Tiger King 's Carole Baskin says she wants to slap Chloe Fineman over SNL impression
Tiger King's Carole Baskin is not a fan of Saturday Night Live star Chloe Fineman's portrayal of her on the sketch comedy show.
Baskin, who rose to notoriety after appearing in the Netflix documentary about wild cat owners in the United States, even joked that she'd like to strike the actress for what she says is an inaccurate portrayal.
“I could just slap that woman! [Laughs]," Baskin says in a new interview on The Pet Show podcast with Dennis Quaid and Jimmy Jellinek from AudioUp. "This whole, 'My kitty, meow, meow, kitty, meow, and then she would just say these really weird words all in a row. That all became popular, I guess, in popular culture and people wanted me to talk like that on the Cameos. And I’m like, ‘I have no idea how to talk like that. That is not how I speak.”
In the interview, set to be released Tuesday at 3/12 p.m. ET/PT, she also shares how the lines have been blurred about who she really is thanks to Tiger King. A video parody made by the documentary's main subject, Joe Exotic, the self-proclaimed Tiger King, has convinced some viewers that Baskin is also a singer. A woman impersonating Baskin appears in the video for "Here Kitty Kitty," a song written by Exotic accusing Baskin of murdering her husband, Don Lewis, who went missing in 1997 (Baskin has publicly denied her role in his disappearance on multiple occasions), which Baskin says has led to fans asking her to sing for them.
“That’s been the weird thing on Cameo, every...well, I shouldn’t say everybody, but so many people want me to sing," Baskin says. "And I’m like, “I was not the person pretending to sing in that show. That was somebody else pretending to sing. I didn’t even pretend to sing. I don’t sing.’ And yet, that became, ‘she sings’ and I don’t know how that connection was made.”
Baskin also sends out a message to Kate McKinnon, the SNL star who has been cast to portray her in an upcoming scripted TV series, with the hopes that she'll do a better job protecting wild cats in the media than Cardi B.
“[Kate] has not reached out to me and I really hope that she does before she gets too far down the line with it," she explains. "I’d love to know what her take is on it and what she’s thinking to do and see if there was any way we could advise her. We reached out to her through the media — because I don’t have any way of contacting Kate McKinnon — but we had posted publicly that we really hope that her or anybody that does any kind of follow-up programming doesn’t end up doing what Cardi B did and hiring people that are exploiting and abusing cats. It’s like the worst thing you can do is abuse cats to show other people that you shouldn’t abuse cats.”
Watch Fineman's parody of Baskin starting at 1:54 below:
Related content:
