YouTuber Josh Pieters Pranks Carole Baskin Into First Post-’Tiger King’ Interview

YouTube jokester Josh Pieters is doing some of his finest work in isolation, pranking one of quarantine’s most-talked-about figures: animal rights activist Carole Baskin of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King.

Pieters, a South African vlogger with 1.4 million subscribers, who rose to renown as a friend of fellow vlogger Caspar Lee, has nabbed millions of views with past stunts, including tricking the public with an Ed Sheeran lookalike and conducting a prank against right-wing British media personality Katie Hopkins. In quarantine, however, he has made the most of the necessity of remote talk-show interviews, and duped several celebs into thinking they were appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show with James Corden.

Pieters has created three such interview videos on Zoom — simply by playing sound bites of each late-night host, prank-call style — the first two with B-list celebs from the U.K. However, the third video in the series featured Baskin — a polarizing figure from Tiger King. (While that series primarily followed former zoo operator Joe Exotic, who is serving prison sentence for a murder for hire plot against Baskin, the project also raised suspicion that Baskin had killed her husband as well).

“It was just really interesting seeing people like Prince William and all these people you’d never imagined to see on Zoom, and Zoom becoming such a big thing,” Pieters, who lives in London, told Insider of the genesis of the stunt. “Like all of our ideas, we really didn’t expect it to work, and then it did work.”

While a sitdown with Fallon would’ve been her first mainstream interview post-Tiger King, Baskin did speak to the Tampa Bay Times, where she and her husband called the series a betrayal. But for her part, Baskin — who presides over the Big Cat Rescue nonprofit in Florida — appears to have taken Pieters’ latest stunt in stride.

“I was suspicious as we were doing it because the questions appeared taped. But had no idea it would turn out to be such a fun prank,” she told US Weekly. “It gave us a very welcome good laugh. I appreciate their cleverness and that they created their video in a way that I don’t feel was in any way mean-spirited.”