A Missouri girl who starred within the HBO documentary collection Chimp Loopy has been sentenced to almost 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 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 one in all obstructing justice and was sentenced on Thursday.
Almost a decade in the past, the Folks for the Moral Therapy of Animals (Peta) rights group sued, saying she was conserving a number of chimps in “confined in cramped, nearly barren enclosures” on the now-defunct Missouri Primate Basis facility.
Among the many chimps was Tonka, who appeared within the 1997 motion pictures Buddy and George of the Jungle. Actor Alan Cumming, who starred in Buddy alongside Tonka, additionally begged for the primate to be moved.
Haddix signed a consent decree in 2020 agreeing to ship 4 of the chimpanzees 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 decide 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, based on court docket information.
“I wished 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 stated, based on court docket information.
However Tonka was alive. In 2022, Peta eliminated him from a cage within the basement of her dwelling in Dawn Seashore, Missouri.
Haddix informed the St Louis Submit-Dispatch newspaper in 2022 that she lied to guard Tonka from “the evil clutches of Peta”. She additionally admitted to occasions proven within the third episode of Chimp Loopy 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 dwelling in Dawn Seashore in violation of court docket orders, paperwork within the case stated. She was arrested, and her bond revoked.
“Defendant has proven no regret for her felony conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
Her lawyer, Justin Gelfand, requested for mercy in court docket filings, saying she suffered abuse as a toddler and in rocky marriages as an grownup.
