Tiger King's Carole Baskin "wasn't coerced", says producer

Carole Baskin, who owns Big Cat Rescue, wrote a blog post last week in which she skewered the documentary and claimed that she had been misled about the nature of the programme prior to taking part.

But Eric Goode, one of the show's co-producers, has defended the series against Baskin's criticisms in an interview with the LA Times.

"Carole talked about her personal life, her childhood, abuse from her first and second husband, the disappearance of her ex, Don Lewis," he said. "She knew that this was not just about... it’s not a Blackfish because of the things she spoke about.

"She certainly wasn’t coerced. The other thing I would say about all these people is that there was a lack of intellectual curiosity to really go and understand or even see these animals in the wild.

"Certainly, Carole really had no interest in seeing an animal in the wild... The lack of education, frankly, was really interesting — how they had built their own little utopias and really were only interested in that world and the rules they had created."

Another producer on the show, Rebecca Chaiklin, added, "I would just say we were completely forthright with the characters.

"With any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change, and we followed it as any good storyteller does. We could have never known when we started this project that it was going to land where it did."

The documentary series explores a bitter feud between Baskin and big cat breeder Joe Exotic over a number of years, as she repeatedly attempts to get his private zoo closed down due to alleged animal abuse.

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Tiger King is streaming on Netflix now