The Netflix docuseries “Tiger King,” which chronicles the rise and fall of an eccentric zookeeper, has taken the world by storm in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though its main subject, Joe Exotic, has yet to publicly comment on his portrayal, two of the doc’s peripheral subjects – Doc Antle and Jeff Lowe – have denounced it as shameless sensationalism.
According to People, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who runs a famed exotic animal preserve in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, told TMX.news that “Tiger King” falsely portrayed him as a cult-like polygamist, asserting that the filmmakers misled him on the show’s subject.
“Remember, this is not a documentary,” Antle said. “This is a salacious, outrageous ride through a television show produced to create drama, to just tie you into some crazy train wreck of a story between the feud of Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic, and the meltdown that ensued between two people who both are far too close to murder themselves, and I think a little bit of madness thrown in on their parts.”
Antle said that the filmmakers had him believe the documentary was to focus on his wildlife conservation efforts, asserting that he was asked about Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, Exotic’s bitter rival, on a few occasions.
“[I] worked with the director for two and a half years, saw him probably five or six times for several days in a row each time,” said Antle. “That endless portrayal of a program that he was doing with us was purely about a wildlife conservation show about our work that we’re doing in Sumatra [and] Africa, to save endangered species there. It was all about how the tigers that we have here have raised so much money that we’ve been able to go to Sumatra and create a new ranger station there … and that was the documentary that I worked on, and all of that stuff somehow found its way to the cutting room floor.”
“It was not mentioned in any capacity that this show that I was working on would portray anything about Carole or Joe,” he continued. “Questions about Carole and Joe were a dozen or so thrown into hundreds of others, and I repeatedly told them I have no desire to be involved in some show where you’ve got the feud of Carole and Joe going on, it’s not my thing, leave me out of it. Over and over, that was the intention, and that’s what we worked towards.”
Though the documentary primarily focuses on the dangerous rivalry between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, Antle’s Myrtle Beach operation is extensively scrutinized in one particular episode to further broaden its themes on how the exotic animal world breeds a cult-like atmosphere centered around a charismatic figure. In Doc Antle’s case, he is portrayed as a New Age guru who employs harems of women who may or may not be his “wives.” Antle says this portrayal is complete hogwash.
“I’m a single guy. My wife died 25 years ago, the mother of my son and daughter, my youngest ones, and I’ve never been married since,” said Antle. “I have girlfriends, I’m a single guy. This massive judgmentalness [sic] of somehow I’m not supposed to have girlfriends or something is just off my rocker here with how they got to this point.”
Antle noted that half his staff members are men, which he claims the documentary explicitly did not show.
“They are just looking for something to be outrageous,” he added. “The girls that they are showing throughout the facility … these are the girls that are the wives of staff who live here, these are my grandchildren, these are my grandchildren’s fiancés, these are my son’s fiancée, this is a variety of ladies who devote their time here that are part of a team. The team is half men. Did you see any men in the series? They cut them all out to make it appear that this is a girl place.”
As to the documentary’s claim that he euthanizes tiger cubs the moment they cease being profitable, Antle flatly denied this. He also noted that the epilogue stating his compound was recently raided by the feds pertained to a separate case in Virginia and that he was only asked to share some of his lions’ DNA.
As noted by Fox News, Jeff Lowe, Exotic’s infamous business partner, also told TMX.news that the documentary only got 10% of the story right and flatly denounced the allegation that he “stole” the zoo from Joe Exotic.
“We were being looked at by the feds just like Joe was, so we knew that and we had to protect ourselves. And if it means turning over a guy to the federal authorities that killed not just five tigers – five tigers was just the tip of the iceberg. You know, he’s killed a hundred tigers here that were not beneficial to him monetarily,” Lowe said. “And you know it’s just the five that they picked, we knew exactly where they were buried and we knew exactly how they died, so it was the five easiest to prosecute him and convict him on.”
The documentary also implied that Lowe involved himself in Exotic’s murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin only to use it as leverage against him. Lowe also denied this.
“It was a constant,” Lowe said. “Every day, it wasn’t about caring for the tigers, it wasn’t about taking care of your staff – it was about: ‘How do I eliminate Carole Baskin?’ We all knew it and it just got to the point where once Joe started making aggressive moves towards a plan, we knew we had to get out of here.”
Hardly anybody came away from the documentary looking clean, and Joe Exotic’s rival, Carole Baskin, is no exception. Regarding the allegation that she murdered her husband to gain his inheritance, Baskin wrote a lengthy post on her organization’s website denouncing that as false.
The filmmakers recently told the Los Angeles Times that they were entirely forthright with the documentary they were filming from the get-go, noting that they behaved as good storytellers.
“I would just say we were completely forthright with the characters,” said co-director Rebecca Chaiklin. “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.”