Tonia Haddix, star of the hit HBO documentary series “Chimp Crazy,” has been sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison after repeatedly lying to authorities about the fate of a chimpanzee named Tonka.
The 51-year-old Missouri woman had previously admitted to lying to a federal judge about the whereabouts of the animal.
As revealed in the Emmy-nominated series, Haddix told authorities that Tonka had died when she was actually hiding him in a cage in her basement. She also disobeyed a court order to surrender the chimp to the animal rights nonprofit PETA.
Haddix, who pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in March, was sentenced Thursday to 46 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
“Now that Tonia Haddix is locked up, she’s getting a taste of the suffering she inflicted on animals by imprisoning them in cages and denying them any semblance of a natural life,” Brittany Peet, PETA’s general counsel for captive animal law enforcement, told the Daily News in an emailed statement.
“PETA is relieved to see justice done and urges everyone to support the Captive Primate Safety Act, which will keep vulnerable monkeys and apes out of the pet trade and the hands of ruthless dealers like Haddix,” Peet added.
Tonka — who was taken from his mother prematurely to be featured in Hollywood films such as “George of the Jungle,” “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Buddy” — was one of the subjects of a long-running federal civil suit filed by the nonprofit in 2016.
In 2020, Haddix agreed to send four chimpanzees to a sanctuary in Florida, but was allowed to keep three others. However, after a judge found she had violated the agreement and ordered the removal of all her remaining chimpanzees, Haddix claimed Tonka had died and that his remains had been cremated.
“I wanted to keep trying to save Tonka if I could. But then he just died on his own, so there was no saving him,” she said in a January 2022 hearing, according to court records.
Six months later, after new evidence showed Tonka was still alive, a judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring Haddix to cooperate with his transfer.
On June 8, 2022, representatives from PETA and the Save the Chimps Foundation removed Tonka from a cage in Haddix’s Missouri basement and brought him to a Save the Chimps sanctuary, where he still lives today.
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