Another star of Tiger King, a popular documentary series on Netflix, is going to prison.
Nearly two years after entering a guilty plea to charges of money laundering and exotic animal trafficking, federal prosecutors on Tuesday sentenced Bhagavan Doc Antle to one year and one day in prison.
In addition, he was mandated to return three chimpanzees and about $200,000 to the government, serve three years of supervised release, and pay a $55,000 fine.
The 65-year-old Antle made an appearance in the first season of the wildly popular docuseries in early 2020. She was the main character in the third season, The Doc Antle Story, which premiered in December 2021.
The flamboyant animal trainer was found guilty in June 2023 of unlawfully acquiring endangered lion cubs in Virginia for show and profit at the Myrtle Beach Safari, a zoo he owned and ran in South Carolina, which is also known as The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (T.I.G.E.R.S.).
In November 2023, Antle entered a guilty plea, acknowledging that between September 2018 and May 2020, he had directed the sale or acquisition of two cheetah cubs, two lion cubs, two tigers, and one juvenile chimpanzee—all of which are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Doc Antle presented himself as an environmentalist. However, U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling for the District of South Carolina claimed in a statement on Tuesday that he was actually a major participant in the illicit chimpanzee trade and that he laundered over half a million dollars through a convoluted web of fraud.
The first season of the show Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness was released during the early stages of the COVID lockdowns and quickly became a pop cultural phenomenon. It came after the conflict between Florida animal rights activist Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic, the owner of an Oklahoma zoo.
Exotic, whose actual name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, was found guilty by a federal jury of conspiring to kill Baskin and is presently serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison.
Joe Exotic’s crimes have nothing to do with Antle’s. Prosecutors claim that Antle used his non-profit organization, The Rare Species Fund, to obfuscate payments as charitable contributions in order to carefully plan an intricate web of illicit wildlife trafficking activities.
Prosecutor Patrick Duggan stated in court on Tuesday that he was intentionally and unlawfully trading them as part of a black market that fuels another black market of smuggling and poaching.
Using News Wire Services
