Netflix’s Tiger King introduces audiences to a handful of large-cat owners in America who need to be seen to be believed. (Joe Exotic—the mulleted, gun-toting, cowboy at the show’s center is a combination of Joe Dirt and Arrested Development’s Gob, dabbling in magic shows and homemade music videos when he is not tending to his animals.) Though the seven-part docuseries, from Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, tracks the colorful operators of private zoos in the not-so-distant past—Joe Exotic was sentenced to 22 years in prison just this January for his murder-for-hire plot and other wildlife violations—there are already updates on the over-the-top personalities, most of whom had not seen the series before it premiered Friday.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Chaiklin suggested that seeing Tiger King could be a wake-up call for some of the characters featured. “There will be some people who are really happy with the series,” said Chaiklin. “There will be others who are not so happy. I think it will be a moment of reckoning for who they are and what their behavior actually is.”
The TV producer who acts as an all-knowing Big Lebowski–type narrator in Tiger King left the U.S. after the Joe Exotic saga took another tragic twist—when the structure containing hours of footage he planned to use for a reality series burnt to the ground in a mysterious fire on Exotic’s Oklahoma property. Speaking to Vanity Fair from Norway last week, Kirkham explained: “I moved here to marry my girlfriend about two and a half years ago and, quite honestly, to get the hell away from that entire part of my life.”
Kirkham said that he only agreed to revisit this traumatic chapter when Tiger King’s producers agreed to meet him in Oslo. “It wasn’t a subject I wanted to go back into,” said Kirkham, adding that filming—and recapping his time with Exotic—was not remotely healing. “The only therapeutic part of this entire scenario was hearing that Joe had been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.”
“You have to understand, this is one of the cruelest human beings I have ever encountered,” Kirkham said of Joe. “He is so cruel and so evil…like something out of The Omen.”
Kirkham still regrets having put his career on hold to embed himself in Joe’s private zoo—but at the time, he said, he saw the potential to make a lucrative reality-TV show. “I ended up selling my soul to the devil as a journalist, just because I knew I had something that was so big and so outrageous that I was going to retire on it basically,” said Kirkham. “Within three months, I should’ve probably walked out of that place and just said, ‘Take your losses and leave.’ But I had all my money and all of my equipment and everything else in my life wrapped up into what I knew was going to be a very big reality show.”
After the fire, Kirkham said he suffered a nervous breakdown. “I had invested everything into [filming Joe],” said Kirkham. “I lived in a nasty, dirty, filthy environment with nasty, dirty, filthy him. I got bit by a spider about the fourth month I was there, and I lost my hearing completely for a month because of the venom. I went through so much shit at that zoo in that year’s time I was there I’m surprised I didn’t put a gun to my own head.” After leaving Joe’s property, Kirkham said he checked into a facility to get in-patient psychiatric care for a week.
These days, Kirkham is working as a journalist for a local online newspaper in Norway. “I’m the only American journalist probably in all of Northern Norway. I speak English, not Norwegian,” said Kirkham. “They air my videos. I do video stories for them. Some serious, some lighthearted, some just Rick out having fun learning Norway. I’m also working on a documentary for them now on a local disc jockey.”
Baskin—the self-described Mother Teresa of Big Cats—continues her mission to end the abuse of large cats via her Big Cat Rescue sanctuary, where she posts videos of her captive cats and sells cat merchandise. (Personally, Baskin is also still recording videos for a diary series on her YouTube channel, in which she recaps days of her life some 40 years ago.) Speaking to Vanity Fair last week—before she saw Tiger King herself—Baskin said she agreed to participate in the project because the filmmakers said they were trying “to create the Blackfish of the cat industry”—a reference to the 2013 documentary that influenced a major drop in attendance at SeaWorld, which ultimately ended its orca shows.
Baskin hopes that audiences will understand that while Joe Exotic was obsessed with her, Exotic was actually a very small part of her own life.
“I think for Joe, [the feud] was probably very personal, because people said there wasn’t a day in his life that he wasn’t ranting and raving, and carrying on and calling out my name. But for me, he was just one of about a dozen of these bad guys that I was exposing online, talking to reporters about, and saying, ‘No, conservation [does not mean] breeding tigers for use as pay-to-play props.’”
Though some Tiger King characters raise questions about the legitimacy of Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue operation—she charges a fee of about $50 per person so visitors can see her cats—she maintained to Vanity Fair that her Big Cat Rescue sanctuary is more legitimate than other big cat parks.
“It’s not like a zoo, you can’t just walk around,” she said. “We take you out for a guided tour for an hour and a half. We tell people why these cats don’t belong in cages and why there shouldn’t have to be an organization like Big Cat Rescue to rescue cats from horrible situations. At the end [of the tour], we actually get them to call their member of Congress and ask them to cosponsor the Big Cat Public Safety Act.”
As of this Friday morning, during a rambling hour-long phone call, Antle was still processing the first episodes of Tiger King he had seen. Antle told Vanity Fair he agreed to film with Eric Goode only a handful of times, for what he thought was going to be a project about wildlife conservation. He didn’t realize he would be such a prominent figure in Tiger King until he saw its trailer. And shortly after seeing said trailer, Antle retained a lawyer.
That said, Antle added, the first few episodes of Tiger King he saw were “not as bad as I thought.”
Antle said he was used to defending himself against what he called animal conservationist propaganda. Last December, a spokesperson for the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division confirmed that agents had served search warrants to his Myrtle Beach Safari related to a multi-state investigation into several lion cubs in Antle’s possession. According to the *Charlotte Observer, “Antle and his facility have long been criticized by animal rights advocacy organizations, including PETA, which has chronicled dozens of citations Antle has received from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the federal Animal Welfare Act.”
During his phone call with Vanity Fair, Antle rattled off long defenses of his establishment, its treatment of animals—specifically the cubs he lets interact with paying customers—and the allegations raised in the docuseries.
“No one’s ever had a program as effective as we have, as long as we’ve had, and as carefully produced over the years,” Antle said of his Myrtle Beach Safari—where, Antle said, cubs only interact with human visitors for 20 minutes three times a week, during a six to eight-month season. He also argued that no law dictates how old a tiger must be to interact with a guest. (The documentary claims that only tiger cubs are safe to interact with humans, which leads to speed-breeding practices and a surplus of expensive, neglected adult tigers.) After a minutes-long monologue about tiger lineage—full of numbers and a referential example about European royalty—Antle said, “You can tell I am rehearsed at this. I have given this exact speech to Congress on numerous occasions. I have been running our own conservation program for 38 years. I have been trying to figure out what can be done to save tigers many many decades…. Either I’m 100% conning you, or it’s real.”
As for Tiger King’s allegation that Antle runs a Big Love–type compound, where he maintains romantic and abusive relationships with the women working for him?
“That’s fresh,” said Antle. “I’ve got people popping out of the woodwork, welders, contractors, and people I’ve paid millions of dollars to, to enrich my facility…. They know us so well…and not a soul ever imagined that there is a cult going on here. There are a lot of cute girls here, because the conservation movement does draw in cute girls. But those cute girls have nothing to do with this old fat guy running the place.” Several decades ago, that was a different story: “Back in the day, when I was in my 30s, 40s, sure, tons of women were hitting on me all the time. I’m a wealthy tiger guy. It certainly created an atmosphere.” Now, though: “I’m not the heartthrob. But my son is the heartthrob. He is a living Tarzan. He has women throwing themselves at him.”
This past January, Joe Exotic—real name: Joseph Maldonado-Passage—was sentenced to 22 years in prison for several crimes, including a murder-for-hire plot and wildlife violations. A federal jury found the exotic animal owner guilty of trying to pay a hit man $3,000 to kill his rival, Carole Baskin. Additionally, Joe shot and killed five tigers in October 2017, and falsified paperwork to say that he had donated five baby lemurs when, in fact, they were sold.
After the sentencing, Joe maintained his innocence in a Facebook post where he said he planned to appeal the ruling. In another post published earlier this week, Joe seemed hopeful that Tiger King would prove his innocence.
“At 12:01am Friday Morning 132 countries that get Netflix most will be trapped in their own homes with nothing to do but watch the TV series Tiger King,” Exotic wrote, “and the entire world will know what these people did to put me here.”
Tiger King’s codirectors were filming as recently as January, at the sentencing of Joe Exotic, and still have surplus footage. Asked whether there might be some follow-up to Tiger King, Goode told Vanity Fair, “There would only be the potential for a sort of final episode.” But he wasn’t certain the people who participated in the series would want to continue filming once they had seen its final cut. “Once this comes out, we’ll lose our access with most of the characters.”
Both Goode and Chaiklin said they had a degree of sympathy for the characters they followed.
“I love people that—and I would include myself in this—have obsessions,” said Goode. “I think obsessions can be very joyful…whether it is art, painting, music. [With the large-cat owners, however] their obsession is sadly affecting another living creature.”
“These are people who work incredibly hard,” said Chaiklin. “They’re up at the crack of dawn. They’re working all day to care for these animals even if the animals are suffering. Nothing is black and white in life. You spend time with people, and you see the good side and the bad side, so it’s complicated.”
What binds the large-cat owners in Tiger King, outside of their obsession, however, is that they genuinely believe they are doing good.
“These people start to believe their own stories over time,” said Goode. “They anthropomorphize the animals that they have and they believe that these animals somehow love them back. Or in some cases, they justify [the captivity] by saying these animals are ambassador animals. That these few animals we can take out of the wild for the betterment of man. That we’re educating people. They basically come up with some story that justifies the keeping of these animals. But ultimately it’s a really selfish pursuit.”
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