Tiger King’s Joe Exotic approached Rick Kirkham and asked him to kill rival Carole Baskin, the TV producer has revealed.
The zoo owner – who is the focus of the record-breaking Netflix documentary – is currently serving 22-years behind bars for conspiring to kill the animal rights activist, as well as a string of animal abuse charges.
And Rick, who was filming the 57-year-old for his own reality TV series, explained there was a point that Joe asked him to ‘get rid’ of his enemy.
Speaking to Metro.co.uk ahead of a livestream Q&A session on 11 April, he lifted the lid on their twisted dispute.
‘Joe approached me to get rid of, as we put it, Carole Baskin when I was at the park,’ the 61-year-old told us.
‘He said, “Rick, I can make you a rich man if you can go down to Tampa and get rid of that b***h for me.” I thought he was joking, and said “Oh Joe, you can’t be doing that, don’t be saying that on camera”.
‘He said, “I don’t care if it’s on camera or not, I’ll make a rich man out of whoever goes down there and offs that b***h”.’
Opening up on the conversation, Rick admitted it was ‘frightening’.
‘People can say, “Hey, I want to kill you”, hell I’ve said it before but I didn’t mean it,’ he continued. ‘This guy meant it.
‘That’s what’s ironic, because now I realise all the times he made hints at going down there and getting rid of Carole, he was serious.
‘That’s the frightening part. He was serious and he was very capable of it, too. He knew all the right people, all the bad guys. He had a lot of bad friends.’
However, despite their rollercoaster feud, Rick insisted Joe and Carole were very ‘alike’ in how they went about their business.
‘Joe and Carole, as I’ve said before, were two peas in a pod,’ he added. ‘They were both very, very much alike, just very, very different in how they approached it. Both of them were eccentric, exotic animal owners, trainers and breeders.
‘The only difference is Carole wasn’t as violent with people or animals as Joe was, but they both kept animals and got money from people coming to see and touch those animals.
‘They’re one and the same, Carole is the same as Joe, she’s just not as violent.
‘And obviously, didn’t plan to kill her rival like Joe did.’
The producer spent a year of his life living at GW Zoo alongside Joe, filming his life for a reality show that never saw the light of day..
He often appeared on the Netflix show himself – but lost the majority of his footage when a fire destroyed his ‘studio’ in the zoo.
Rick – who hasn’t spoken to his former subject since ‘two nights before’ the blaze – will be speaking out about what happened behind the scenes in an interactive livestream, hosted by journalist Per Sundnes.
Rick Kirkham’s livestream will begin on 11 April, at 7pm on AllThingsLive, with tickets available for £4.
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