Carole Baskin rose to fame as the antagonist in Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. Her feud with Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage skyrocketed her to stardom and even landed her a spot on Dancing with the Stars. Baskin’s relationship with her ex-husband, who went missing, also solidified her standing as a topic of conversation. But now, Baskin is giving fans even more insight into her life.
Carole Baskin’s role on ‘Tiger King’
Tiger King showcased Baskin and Exotic’s rivalry over the treatment of the exotic cats in each of their care. The feud culminated in Exotic being found guilty of paying a hitman $3,000 to kill Baskin.
“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,” she told Vanity Fair. “But for me, he was just one of about a dozen of these bad guys that I was exposing online.”
Now, Exotic is in jail and Baskin is still reveling in the fame of the documentary and her brief stint on DWTS.
Carole Baskin comes out
The documentary spent a lot of time focusing on Baskin’s relationship with her ex-husband Don Lewis and her relationship with her current husband, Howard Baskin. But now, the tiger lady has revealed that she could have just as likely ended up married to a woman.
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“I have always considered myself to be bisexual,” she recently told Pink News. “Even though I’ve never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband.
“As far as the way I feel about us, I think we are all one and I just don’t see us as being different genders or different colors or anything,” she continued.
Baskin’s journey into exploring her sexuality started in the 80s when she first began really being involved with the LGBTQ community.
“I was engaged to a psychologist, and that was his entire field, dealing with the LGBT+ community,” she said. “It was during the period when AIDS was just wreaking havoc around the world, and people were losing their loved ones, and so I became very close to people in that community then.”
When did Carole know she was attracted to men and women?
Growing up, Baskin didn’t consider herself very girly.
“I was always very male-oriented in the things I did … I never had any mothering instincts or anything, you know, I never played with dolls,” she said. “And so I always thought that there was something off there, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”
But it wasn’t until later that she realized she wasn’t just attracted to men.
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“But it was during the ’80s that I discovered that through dealing with the LGBT+ community that I [realised] I had just as equal feelings for women as I did for men,” she said.
Despite both being a part of the LGBTQ community, Baskin still has no love for her former nemesis Exotic.
“I think he’s an embarrassment to the human community,” she told the outlet. “It’s not a matter of what your sexuality is, this man is just a deviant in the way that he treats human life and animal life.”