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Of all the wacky characters to appear in the hit Netflix docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness reality TV producer Rick Kirkham might have come out of it the most unscathed.
While Kirkham did admit during a recent two-hour livestream pay chat that he “sold my soul to the devil being in that zoo,” in the grand scheme of things his role in the zoo’s shenanigans was pretty tame.
The former Inside Edition reporter hit on numerous Tiger King-related topics during the livestream. He answered questions submitted by readers from his home in Norway, shared more tales of animal abuse at the hands of Joe Exotic, as well as Joe’s political campaigns, country music career, and perhaps most jarring, showed footage of Kelci “Saff” Saffery’s torn up arm and hand after the tiger attack.
Kirkham also revealed that he is working on finishing up a memoir, about half of which he says will be about his one year at the GW Zoo with Joe Exotic and crew.
He also dropped yet another bombshell that wasn’t featured in Tiger King. (If there isn’t a second season of this show, we riot.)
According to Kirkham, Joe Exotic had been “married to a woman years before.”
“He had children and his son came to work at the zoo the summer that I was there, the very first summer,” said Kirkham.
“His son Brandon is in the documentary and I’m surprised that the documentary didn’t bring that up,” Kirkham added. “Joe treated his son worse than he treated the other employees. He expected more out of him, he expected him to take more leadership and do harder work. … He had his son sweeping the park instead of giving him a decent job, feeding the animals or something like that. It was almost as though he regretted having a child, that he regretted having been married.”
This is just the latest revelation Kirkham has revealed since Tiger King premiered. During the Tiger King after show, Kirkham told host Joel McHale, “Joe was terrified of big cats. He was scared to death of lions and tigers. In the shots you see where he’s in with the two tigers, the white one is blind and the other one is on tranquilised. it’s idiotic to think how he’s become famous as ‘the tiger king’ when he’s so terrified of big cats.”
He also told The Daily Beast that he doesn’t understand why people are rallying behind Joe Exotic, “one of the most evil people I’ve met in my entire life.”
“I witnessed him shoot and kill two tigers for no reason whatsoever, just because he was pissed off at them,” Kirkham claimed, adding, “We had wild chickens that ran around everywhere in the zoo, and he’d just be pissed and kick one of these chickens into the cage so that these tigers could just rip it to shreds. That was just the kind of guy he was. He enjoyed seeing people and animals hurt. He enjoyed it. He got off on it.”
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