This post has spoilers for past and upcoming episodes of Chimp Crazy
Chimp Crazy is a currently airing HBO series from Eric Goode, the manipulative director who brought us Tiger King. Goode explores the seedy, heartbreaking underworld of people who privately collect and raise chimps. Because Goode is known and mistrusted as the director of Tiger King, he uses a “proxy director” to interview his subjects, a man named Dwayne Cunningham who has served time for importing exotic animals. We know some of the tragic stories shown on the series, but the main one is new to me, the story of how PETA seized a compound of neglected chimps in 2021 in Missouri after a prolonged legal battle. The chimps were relocated to a sanctuary in Florida, where they have free reign on their own private island and are cared for by trained primatologists.

The main subject of Chimp Crazy is a despicable cartoon of a woman named Tonia Haddix, whom we follow as she gets lip injections and goes to tanning appointments. Haddix helps care for the chimps, feeding them McDonalds and ensuring that their cages are locked. Before PETA seizes the facility, Haddix kidnaps an older chimp named Tonka, keeping him in a large pen in her basement. Tonka starred in a 1997 movie with Alan Cumming called Buddy. Cumming makes PSAs with PETA in an attemp to help find Tonka after he goes missing.

Haddix claims that Tonka, who suffers from heart failure, has died and been cremated. We watch as she perjures herself in a Zoom court session, fake crying pitifully as she lies about Tonka dying. Footage is later shown of Haddix transporting Tonka to another shady chimp collector’s facility to hide his location before bringing him home. From April to June, Tonka has been kept caged. It’s clear that Cunningham, if not Goode, knew from the beginning that Haddix kidnapped Tonka, although a weak attempt is made to muddy the timeline. It is only when Haddix says she’s going to euthanize Tonka that Goode tells PETA’s legal counsel that the chimp is still very much alive and imprisoned in Haddix’s basement. In those three months, Tonka’s life has been jeopardized as producers used Haddix’s deceit for content.

I was so enraged when I watched this third episode. I blame Goode for helping Haddix conceal Tonka. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Goode sort of throws Cunningham, his proxy director, under the bus, for keeping Haddix’s secrets for her. Goode then admits that he knew, for months, that Haddix had Tonka in her basement.

Did Tonia’s trust make it harder to reveal that you and Dwayne had betrayed her?
Oh, yeah. Dwayne had gotten very close to Tonia. Dwayne was not telling me everything. So, I had to sit Dwayne down. He’d gone rogue. That was really difficult. He was confiding and telling things to Tonia that weren’t making it to me. I think Tonia is lonely at times and really needed a friend, and Dwayne was her friend. And Dwayne would say, “Tonia, don’t say anything to the filmmakers that you don’t want the whole world to know.” He was very protective. So, Dwayne knew things before I knew them.

It was frustrating. I sat down with Dwayne. We filmed it, but it didn’t end up in the show. Part of me wanted to include that conflict, that struggle with Dwayne. I didn’t know Dwayne well. Dwayne is someone who does believe people should keep animals. He wasn’t so clear on where Tonka should be. He witnessed this endless doting and love with Tonka. So, he wasn’t so convinced that Tonka should leave.

How long did you keep filming between learning of Tonka’s existence in Tonia’s Lake of the Ozarks house and informing PETA about it?
I want to say it was a matter of months. The first thing I did was call up a few primatologists. I asked them about whether one can tell if a chimp is really depressed, which is what Tonia had been saying.

The thing is, I thought this woman was going to lead us to other people who were keeping apes and gibbons. That this is where we were headed. But she was caught up in this lawsuit with PETA.

So, when she eventually said she was going to put Tonka down, and said she had a vet appointment coming up to do it, we notified PETA.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Spoilers for Tonka’s whereabouts in future episodes
There’s a 1951 Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) movie called Ace in The Hole, starring Kirk Douglas. Douglas’s journalist character keeps a man trapped in a cave in order to prolong the media circus surrounding him and to further his career. It does not end well for Douglas or the trapped man. There are parallels to what Goode did here with Haddix and Tonka. Goode needs to be heavily fined, at least, for not revealing Tonka’s location to authorities sooner.

After I watched this episode I looked up Tonka to see if he’s since passed away. The good news is that he’s now on that private island in Florida with other rescued chimps and is thriving. Save The Chimps has videos on their YouTube page explaining how Tonka is doing. As for Tonia Haddix, she’s still active on Facebook posting garbage memes and sharing photos of the capuchin monkeys she’s raising. Capuchin monkeys are legal to own in some US states.

Photos are screenshots from YouTube