The Department of Homeland Security is seemingly silent on Tiger King star Carole Baskin’s claim that her husband Don Lewis, missing since 1997, is actually alive.
“One of the really exciting things that came out of ‘Tiger King 2’ is that they produced a letter from Homeland Security and it says that a special agent in charge with the FBI at Homeland Security reached out to the sheriff’s detective George [Jorge] Fernandez, which means this had to have happened after 2002, because Homeland Security wasn’t even around until 2002,” Ms Baskin was quoted as saying to ITV in November 2021.
“They said my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica,” she added.
“And yet all of this drama has been made about me having something to do with his disappearance, when Homeland Security has known where he is,” she said.
“I was not aware of it until ‘TK2’ aired,” Ms Baskin told The New York Post via email, referring to her Big Cats Rescue blog.
The Independent reached out to a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security who did not return a request for comment at the time of publishing this story.
In November 2021, Ms Baskin and her current husband Howard Baskin questioned in a blog post why the department released Mr Lewis’s alleged whereabouts to Netflix for the second season, in which she did not participate.
Ms Baskin had revealed in the first season of the hit Netflix documentary series that Mr Lewis had disappeared in 1997.
“Also noteworthy is the document they display from Homeland Security, which was not formed as an agency until 2002, five years after Don Lewis’s disappearance, saying they had information that Don Lewis was alive in Costa Rica,” they wrote in the blog.
“Why is this just appearing?”
Speaking to ITV, Ms Baskin said: “I don’t know how it is that Homeland Security says he’s alive and well in Costa Rica but I’m glad to hear it.
“I didn’t think he was capable of supporting himself. He took about a million dollars down to Costa Rica, I had agreed to let him do that so he could prove to himself that he could make a living.”
While Ms Baskin’s interview is over a year old, her claims have gone viral on social media with several users sharing screenshots.
Ms Baskin was not a part of the second season of “Tiger King” and has spoken out against the narrative that she had something to do with Lewis’s disappearance. Baskin and her husband sued Netflix for including footage of the couple in the trailer forTiger King 2.
