Carole Baskin shares update on volunteer who was attacked at her sanctuary

She recently revealed she has always considered herself to be bisexual and previously had a ‘wife’ during the eighties.

And Carole Baskin has now opened up about the relationship, which she admitted was ‘never intimate’, because she knew her partner was heterosexual, during an appearance on Friday’s episode of Loose Women.

The Tiger King star, 59, who has been married to men three times, said she ran an advert for a wife in the paper, and said she needed help with cooking, cleaning but sex wasn’t required.

Discussing a previous interview, where Carole admitted she views both genders equally, she said: ‘Everybody is making such a huge fuss about that… 

‘A magazine interviewed me and I said I have always seen men and women equally, and I don’t have a preference one way or the other, and boy did that get blown out of proportion.

‘Back in the 80s, I had actually run an ad in the paper because I don’t cook, I don’t clean, I am a workaholic, and my ad said something to the effect of, ‘Wife needed, cooking, cleaning a must, no sex required.’

‘And she responded to that and so she was a great friend and she cooked and cleaned and took care of everything that I needed…

Carole went on to admit it wasn’t absolutely everything she needed as the woman she was living with was ‘definitely heterosexual’ so she never tried to initiate a sexual relationship with her.

She said: ‘Except for having a relationship because she was definitely a heterosexual. I never even attempted anything with her because I knew that was her leaning.’ 

At the beginning of the interview, Carole gave an update on a volunteer – Candy Couser – who was rushed to hospital after she was attacked by a tiger at the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary.

Carole explained: ‘She is recovering in the hospital, it looks like they were able to save her arm and we are so thankful for that. 

‘I am hoping to get an update from her husband later today but as you can imagine with Covid, we can’t visit her… so we are really relying on him to keep us up-to-date on her recovery.’

Talk soon turned to Carole’s relationship with Joe Exotic, who is currently in prison after being convicted in April 2019 of 17 charges of animal abuse and two counts of murder for hire.  

Speaking about her interactions with Joe despite the talk surrounding them, she said: ‘Joe and I have never had a conversation. 

‘We still have never had a conversation, so if they were selling the idea of it being this big feud, they certainly had plenty of footage of Joe trash talking me, but they couldn’t get me to trash talk him… I never said anything nasty about him personally.’

Asked if there was ever a point where she was scared for her life, she revealed: ‘We had gotten our gun permits long before this, because of the fact that I have been under threat for so many years from all kinds of these breeders and dealers of big cats. My husband Howard really is my rock, I absolutely adore him.’ 

Speaking about what she thought Tiger King was going to be while filming it, she said: ‘We had been working with the producers for five years because they said they were working on a film that was going to be the equivalent of [documentary] Black Fish for big cats… 

‘We thought this would be a great thing because big cats don’t belong in cages… Just like everybody else around the world, we sat down and binge-watched it and at the end we were just gobsmacked – we could not believe that was what they came up with after what we thought they were doing.’

On the backlash she received, she said: ‘My phone started ringing and it rang every two minutes for the next three months. So many people were calling and just screaming threats about how they wanted to kill me, they wanted to kill my family, they wanted to burn the sanctuary to the ground. I was totally shocked…’