Entertainment
Seeing 'Chimp Crazy' led PETA to urge criminal charges against Tonia Haddix
![Seeing 'Chimp Crazy' led PETA to urge criminal charges against Tonia Haddix Seeing 'Chimp Crazy' led PETA to urge criminal charges against Tonia Haddix](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/0e63c47/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x1575+0+0/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffb%2Fb1%2Fd413009d4cea95b31f38b1a0c601%2Fchimp-crazy-tonia-haddix-0.jpg)
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That’s the oath Tonia Haddix swore to uphold in January 2022, when she logged into a Zoom court hearing to deny that she had anything to do with the disappearance of a famous chimpanzee.
During the proceedings, Haddix tearfully recalled how she’d found Tonka — one of seven apes whose care she’d overseen at a former chimp breeding facility in Missouri — dead the previous May. Sitting in front of her laptop at her home near the Lake of the Ozarks, Haddix became so overwhelmed with emotion during her testimony that a judge interrupted her racking sobs and ordered a 10-minute recess for her to compose herself.
Shortly after court came back in session, a verdict was announced.
“It is my belief that Ms. Haddix makes things up,” said Missouri Senior District Judge Catherine D. Perry. “But does that convince me that Tonka is alive and she has hidden him? No, it does not.”
Haddix mumbled her thanks and slammed her screen down. A huge grin spread across her face as she pumped her fists in the air.
“We won, guys. We f— won,” she said, looking around at a film crew who had been shooting the whole thing for the HBO Max docuseries “Chimp Crazy.”
“You won for now, though,” her husband noted.
“Yeah, but we gotta just keep him hidden.”
Haddix and Tonka the chimp in Max’s “Chimp Crazy.”
(HBO)
It’s one of the most astonishing moments in the series — and that’s saying something, considering the documentary, directed by “Tiger King’s” Eric Goode, features a woman describing how she breastfed her chimp. It’s when the audience realizes that Haddix, 54, in fact kidnapped Tonka just before he was about to be relocated from the Missouri facility to an ape sanctuary in Florida. As she lied in court about his supposed death, Haddix was sitting right above Tonka, who she had hidden in a basement cage.
With the third episode premiering Sunday, Haddix’s lies on that Zoom call raised the question: Will she face any legal ramifications for her actions?
After Tonka was eventually located and seized in June 2022, the judge in Haddix’s case with the animal rights group wrote to the assistant U.S. attorney to suggest a criminal investigation into Haddix and her husband, Jerry Aswegan.
The government has yet to prosecute either Haddix or Aswegan, though PETA continues to push for charges. Brittany Peet, the PETA Foundation’s general counsel for captive animal law enforcement, sent a letter to the assistant U.S. attorney about a month before “Chimp Crazy” premiered last month to detail the extent of Haddix’s lies in the series. (Peet is interviewed in the docuseries and had access to early screeners.)
In the letter, Peet said that the nonprofit was told the attorney’s office “has thus far declined to move forward with charges against Haddix because you felt you lacked sufficient evidence to prove that the chimpanzee who was removed from Haddix’s home on June 5, 2022 was actually Tonka.”
Peet proceeds to describe scenes in “Chimp Crazy” that she believes provide “incontrovertible proof” about Tonka’s identity, noting that “it is even more urgent to proceed with charges now that Haddix’s blatant and unrepentant perjury and obstruction is about to be broadcast to a national audience.”
If charged with and convicted of perjury, Haddix could face up to five years in prison, with up to an additional year in prison if charged and convicted with obstructing court orders.
Carrie Costantin, the assistant U.S. attorney to whom the complaints about Haddix were addressed, did not respond to a request for comment from The Times. Haddix, meanwhile, did not answer multiple phone calls and messages seeking an interview.
![A woman in a pink outfit stands in front of a mini-golf place.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/330035a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2500x1410+0+0/resize/1200x677!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F72%2F1d%2Fd78b8d464f78a87ee62474daf4b6%2Fchimp-crazy-tonia-haddix.jpg)
“Chimp Crazy” depicts Haddix lying about Tonka’s whereabouts during a 2022 virtual court hearing.
(HBO Max)
PETA would also like the U.S. Department of Agriculture to terminate Haddix’s Animal Welfare Act license. This license allows her to operate her Missouri zoo, Sunrise Beach Safari, where guests can hold sloths, see kangaroos and feed llamas. The permit also enables her to sell exotic animals through her business Primarily Primates, LLC. During her court case with PETA, Haddix declared that she makes approximately $80,000 per year selling creatures like caracal wildcats, Asian small-clawed otters, Egyptian fruit bats and African crested porcupines.
In September 2023, an enforcement official at the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service — the division of the USDA that administers licenses — said in an email that the agency did not believe Haddix was fit to keep her credential after she “repeatedly provided false information and false statements to a government agency pertaining to the ownership of animals.”
The USDA did not respond to an inquiry regarding the status of Haddix’s license, which expires in September 2025.
After “Tiger King” was released on Netflix in 2020, many of its subjects had their licenses terminated by the USDA. Peet told The Times she’d complained to the organization about big cat owners like Joe Exotic and Jeff Lowe for years, but it was only after “Tiger King” that “it forced their hand because we were able to get international press on animal welfare complaints.”
![A man feeds a tiger with a bottle](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/fd2dfa0/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2840x1893+0+0/resize/1200x800!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffa%2Fc8%2F81b8d89a4b14a74c5e2e756d8665%2F121118-0972-20jepa-r.jpg)
Joe Exotic in “Tiger King.”
(Courtesy of Netflix)
The final punishment Haddix could face for her involvement with Tonka would come from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. If the bureau determined that her treatment of the chimpanzee violated the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Department of Justice could bring a case against her. If found guilty, Haddix could face up to a year in prison and/or a fine of up to $50,000.
The USFWS did not respond to a request for comment.
Peet said she believes there is strong evidence to suggest Haddix’s behavior breached the law protecting Tonka.
“You’re not allowed to cause an endangered species physical, psychological or veterinary injury,” the lawyer said. “In other cases, judges have found solitary confinement of a social species, failing to provide animals with appropriate enrichment, diet and enclosures — those things violated the Endangered Species Act.”
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Movie Reviews
Wolfs: Brad Pitt, George Clooney in laid-back comic thriller
![Wolfs: Brad Pitt, George Clooney in laid-back comic thriller Wolfs: Brad Pitt, George Clooney in laid-back comic thriller](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_image_scmp_review/public/d8/images/canvas/2024/09/02/b322f52e-7718-4e8a-9d5e-d3d46a88f2d8_8e7cd11b.jpg?itok=VE7zHZ_O&v=1725235416)
3/5 stars
Unveiled out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Wolfs is a comic thriller that skates along primarily thanks to the laid-back bonhomie of its two stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
These two long-time buddies, who first worked together in Ocean’s Eleven, are back playing rival “cleaners” in this New York-set tale. Both dressed in blacks and greys, uttering the same gnomic phrases, as Austin Abrams’ Kid points out, “You’re, like, basically the same guy.”
Neither Pitt nor Clooney has a name in the film, perhaps because their star power is so enormous we’ll only ever know them as Brad and George.
One chilly night in the Big Apple, Clooney’s fixer is called to a penthouse in a plush hotel by a shaken District Attorney named Margaret (Amy Ryan). In the bedroom is the Kid (Austin Abrams), who she thinks is dead, after he fell and crashed into a drinks trolley. Running a campaign to get tough on crime, the DA knows that if this gets out, it could ruin her.
Then Pitt turns up, it soon emerging he’s been hired by the hotel owner to clean up this mess. With identities compromised, it means that he and Clooney will have to work together, a job that becomes increasingly complicated when a bag of drugs is found and the Kid turns out not to be dead.
As set-ups go, it’s compelling enough, and kicks into gear when Euphoria star Abrams wakes up and makes a bolt for it, in just his underwear, through the freezing cold streets of the city.
You’ll find out next to nothing about the Clooney and Pitt characters, as their shadowy, lone-wolf status dictates. But Watts mines pleasing humour from his veteran A-listers (jokes about fading eyesight), and even includes the Bill Withers classic “Just the two of us” on the soundtrack.
Weighed down by a plot that is entirely secondary – the whole backstory as to why the Kid has a stash of drugs, and who it belongs to, feels almost incidental – Wolfs is the sort of slick, empty-headed entertainment that Hollywood (or in this case Apple) does well enough.
![Brad Pitt (left) and George Clooney in a still from Wolfs. Photo: Sony Pictures.](https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/09/02/3a52de19-255b-469b-83b7-4e7c8af5b092_dab7fc58.jpg)
Abrams is charming as the innocent caught up among the high rollers, while Ryan is excellent in her extended cameo. As for Pitt and Clooney, well, they bring the sizzle if not the surprises.
Wolfs will start streaming on Apple TV+ on September 27.
Movie Reviews
‘Nobu’ Review: A Glowing and Straightforward Portrait of the Japanese Chef and His Empire
![‘Nobu’ Review: A Glowing and Straightforward Portrait of the Japanese Chef and His Empire ‘Nobu’ Review: A Glowing and Straightforward Portrait of the Japanese Chef and His Empire](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Nobu-Marketing-Still-From-Film-2.jpg?crop=0px%2C8px%2C3840px%2C2148px&resize=1440%2C810)
A subject’s charm can take a documentary a long way. That’s the case in Matt Tyrnauer’s latest project, Nobu, a glowing portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa. The Japanese chef is best known for his empire of luxury sushi restaurants (and more recently, hotels), where guests can experience his medley of dishes inspired by his Japanese roots and early foray into Peruvian cuisine. In Nobu, based on Matsuhisa’s memoir of the same name, Tyrnauer (also in Telluride this year with Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) anchors the global phenom’s name to a personality.
Nobu is a straightforward and admiring portrait of its subject. The film will likely appeal to fans of the chef (especially since this year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Nobu restaurant), but it may not completely satiate the culinary-curious. Less process-oriented and more wide-ranging than David Gelb’s glossy doc Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Nobu looks at Matsuhisa as a man and a brand, offering bits of biography alongside insights into the chef’s steadily growing empire.
Nobu
The Bottom Line A tasty appetizer, if not a full meal.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Director: Matt Tyrnaeur
1 hour 50 minutes
Tyrnaeur shapes Nobu around lengthy interviews with Matsuhisa, who generously details his early years growing up in Japan, his desire to become a sushi chef and the minor successes and major failures of his early ventures. These conversations, supplemented by interviews with Matsuhisa’s wife, Yoko, and his two daughters, Junko and Yoshiko, form a relatively candid biography and showcase Matsuhisa’s personality. His humor — characterized by Dad jokes and deadpan delivery — enlivens his storytelling and makes the early part of the doc feel more intimate. Stories about Matsuhisa’s formative years reveal a childhood marked by premature grief and a fascination with sushi-making. He likens the process of watching a chef delicately press pieces of fish onto rice and serve it to customers to seeing an actor on stage. To Matsuhisa, sushi is not just a cuisine but a performance.
When the chef talks about the inspiration for popular dishes like black cod miso or experiments in the kitchen, Nobu nears its full potential as a documentary. Anecdotes about Matsuhisa’s early years in Peru, where he encounters cilantro for the first time, and restaurant ventures in Anchorage and later in Los Angeles affirm the creative thread that undergirds his multi-million dollar business. These moments enrich the portrait with tactical evidence of an artist at work. It’s when we can witness the genius instead of just hearing about it from the film’s various talking heads. A standout sequence comes near the end of the documentary, when Nobu, in a rare move, decides to host close friends at his home in Japan. Here, the chef’s theories about sushi-making as performance are distilled into action. While shaping bits of saltwater eel onto a plate, Matsuhisa regales his guests with jokes and stories about his early culinary days and his more recent ones as an international celebrity.
And what a star Matsuhisa has become. Tyrnauer dedicates a significant portion of Nobu to the business of running a global conglomerate. With dozens of restaurants worldwide and a handful of hotels, Nobu is now a luxury good. Tyrnauer travels with the chef — always private, rarely commercial — to his various eateries with a special focus on Nobu Los Cabos and Nobu London. He also sits in on board meetings with Matsuhisa and his Nobu co-founders Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, where the trio negotiate expansion deals and visions of the brand’s future. The filmmaking is direct here, focused more on the transfer of information than scoring style points.
Each of Matsuhisa’s restaurants adheres to Nobu’s modus operandi — intimate luxury, quality food — while also using local ingredients to reflect cultural appetites. Tyrnauer includes interviews with writers like Ruth Reichl and chefs like Wolfgang Puck to help map the chef’s influence on the culinary world. Some of these strands are introduced and abandoned at a fast clip, contrasting with the steady pace established in the biographical section.
With so much to cover and such a flattering sheen, the documentary mostly sidesteps areas of potential tension. When the corporate culture is described as familial, questions about labor practices, including some recent-ish lawsuits, are left unaddressed. And a moment of disagreement between De Niro and Teper about the direction of the company — expand rapidly in pursuit of capital or move slowly to maintain high standards — is observed but not assessed. It’s for this reason that Nobu functions best as a primer, a tasting menu for all things Nobu — man and brand.
Entertainment
ESPN, ABC and other Disney channels dropped from DirecTV in contract dispute
Walt Disney Co.-owned channels, including ESPN and ABC stations, were knocked off DirecTV platforms Sunday after talks to reach a new distribution deal collapsed.
The blackout — which affects DirecTV’s nearly 11 million customer homes — hit before the kickoff of Sunday’s highly anticipated University of Southern California-Louisiana State University college football game and in the middle of ESPN’s coverage of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. The impasse came at the deadline for a new distribution deal after weeks of haggling between the two companies over contract terms and fees that Disney charges to carry its programming.
Without an agreement, DirecTV lost its rights to carry Disney channels.
Sports fans will quickly feel the pinch. In addition to college football on ESPN and ABC, the new NFL season begins later this week. ESPN is set to start its season with a “Monday Night Football” game Sept. 9 between the San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets, in which Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers is expected to return after suffering an injury a year ago.
Disney’s eight ABC stations, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles, are no longer available on DirecTV. That means viewers of local news and “Jeopardy,” “Wheel of Fortune,” “Good Morning America” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” will be without some of their favorite shows. Customers in Fresno, San Francisco, Chicago and New York also lost access to their local ABC station.
Other Disney-owned channels, including Freeform, FX and National Geographic, are included in the outage.
It’s not clear how long the blackout will last. A year ago, a similar tussle between Disney and Charter Communications, which operates the Spectrum TV service, resulted in a 12-day blackout of Disney channels.
“I don’t think a blackout is a good dynamic for anybody, especially not the consumer,” Justin Connolly, Disney’s president of platform distribution, said last week. “Let’s roll up our sleeves … and let’s get something done that both sides can execute.”
The Labor Day Weekend clash reflects the television industry’s economic strain.
The shift to streaming and resulting cord-cutting has devastated pay-TV companies. DirecTV has lost more than half of its subscribers in the last decade. The El Segundo company now has about 11 million subscribers, according to industry estimates.
This year marked the worse-ever industry drop in pay-TV subscribers, according to the MoffettNathanson financial research firm. During the first quarter, the industry lost nearly 2.4 million pay-TV homes in the U.S. — a 12% year-over-year decline, the firm said in a recent report.
Other Disney-owned channels, including Freeform, FX and National Geographic, are included in the outage. Above, Walt Disney Co.’s headquarters in Burbank.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Subscriber declines have squeezed Disney.
The Burbank entertainment company has long relied on billions of dollars in programming fees that it receives annually from DirecTV and other providers. The fees are calculated, in part, by the number of subscribers that receive the channels.
In addition, Disney’s ESPN has historically been the most expensive basic cable channel, costing distributors nearly $10 per month per subscriber home. Disney has sought to maintain those premiums to help pay for its pricey sports rights contracts, including long-term NFL and NBA deals.
The challenges set the stage for contentious contract talks at DirecTV’s El Segundo headquarters.
The environment has changed dramatically since the last time the two companies hammered out an accord. That was in 2019 when DirecTV was wholly owned by AT&T. Since then, the phone giant has spun its television distribution group into a separate entity and taken on a private equity partner, TPG, to manage the business.
For the past year, DirecTV executives have been working on plans to increase its offerings to consumers.
DirecTV wants to offer genre-themed packages — think sports or general entertainment — to provide cheaper plans for customers who refuse to pay $100 or more each month for a traditional bundle with more than 100 television channels. Executives want to appeal to customers who have long pined for a way to sign up for only the channels they actually watch.
But, according to DirecTV, existing contracts with programmers prevent it from widely offering customers curated packages.
“Instead of allowing distributors like DirecTV to also develop smaller, more tailored packages at prices that reflect the value they get from the content, programmers have continued to impose and enforce strict bundling requirements,” DirecTV said in a position paper in late August.
The expiration of the 2019 distribution deal with Disney has given DirecTV an opening to try to change contract terms.
The satellite TV company said it has asked Disney to ease a key distribution requirement — minimum penetration rates. For example, Disney’s deals require that DirecTV and other distributors provide ESPN to a minimum of nearly 80% of its customer base.
DirecTV maintains that such “antiquated” penetration rates “force pay TV customers to subscribe to many channels they may not watch,” and the contracts limit DirecTV’s ability to offer smaller and less-expensive packages.
“People watch genres,” DirecTV Chief Content Officer Rob Thun said in a recent interview with The Times. “We think choice and control can be afforded to customers but that flexibility is not available to us today.”
But such a switch could reduce revenue flowing to Disney at a critical time.
Disney’s stock has been under pressure amid softness at its theme parks and resorts and shares have been trading near five-year lows. On Friday, Disney closed up nearly 1% to $90.38.
Last year’s outage of ESPN and other Disney channels on Charter’s Spectrum ended with an agreement that saw several smaller Disney channels, including Freeform and Disney Jr., dropped from Spectrum’s lineup.
In the end, both companies said they came away with a win.
Charter didn’t force the issue of penetration rates. Instead, Disney and Charter agreed to widen the reach of the Burbank company’s streaming services, including Disney+ into Spectrum homes.
Disney executives are hoping last year’s Charter agreement can provide a template for a pact with DirecTV.
“There has to be the path to a deal here,” Disney’s Connolly said.
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