, you know,
background context. And instead, she got a seven
part series that centered the mystery of her
husband's death and a music video of Joe Exotic
singing. You're a kitty kitty with a carol lookalike
feeding meat to a tiger. She was, by all accounts,
horrified and devastated. She felt the producers
completely lied to her. She accused them of framing
her for her husband's death using lies and innuendos.
They gave Jo the sympathetic, lovable, rogue
edit, and they handed her the classic crazy cat
lady villain edit. The public reaction was immediate
and brutal. I remember seeing the death threat
she was getting online. It was a glo - global
pile on. It was. But look at what she did next.
This goes back to the resilience we talked about
from her teenage years. She didn't hide. She
didn't delete her social media accounts and disappear.
She went on Dancing with the Stars. That was
one of the most surreal moments of the pandemic.
Watching Carole Baskin in a full leopard print
ball gown dancing a Paso Doble to Eye of the
Tiger. It was cringe inducing, maybe, but it
was also a brilliant power move. She was saying,
you can laugh at me, but you can't erase me.
You can't banish me. She used every single interview
on that massive platform to talk about the cats
and legislation she was pushing. And she fought
back legally against Netflix when they announced
the sequel. She did. She and Howard sued Netflix
and the production company to stop them from
using any footage of her in Tiger King 2, arguing
it was a breach of their original appearance
contracts. Did it work? She ultimately lost the
injunction on First Amendment groans, but she
made her point very publicly. She refused to
participate in any way. She told the press the
producers could lose her number. And while the
entire Internet was busy making fun of her dancing
and relitigating a cold case, she was actually
in the final stage. of achieving the one thing
she set out to do two decades ago. Let's talk
about the legislation, the real endgame. The
big cat Public Safety Act. This is the real legacy.
This is the checkmate. What does the act actually
do? Because a lot of federal laws sound good,
but are ultimately toothless. This one has very
sharp teeth. It was passed by Congress with broad
bipartisan support and signed into law by President
Biden on December 20, 2022. It does two main
things. First, it bans direct public contact
with big cats. That means no more cub petting,
period. That kills the entire business model
of roadside zoos. Instantly. It evaporates it
overnight. If you can't charge 50 bucks for a
photo with a baby tiger, you can't afford to
keep breeding them. It cuts off the primary money
supply for people like Joe Exotic and Jeff Lowe.
And what's the second major provision? It phases
out the private ownership of big cats as pets.
If you already own a tiger or a lion, you're
grandfathered in, but you have to register it
with the federal government. You are not allowed
to breed it and you are not allowed to sell it
or acquire any new ones. So once the current
generation of privately owned pet tigers dies
off, there will be no more. That's it. In 15
or 20 years, the era of the Tiger King in America
will literally be extinct. Wow. That is a much
bigger deal than I think people realize. She
actually did it. She did it. And you have to
understand, she spent 24 years lobbying for this.
She started walking the halls of Congress in
1998. She was wearing out shoe leather in Washington,
D .C., meeting with staffers, building coalitions,
getting doors slammed in her face for decades.
You know, when you frame it like that, the entire
epic feud with Joe Exotic feels like a complete
distraction, like a sideshow to the main event.
It was a sideshow, a very loud, very... dramatic
sideshow that got all the attention. But Joe
Exotic was a symptom of the disease. The Big
Cat Public Safety Act was the cure. Joe is in
prison, his zoo is a vacant lot, and the law
he spent years mocking and fighting against is
now the law of the land. Carole Baskin won. It
wasn't pretty, and she took a lot of personal
damage along the way, but on every single major
front, she won. And she's still evolving personally.
We should mention she came out in 2020 during
the height of all this. Yes. In an interview,
she came out as bisexual. She said she's always
felt that way, but grew up in a time and place
where that wasn't something you talked about.
And she's still happily married to Howard. Very.
He, by the way, deserves some kind of medal for
being the most supportive, unflappable husband
in recent memory. Howard, the guy who was always
there in the background, patiently recording
those video messages with her. He really is a
ride or die partner. He's the chairman of her
advisory board. He has a Harvard MBA. He's the
one who helped her craft the legal strategies
against Joe Exotic and Netflix. They are an incredibly
formidable team. So let's wrap this up. We started
this deep dive by asking if Carole Baskin is
more than just a meme. I think the answer is
pretty clearly yes. She is a figure of massive,
jarring contradictions to the Internet. She's
a joke and the prime suspect in a cold case to
the legal system. She's the documented victim
of domestic abuse, trademark theft and an attempted
murder for hire plot. And to the animal rights
movement, she is a legislative pioneer who successfully
ended a cruel and dangerous industry in the United
States. It really makes you think about how easily
we, the public, get manipulated by a good edit.
Tiger King made millions of people sympathize
with the guy who admitted on camera to shooting
five tigers in the head to make space in their
cages. Okay. Because he was funny and charismatic.
Right. And it made us vilify the woman who was
trying to pass a law to stop him because she
was annoying, corny, a little awkward on camera.
Because she was earnest. And because she was
a woman in power who refused to be bullied into
silence. And the Internet, as a general rule,
has a real problem with that combination. That's
the heavy truth right there, isn't it? What a
story. But the scoreboard doesn't lie. The law
is passed. The Tigers are safer. And Carole Baskin
is still standing. Well, I am never going to
look at a potato the same way again. Yeah. Or
a Datsun truck, for that matter. The potato is
a symbol of resilience, of using what you have
at hand to escape. It really is. Thank you for
walking me through all this. It was. It was so
much wilder and more complex than I remembered.
It's always in the source material. You just
have to be willing to read past the headlines
and the memes. Well said. All right. That's it
for this deep dive. Our advice to you, don't
buy a tiger. Definitely don't join a murder plot.
And we'll catch you on the next one.