Carole Baskin, depicted as a flawed foe of star Joe Exotic in the Netflix series “Tiger King,” filed a federal lawsuit Monday that seeks to halt the rollout of the show’s second season later this month.
The suit from Baskin and her husband, which names Netflix, Royale Goode Productions and producers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, seeks to prevent the use of footage of the couple in “Tiger King 2” and its promotional material.
The claim filed in federal court in Tampa, Florida, also seeks legal costs and future, unspecified relief.
Netflix said it had no comment Monday.
Producers, contacted through a nonprofit associated with Goode, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the suit, Baskin says that Goode and Chaiklin, who she says first contacted her in 2014, pitched a single wildlife documentary with her and her Big Cat Rescue nonprofit as protagonists.
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The suit says producers touted the involvement of “Tiger King” executive producer Fisher Stevens, who was a producer of wildlife documentary “The Cove,” and said that Baskin would be portrayed “as the heroine battling the cub petters.”
The producers showed Baskin a sizzle reel and rough-cut scenes that suggested “an animal welfare documentary,” her suit says.
“Tiger King” ultimately followed the drama between Baskin and Joe Exotic (Joseph Maldonado-Passage), a private zoo operator successfully sued by Baskin over his use of her Big Cat Rescue name and his claim that she offered cub petting for profit.
Exotic lost his zoo and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned in a murder-for-hire plot that targeted Baskin.
In the series, Exotic repeatedly suggested that Baskin murdered her second husband, who went missing in 1997, a claim she has vigorously and repeatedly denied. The couple had started her wildlife sanctuary Big Cat Rescue in Florida.
Baskin appeared to accept the spotlight that came with starring in March 2020’s “Tiger King,” which became one of the streaming era’s blockbusters. In September 2020, she appeared on “Dancing with the Stars” and performed to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
But in May, she indicated she would not be involved in a second season.
“I told them to lose my number,” Baskin told PageSix. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
Monday’s lawsuit says producers had more than 50 hours of footage of Baskin and her surroundings and suggests they used at least some of it for “Tiger King 2.”
The Baskins believed that any footage would be used for a “single documentary feature film” and were dismayed when a trailer suggested the Baskins would be “a central element of the sequel.”
In a statement Monday, Howard Baskin said the project “is anything but a legitimate documentary.”
“While we cannot stop Netflix and Royal Goode Productions from producing low-brow, salacious and sensational programing, we do believe that we have the right to control footage filmed of us under false pretenses,” he said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
