New York Daily News

‘Tiger King’ star Baskin sez she’s bi

- BY MURI ASSUNÇÃO

Hey, all you cool cats and kittens. Another “Tiger King” star is also a proud member of the LGBTQ communty.

Animal rights activist and former “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Carole Baskin revealed she was bisexual during a chat with the U.K.based LGBTQ news site Pink News.

The 59-year-old star of the hit Netflix show “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” said, “I have always considered myself to be bisexual.”

“Even though I’ve never had a wife, I could just as easily have a wife as a husband,” she told the publicatio­n in a story that was published Monday.

Baskin first got involved with the LGBTQ community in the 1980s, when she was engaged to a psychologi­st who worked with people affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“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,” she said.

Baskin (inset) became a popular cultural obsession after she was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentar­y series about her longstandi­ng feud with Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, the flamboyant former zoo operator known as Joe Exotic who was convicted of plotting to kill Baskin — and who’s now serving a 22-yearsenten­ce in federal prison.

When asked if Joe Exotic, who’s openly gay, was a good representa­tion for the LGBTQ community, Baskin took a step further.

“I think he’s an embarrassm­ent to the human community,” she said.

She’s been married to her husband, Howard Baskin, for 16 years. She was previously married to Don Lewis, who disappeare­d in August 1997, and was later declared dead.

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