Tiger King star Carole Baskin has reacted to claims that her former husband is alive and well, having apparently been found in Costa Rica.
Don Lewis went missing in 1997, after marrying Baskin six years earlier, and was later legally declared dead in 2002.
In the first season of Netflix’s smash-hit Tiger King, producers explored the possibility that Baskin could have been responsible for Lewis’ disappearance – something she denied.
However, the latest season, which Baskin is demanding Netflix removes her from, reportedly reveals that Lewis is alive and living in the Central American country of Costa Rica.
Reacting to the news on ITV’s This Morning, Baskin said: “One of the really exciting things that came out of Tiger King 2 is that they produced a letter from Homeland Security and it says that a special agent in charge with the FBI at Homeland Security reached out to the sheriff’s detective George Fernandez, which means this had to have happened after 2002, because Homeland Security wasn’t even around until 2002.
“And they said that my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica.
“And yet all of this hay has been made about me having something to do with his disappearance, when Homeland Security has known where he is at least since back then.”
She added that she didn’t think Lewis had been capable of supporting himself, saying: “He took about a million dollars down into Costa Rica and I had agreed to let him do that so he could prove to himself that he could make a living.
“And when we recovered what we could out of that years later, it was only about $80,000 because the investments he had made were so bad.
“So I don’t know how it is that Homeland Security says he’s alive and well in Costa Rica but I’m glad to hear it.”
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Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, And Madness arrived on Netflix in March 2020 and proved a ratings hit while much of the world was in lockdown, telling the story of Baskin’s nemesis, the flamboyant big cat enthusiast Joe Exotic.
He was sentenced in January 2020 to 22 years in federal prison after being convicted of trying to hire two men to kill Baskin.
An appeals court has since ruled Exotic should receive a shorter sentence.