A good sport. Carole Baskin reacted to her fake Jimmy Fallon interview, and the Tiger King Netflix star was surprisingly chill. ICYMI, Carole was pranked by two YouTubers, Josh Pieters and Archie Manners, who contacted the Big Cat Rescue CEO and pretended to be producers The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Under a fake production company name, Josh and Archie told Carole that Jimmy wanted to interview her about Tiger King, and when she declined, they told her that she could talk about cats and just cats—to which she agreed.
On the interview day, Carole zoomed with Archie, who told her that, due to an issue, she wouldn’t be able to see Jimmy, but he could hear her. The interview then proceeded with Josh playing voice clips of Jimmy asking questions to other celebrities (such as how they’re quarantine is going) that Carole answered. The video was uploaded to YouTube, and within hours, it had more than a million views.
But what’s Carole’s response to everything? In the video, she seemed oblivious that the interview was a prank, but as she told Us Weekly, the Big Cat Rescue founder had her suspicions. Still, she as a good sport about the prank.
“I was suspicious as we were doing it because the questions appeared taped. But had no idea it would turn out to be such a fun prank. It gave us a very welcome good laugh. I appreciate their cleverness and that they created their video in a way that I don’t feel was in any way mean-spirited,” she told Us Weekly.
As viewers know, Carole was controversial figure on Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness after the docuseries suggested that she murdered her missing husband, Don Lewis, by feeding him to a tiger at their park. We broke down the rest of the story here (as well as other theories as to what happened to Carole’s husband), but the animal activist has been pretty open since Tiger King about how the docuseries led to hundreds of thousands of death threats. So we understand why she was hesitant about a (fake) Jimmy Fallon interview at first.
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