Tiger King’s Doc Antle blasts allegations of ‘cub killing’ and ‘harem’ from ‘salacious’ Netflix hit

Tiger King star Bhagavan ‘Doc’ Antle set the record straight on allegations of him killing tiger cubs when they’re no longer cute and keeping a harem of wives from the ‘salacious’ Netflix hit docu-series on Tuesday.

When directing duo Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaikli interviewed the 60-year-old animal trainer over two and a half years, he thought the show would be about his Myrtle Beach Safari and conservation efforts in Sumatra and Africa.

‘All that stuff somehow found its way to the cutting room floor,’ Doc told TMX.news.

‘It was no mentioned in any capacity that this show that I was working on would portray anything about [his rivals Joe ‘Exotic’ Maldonado-Passage and Carole Baskin]. [They asked me a] dozen or so questions about Carole and Joe thrown into hundreds of other [questions].

‘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…Everything went sideways in a great big explosive entertaining way. But it certainly is not a documentary and full of a whole pack of untruths.’

Antle pointed out how filmmakers depicted G.W. Exotic Animal Park keeper Kelci ‘Saff’ Saffery without her prosthetic arm among trash, and Joe’s husband John Finlay looking like ‘a redneck methhead’ shirtless without his false teeth.

‘I don’t believe he’s done drugs for many, many years,’ the Arizona-born breeder noted.

Antle defended his seasonal meet-and-greets with tiger cubs at his park, and he stressed that ‘euthanizing cubs is illegal, immoral, and absolutely never happens here and never has.’

Bhagavan’s former employee Barbara ‘Bala’ Fisher made ‘outrageous’ claims he has multiple wives and a harem of groomed girlfriends, including herself at one point.

‘This is a girl who was a part-time babysitter here,’ Doc said.

‘She came in, watched my kids, got pregnant, moved off to marry the gentleman she got pregnant from. I only knew her for that short time. She went away. A year later, she came back, taught school for my kids a little bit, played around the edges of it. She was never a tiger trainer, never a tiger person.’

Antle never remarried after his wife, who was the mother of his son Kody and daughter, died 25 years ago.

‘I have girlfriends. I’m a single guy – just massive judgmentalness of somehow I’m not supposed to have girlfriends or something is just off my rocker here how they got to this point,’ Bhagavan explained.

‘The girls that they’re showing throughout the facility, these are the girls who are the wives of staff who live here. These are my grandchildren. These are my grandchildren’s fiancée. This is my son’s fiancée. This is a variety of ladies who devote their time here, they are part of the team.

‘And the team is half men. Did you see any men in the series? They cut them all out to make it appear this is a girl place. This is a boy place. The star is my son and my grandson. There are lovely hardworking girls here that take care of this facility and they are stars in their own right.’

The T.I.G.E.R.S. founder went on to call his 50-acre facility the ‘Ritz Carlton of keeping big cats’ unlike Baskin and Maldonado-Passage.

‘Carole Baskin’s facility [Big Cat Rescue] is some worn out junk heap. You look at her backyard, it looks like it’s a fallen down kennel that’s keeping a dozen cats in. That’s all the big cats that she has!’ Doc said.

‘And you go to Joe’s [Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park] – it’s an outrageous collection kind of a worn-out dog pen where he’s got great intentions and way too many animals to care for and is missing the ingredient of enough money to probably make it work.’

After watching the seven-part series, Antle said he thought the 58-year-old animal activist did in fact murder her first husband Don Lewis, who disappeared in 1997 shortly before she took control of his will and estate.

‘It sure looks like it!’ Doc said smiling

‘I was with my big cat swimming on the river just a couple days ago and boats are whipping by as we’re letting her swim and play along the preserve. And people from the boats are screaming, “Carole killed her husband! Carole killed her husband!”‘

As for Joe ‘Exotic’ who’s serving 22 years for a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin and violating the Lacey Act and Endangered Species Act, Bhagavan think he got a ‘raw deal’ and more prison time than his crimes warranted.

‘I would hope that in his appeal maybe something else comes to light,’ Antle said.

‘I think Joe was prosecuted for things that no one else has been prosecuted for in the United States. And I found it odd that it was tacked on to what I believe was a very flimsy murder-for-hire scam that went along.’

The gun-toting openly gay polygamist – who ran for President in 2016 and Oklahoma Governor in 2018 – has set up a Change.org petition to get Trump’s attention, which has been signed by over 23K people.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness has held the No. 1 spot on Netflix’s Top 10 list since dropping March 20, and it’s still the most tweeted about TV show in the United States.