A Missouri woman who starred in the HBO documentary series Chimp Crazy has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after she lied that a movie star primate that she was accused of mistreating had died.
Tonia Haddix, 56, was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release after her 46-month prison sentence ends.
Haddix, who ran a primate facility the St Louis suburb of Festus, pleaded guilty in March to two counts of perjury and one of obstructing justice and was sentenced on Thursday.
Nearly a decade ago, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) rights group sued, saying she was keeping several chimps “confined in cramped, virtually barren enclosures” at the now-defunct Missouri Primate Foundation facility.
Among the chimps was Tonka, who appeared in the 1997 movies Buddy and George of the Jungle. Actor Alan Cumming, who starred in Buddy alongside Tonka, also begged for the primate to be moved.
Haddix signed a consent decree in 2020 agreeing to send four of the chimpanzees to a Florida sanctuary. The order allowed her to keep three others, including Tonka, at a facility she was to build.
But after a judge found that was not complying with the agreement, authorities arrived in 2021 and removed the remaining chimps, except for Tonka. Haddix claimed Tonka had died and that she had cremated the remains, according to court records.
“I wanted to keep trying to save Tonka if l could. But then he just died on his own, so there was no saving him,” she said, according to court records.
But Tonka was alive. In 2022, Peta removed him from a cage in the basement of her home in Sunrise Beach, Missouri.
Haddix told the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper in 2022 that she lied to protect Tonka from “the evil clutches of Peta”. She also admitted to events shown in the third episode of Chimp Crazy last year, saying: “Tonka was literally on the run with me.”
Just last month, investigators found another chimp locked up in the basement of her home in Sunrise Beach in violation of court orders, documents in the case said. She was arrested, and her bond revoked.
“Defendant has shown no remorse for her criminal conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
Her lawyer, Justin Gelfand, asked for mercy in court filings, saying she suffered abuse as a child and in rocky marriages as an adult.
