Carole Baskin reveals she had a wife after coming out as bisexual

22nd October 2020

The Tiger King star came out as bisexual earlier this week.

Earlier this week, Tiger King star and Dancing with the Stars competitor Carole Baskin told PinkNews that she identified as bisexual. She told the online publication that at the time she was “engaged to a psychologist, and that was his entire field, dealing with the LGBT+ community.”

She added: “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.

“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.

“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.”

However, despite telling PinkNews that she hadn’t had a wife, she has since confessed to TMZ that during the 1980s she had a “non-sexual wife” who identified as straight.

She explained that her wife did the cooking and took care of their home, as well as becoming a secretary for Carole’s real estate business.

Carole also spoke about her rules of attraction, saying she was more attracted to who a person was on the inside, as opposed to their physical characteristics. She added that a human connection has nothing to do with someone’s sex, gender, race or nationality, saying that people were made up of all of those things.

The Big Cat Rescue owner rose to fame this year in the documentary series Tiger King, which followed the exploits of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, aka Joe Exotic, who is currently serving a 22-year jail sentence for two counts of murder-for-hire on Carole, and animal abuse.

When PinkNews asked whether Carole thought Joe was good LGBTQ+ representation, she said: “I think he’s an embarrassment to the human community.

“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. I think he’s a malignant narcissist, and that it’s all about him. It doesn’t have anything to do with any of the communities that he may associate himself with.”

The success of Tiger King has spawned a whole host of upcoming series based off of the show, and in one upcoming limited mini-series, Carole will be played by SNL alum Kate McKinnon. Baskin called McKinnon a “wonderful actress” and implored her “to not use real big cats and cubs” in the series.