After Carole Baskin‘s former husband went missing in 1997, many people wondered, “Is Don Lewis alive?” He’d been declared dead in 2002 after disappearing five years prior, but according to Baskin, Lewis was located alive and well in Costa Rica over a year ago. The funny thing is, no one noticed until now!
Baskin revealed the news on “This Morning” in the UK in November 2021. She told the hosts during the interview that Don Lewis is alive and doing just fine. Baskin claimed that Lewis had been in touch with the US Department of Homeland Security and that he hadn’t actually been considered a missing person for years.
“One of the really exciting things that came out of Tiger King 2 is that they produced a letter from Homeland Security and it says that a special agent in charge with the FBI at Homeland Security reached out to the sheriff’s detective George [Jorge] Fernandez, which means this had to have happened after 2002, because Homeland Security wasn’t even around until 2002,” Baskin explained. “They said my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica.”
Don Lewis being alive is certainly a surprise
Asked if she was surprised by the news that Lewis wasn’t dead after all, Baskin admitted she was. In fact, she didn’t know how he managed to survive for so long.
“I didn’t think he was capable of supporting himself,” she said. “He took about a million dollars down to Costa Rica, I had agreed to let him do that so he could prove to himself that he could make a living.”
TMZ published a screencap of an alleged government document that seemed to confirm Baskin’s story of Don Lewis being alive and well in Costa Rica. While this seemingly exonerates Baskin of all wrongdoing, not everyone saw it that way.
“Tiger King” host Joel McHale thinks the whole thing is sort of sketchy. Either Baskin knew along that Lewis was never really missing, or he actually is dead and the document and her story are fake. What’s the truth here? We may never know.
