Despite many online reports stating that Carole Baskin has said that her ex-husband is alive, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office has refuted the claims. This week, big cat sanctuary owner and Tiger King star Carole Baskin once again hit headlines after a resurfaced video showed her stating that her ex-husband, Don Lewis, is actually alive. Lewis' disappearance became a widely-discussed and highly reported subject of the first season of Netflix's hit 2020 documentary, with rumors widely circulating about how and why he went missing. Per the <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/carole-baskins-dead-husband-found-alive-last-year-but-no-one-noticed/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New York Post</a>, Lewis famously disappeared in 1997 - just two months after he sought a restraining order against then-wife Baskin. However, despite many claims that Lewis has died, many online publications are currently circulating a 2021 interview Baskin gave to the UK talk show This Morning, in which she says Lewis is <a href="https://vt.co/news/entertainment-news/carole-baskin-say-her-ex-husband-has-been-found-alive">actually alive and well in Costa Rica</a>. Baskin made the claims while speaking about the Tiger King 2 follow-up documentary, Baskin said: "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 added: "They said that my husband, Don Lewis, is alive and well in Costa Rica." [[youtubewidget||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEwvbWCoak]] "I didn’t think he was capable of supporting himself," Baskin then quipped. "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.” Baskin later reiterated these findings to The Post, saying: "I was not aware of it until [Tiger King 2] aired." However, despite The Post reporting that Baskin has further doubled-down on her claims in in an email to the outlet, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office has told TMZ differently. Speaking to <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2023/01/19/tiger-king-carole-baskin-husband-missing-dead/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">TMZ</a>, spokesperson from the Sheriff's Office - which is currently leading the investigation into Lewis' disappearance - has revealed that no federal officials have communicated any information to suggest that Lewis has been found. As a result, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office still considered Lewis to be a missing person and investigators are still working on the case as a priority, per TMZ. <img class="size-large wp-image-1263190162" src="https://img.vt.co/2023/01/2H8GY83-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" />[[imagecaption|| Credit: TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy]] Lewis' disappearance was one of the focal points of the Tiger King documentary, with Joe Exotic repeatedly claiming that Baskin has killed her husband - going as far as to suggest that she did so with a meat grinder and fed him to her big cats. Baskin would even address these allegations on her BigCatRescue.org website, writing: "This is the most ludicrous of all the lies. "The meat grinder shown in the video was enormous. Our meat grinder was one of those little tabletop, hand-crank things like you’d have in your kitchen at home. Meat had to first be cut into one-inch cubes … to go through it. The idea that a human body and skeleton could be put through it is idiotic." [[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/darthramious/status/1244352922172837888]] However, the sanctuary owner then found herself being widely "memed" on social media after telling the documentary filmmakers: "If I were gonna, you know, if somebody wanted to kill you, then they would put sardine oil all over you. "Something that the cat wants to eat, not something the cat wants to drool on." <h6>Featured image credit: Tribune Content Agency LLC / Alamy</h6>

County Sheriff's Office responds to Carole Baskin's claims her husband's been found alive

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