By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH, Related Press
A Missouri lady who starred within the HBO documentary collection “Chimp Loopy” has been sentenced to just about 4 years in jail after she lied {that a} film star primate that she was accused of mistreating had died.
Tonia Haddix, 56, was additionally ordered Thursday to serve three years of supervised launch after her 46-month jail sentence ends.
Haddix, who ran a primate facility the St. Louis suburb of Festus, pleaded responsible in March to 2 counts of perjury and considered one of obstructing justice.
It began almost a decade in the past, when the Folks for the Moral Therapy of Animals sued, saying she was conserving a number of chimps in “confined in cramped, just about barren enclosures” on the now-defunct Missouri Primate Basis facility.
Among the many chimps was Tonka, who appeared within the 1997 films “Buddy” and “George of the Jungle.” Actor Alan Cumming, the British-born actor who starred within the film “Buddy” alongside Tonka, additionally begged for the primate to be moved.
Haddix signed a consent decree in 2020 agreeing to ship 4 of the chimps to a Florida sanctuary. The order allowed her to maintain three others, together with Tonka, at a facility she was to construct.
However after a choose discovered that was not complying with the settlement, authorities arrived in 2021 and eliminated the remaining chimps, apart from Tonka. Haddix claimed Tonka had died and that she had cremated the stays, in response to courtroom information.
“I needed to maintain making an attempt to avoid wasting Tonka if l may. However then he simply died on his personal, so there was no saving him,” she mentioned, in response to courtroom information.
However Tonka was alive. In 2022, PETA eliminated him from a cage within the basement of her residence in Dawn Seaside, Missouri, close to the Lake of the Ozarks.
Haddix informed the St. Louis Submit-Dispatch in 2022 that she lied to guard Tonka from “the evil clutches of PETA.” She additionally admitted what occurred within the third episode of “Chimp Loopy,” which premiered final 12 months, saying, “Tonka was actually on the run with me.”
Simply final month, investigators discovered one other chimp locked up within the basement of her residence in Dawn Seaside in violation of courtroom orders, paperwork within the case mentioned. She was arrested, and her bond revoked.
“Defendant has proven no regret for her legal conduct, and has continued to problem and defy this Court docket’s authority, and she or he ought to face a big punishment in consequence,” prosecutors wrote.
Her lawyer, Justin Gelfand, requested for mercy in courtroom filings, saying she suffered abuse as a baby after which endured a number of rocky marriages as an grownup.
“This life taught her a transparent lesson: people are unpredictable and usually are not steadily secure or reliable,” Gelfand wrote. “Within the face of those harsh realities threaded all through her life, Haddix got here to kind safe attachments with animals.”
PETA praised the sentence in a information launch, saying that Haddix now “can’t harm one other chimpanzee.”
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